How Can We Recycle More, and Smarter?

China has long bought waste plastic for recycling from North America and Europe, but their policies are changing. What can we do with a surplus of waste, and how can we make the situation better in the future?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. For years, China has been the
top importer of recyclable material taking in about half of
the world's plastics and paper and turning the rubbish into
useful materials, so it was quite a shock. In seventeen
Wendy Chinese government announced it was changing its rules on

(00:23):
the importation of waste. Instead of accepting bales of recycled
materials with five percent impurities, as had been the norm,
China said it would only accept bales containing less than
one percent, a nearly impossible standard to meet in the
short term. When the Chinese announced the change, no one
was exactly sure how it would play out, but now
they know. As the new rule took effect in January eighteen,

(00:45):
many countries, including the United States, Canada, Ireland, Great Britain
and Germany, began to scramble to find ways to dispose
of their recyclables that just months ago would have gone
to China. As a consequence, tons of inventory began piling
up on docks in manicip landfills and in processing facilities.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, for example, the city needed special
permission to bury three thirty tons. That's three metric tons

(01:09):
of plastic in the local landfill, and just for the
sake of simplicity, I'm going to refer just to tons
for the rest of this piece. Apologies, metric users. Just
keep in mind that our tons are a wee bit heavier,
and feel free to insert your own joke about Americans
and heaviness here anyway. Adina Renee Rattlers, Senior director of
International Relations and international Affairs for the Institute of Scrap

(01:31):
Recycling Industries, says China didn't give the world a whole
lot of time to get ready for this. The rules
changing compasses twenty four categories of solid waste, including certain plastics, paper,
and textiles. The problem, Chinese officials claim, though others dispute this,
is that large amounts of contaminated material were being mixed
in with the recyclables that the country was accepting. The

(01:52):
officials also said that much of what they were taking
in was not properly scrubbed and sorted. They wrote to
the World Trade Organization when announcing the move. Large amounts
of dirty wastes or even hazardous wastes are mixed in
with the solid waste that can be used as raw materials.
This polluted China's environment seriously. Since the nineteen eighties, China
has been the world's largest importer of solid waste, using

(02:13):
these recyclables to power its manufacturing industry and to fuel
its burgeoning economy. As Chinese industry grew more robust, the
country also became one of the world's most polluted, forcing
the government to take steps to protect the environment. Adler
says they do have a tremendous environmental problem on their hands.
One of the government's directives has been to better manage
waste domestically and do it quickly. They gave us practically

(02:36):
no time for any kind of transition. Regardless, China's crackdown
has provoked a soul searching moment as the rest of
the planet tries to find both near term and long
term solutions. For years, the world's nations relied on China
to take in its unwanted refuse. In for example, China
bought almost fifty million tons of trash, while the European
Union in sent eight percent of its sorted plastic to

(03:00):
the Asian giant Ireland of its plastic waste, and the
United States sixteen million tons of recycled scrap. In sixteen,
China processed seven point three million tons of paper, metals
and used plastic. Now that China has essentially closed its doors,
there are those who say its actions should be a
wake up call because there's simply no more room at

(03:20):
the local landfill or incinerator plant. Consider these numbers. Every
American will send about sixty four tons of waste to
a landfill over the course of his or her life. Moreover,
the average American throws away four point three pounds that's
one point nine kilograms of trash every day. Americans as
a whole toss out eleven million tons of glass each year.

(03:40):
All that glass weighs as much as four hundred and
forty Titanics or thirty Empire State buildings. According to the
US Environmental Protection Agency, Americans recycle or compost only a
third of the solid waste stream. The world produces more
than three hundred million tons of plastic each year. The
World Economic Forum says that by any fifty there will

(04:00):
be so much plastic floating in the ocean it will
outweigh all of the world's fish. So what's the solution.
Simon Ellen, chief executive of Britain's Recycling Association told The
New York Times, we've got to start producing less and
we've got to produce better quality recyclable goods. Consider the
example San Francisco has set for the rest of the planet.

(04:21):
That city is one of the most recyclable friendly communities
in the world. It's so called zero Waste initiative, one
of the most muscular in the nation, is designed not
to send any trash to the landfill or incinerator, but
rather to increase the rate of recycling and composting. In
two thousand two, the city set a goal to be
zero waste by To that end, Recollogy San Francisco, the

(04:43):
employee owned firm that runs San Francisco's recycling program along
with the city, has developed many programs to produce better
quality recyclables while drastically reducing the amount of trash people toss. Together.
Recollogy and San Francisco instituted one of the first programs
that picks upcome postable material at the curb. People simply
put compost into green bins so it doesn't co mingle

(05:04):
and contaminate other recyclables. Robert Reid, spokesman for Ecology, set
in an email. The goal of these zero waste initiative
encourages San Franciscans to reduce waste, reuse materials, and be
more attentive to recycling and composting. Last November, we reached
the milestone of composting two million tons. We diverted all
that material from landfill disposal and instead turned it into

(05:26):
nutrient rich compost that's applied to local farms and vineyards.
Recycling is good for the economy too, he continued. We
created more than two hundred new jobs permanent local jobs
in San Francisco in ten years while expanding the city's
recycling program. Each day, the world's population generates nearly three
point five million tons of garbage, ten times the amount

(05:46):
from a century ago in and that number is expected
to grow to eleven million tons by the end of
the twenty first century. But there is a glimmer of hope.
The zero waste movement is strong in many communities. The
best way out of the trash and we've created, it seems,
is to recycle and recycle smartly. Today's episode was written

(06:10):
by John Paritano and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more
on this and lots of other environmental topics, visit our
home planet, how stuff works dot com.