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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| China Just Handed the World a 111-Million-Ton Trash Problem (opens to video) |
| 2018-06-24 |
| [Bloomberg] Few people consider used plastic to be a valuable global commodity. Yet China has imported 106 million tons of old bags, bottles, wrappers and containers worth $57.6 billion since 1992, the first year it disclosed data. So when the country announced last year that it finally had enough of everybody else's junk, governments the world over knew they had a problem. They just didn’t know exactly how large it was. Now they know. By 2030, an estimated 111 million metric tons of used plastic will need to be buried or recycled somewhere else‐or not manufactured at all. That's the conclusion of a new analysis of UN global trade data by University of Georgia researchers. Everyone's bottles, bags and food packages add up. Factories have churned out a cumulative 8.3 billion metric tons of new plastic as of 2017, the same Georgia team reported last year. Even 1 million metric tons, the scale that this material trafficks in every year, is hard to visualize in the abstract. It's 621,000 Tesla Model 3s. It's 39 million bushels of corn kernels. The world’s 700 million iPhones make up roughly a tenth of a million metric tons. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #6 Maybe turn it into big chunks and use it to build an artificial island near theirs in the South China sea, militarize it, shine lasers at everything that moves, and don't let anyone fly near it. |
| Posted by: gorb 2018-06-24 23:51 |
| #5 Someone will create a use and make $ off solving someone else's problem. See "fly-ash" as in the Fly-ash Liberation Army, (also active in China) a coal combustion byproduct (trash) |
| Posted by: Frank G 2018-06-24 15:36 |
| #4 "buried or recycled somewhere else‐or not manufactured at all" There is yet another option: just pile it up at the point where the plastic stops being used. Don't bother to recycle. When folks are knee deep in their own debris, the problem will solve itself, one way or 'tother. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2018-06-24 14:37 |
| #3 They will tariff Texas oil then convert the plastic. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2018-06-24 14:26 |
| #2 The biggest use seems to recycle the plastic into pallets and plastic bins used to collect 'plastic to be recycled' -- it seems that no one can certify the plastic 'contaminant free'(!)... |
| Posted by: magpie 2018-06-24 09:58 |
| #1 Well, can't you recycle all this used plastic into pacifiers for leftists? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2018-06-24 08:35 |