> "Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe
A large portion of "recycling" sent to China was actually landfilled or incinerarted in China. So it mostly "killed" us sending off our waste to somewhere else pretending we were recycling it. Single stream didn't actually "work" even when we sent it to China -- the Chinese government just thought the amount of money we paid them to landfill or incinerate plastic and other solid waste (after shipping it 7000 miles!) while pretending to recycle it was worth the environmental consequences to them, until they didn't.
> According to the report from two American advocacy groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, American recycling statistics counted exported plastic waste as “recycled”, despite the reality that, once they left US shores, they were more likely to be burned or dumped than recycled. The US plastics recycling rate peaked at 9.5 per cent in 2014, and a large chunk of that was exported to China.…
> China imported 8.88 million tons of plastic waste before the ban, and a January 2021 study in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 70.6 per cent of this waste was either buried or mismanaged…
> “After China’s 2018 ban, countries found other destinations to send their waste to, which did not have as strict regulations as China. The same problems that caused China to stop importing plastic waste were then transferred to other countries,” she said.
A large portion of "recycling" sent to China was actually landfilled or incinerarted in China. So it mostly "killed" us sending off our waste to somewhere else pretending we were recycling it. Single stream didn't actually "work" even when we sent it to China -- the Chinese government just thought the amount of money we paid them to landfill or incinerate plastic and other solid waste (after shipping it 7000 miles!) while pretending to recycle it was worth the environmental consequences to them, until they didn't.
> According to the report from two American advocacy groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, American recycling statistics counted exported plastic waste as “recycled”, despite the reality that, once they left US shores, they were more likely to be burned or dumped than recycled. The US plastics recycling rate peaked at 9.5 per cent in 2014, and a large chunk of that was exported to China.…
> China imported 8.88 million tons of plastic waste before the ban, and a January 2021 study in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 70.6 per cent of this waste was either buried or mismanaged…
> “After China’s 2018 ban, countries found other destinations to send their waste to, which did not have as strict regulations as China. The same problems that caused China to stop importing plastic waste were then transferred to other countries,” she said.
https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article...