It is difficult to find anything wrong with the concept of
recycling. It makes so much sense....you put all of your unwanted glass, metal,
paper and plastic - stuff that use to go to the local landfill site - into a
blue bin. Someone then comes and takes it away. Nothing could be simpler. The
landfill site does not get filled up as quickly as it use to, you get to feel
good about doing your bit to save the planet and the glass, metal, paper and
plastic all gets used to make something else. What a perfect system! It no
longer matters how much paper, plastic, metal or glass we use - it can be
recycled. Right?
Well, there is a bit of a glitch to that wonderful system.
It turns out that much as 60% of our unwanted and used glass, metal, paper and
plastic ends up in China for processing.
All of that garbage is what fills up those empty container ships
steaming west across the Pacific Ocean. However, China in the summer of 2017 (Reuters,
CNN,
Independent
, CBC),
announced that effective January 2018, it
would no longer allow the importing of some of those materials. All of a sudden
the perfect plan is not looking so perfect anymore.
I seem to have somehow missed the fact that a significant
portion of my household waste ends up in China. I, like I suspect most people,
just assumed that once my recyclables were picked up that I had done my job and
that I didn't need to worry about it again. It never entered my mind that it
was being shipped to China. Even if I had known where it all ended up, I would
not have ever considered that China might not want it anymore. And I should
have known.
I am a fairly active news reader. There are days when I may peruse
the headlines of four or five online news sources. If I missed this news, I am fairly certain
that a large number of Canadians also missed it. I don't understand why this
story has not been deemed to be important enough to discuss again and again
until a solution is found. While I understand why we are attracted to the
analysis of Mr. Trump's daily experiment in how to be an idiot, it would seem me
that discussing what to do with our garbage is at least as important as what silliness
the president has just tweeted. In terms of our children and grandchildren's
lives it is far more important.
One has to ask why there is not more discussion as to what
is going to happen to our used glass, metal, paper and plastic starting next
week. The announcement appears to have taken people by surprise. In my quick
scan of the news - I saw no mention of any country's alternative plan to deal
with the waste. Bundled recycled material is already starting to fill up
warehouses; municipalities that once shipped recyclable waste (and made money
from it -Halifax use to ship 80% (CBC)
of its recycled material) to China now have nowhere to put that material. The
situation will only get worse and people will start to dispose of the material
in our already over used land fill sites.
I suspect that too many people will find this discussion far
too difficult and perhaps even uncomfortable. The solution to the problem is
not to find some other country that needs money so badly that they will allow
their land and water to be polluted with our garbage. The answer is not even to
develop better and better ways of using recyclable material locally. The only
reasonable answer as to what to do with our unused glass, metal, paper and
plastic is to stop producing so much waste. As long as someone else will
dispose of our garbage - we can use as much plastic or paper as we want -
because we never have to deal with it afterwards. We, the developed countries,
need to accept responsibility for our waste. We need to make a collective
agreement to stop using so much plastic, paper etc. We need to pressure
companies to stop enclosing items in large plastic packages, we need to ban the
selling of water in "recyclable" bottles. We need to start to learn
how to stop using plastic and to learn how to reuse the glass containers we now
throw away.
It is time we started to deal with our own garbage - perhaps
if we did - we would stop producing so much of it.
