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A new global crisis?
You drink a Coca-Cola, throw the bottle into the recycling bin... and forget about it. But it doesn’t disappear. Everything you own will one day become the property of the waste industry, a £250 bn global enterprise determined to extract every last penny of value from what remains. In the case of the United Kingdom (UK), some of the waste is kept in the country; but much of it — about half of all paper and cardboard, and twothirds of plastics — will be loaded on to container ships to be sent to Europe or Asia for recycling.
Or, at least, that’s how it used to work. Then, on the first day of 2018, China, the world’s largest market for recycled waste, essentially shut its doors. Under its National Sword policy, China prohibited 24 types of waste from entering the country, arguing that what was coming in was too contaminated. The policy shift was partly attributed to the impact of a documentary, Plastic China, which went viral before censors erased it from China’s internet. The film follows a family working in the country’s recycling industry, where humans pick through vast dunes of western waste. It is filthy, polluting work — and badly paid. The remainder is often burned in the open air. The family lives alongside the sorting machine, their 11-year-old daughter playing with a Barbie pulled from the rubbish.
National Sword was a huge blow1. Still, the waste has to go somewhere. The UK, like most developed nations, produces more waste than it can process: about 1.1 kg per person per day; the US, 2 kg.
There is cause for optimism, though: in December 2018, the UK government published a comprehensive new waste strategy. Among its proposals: a tax on packaging containing less than 30% recycled material and means to force companies to take responsibility for the plastic packaging they produce. They hope to force the industry to invest in recycling infrastructure at home.
Yet such is the torrent of humanity’s refuse that these efforts may not be enough. Recycling rates in the west are stable and packaging use is set to rise in developing countries, where recycling rates are low. If National Sword has shown us anything, it is that recycling — while needed — simply isn’t enough to solve our waste crisis.
(www.theguardian.com, 17.08.2019. Adaptado.)
1 blow: a very disappointing or catastrophic situation.
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