Shipping plastic and paper waste to China and other far away places for recycling causes less environmental damage than binning it in the UK, according to study. Doh?
Sending the waste more than 10,000 miles is still more efficient in terms of carbon emissions than carting it off to landfill and using brand new materials to manufacture replacement goods.
These are the findings of a study carried out by the government-funded Waste & Recycling Action Plan (WRAP) and will be music to the ears of district councils the length and breadth of the land, under siege from local paper reporters keen to prove the 'scandal' of waste exports.
Shipping waste overseas is increasingly common the UK now collects more recycling than it has facilities to process domestically while rapidly growing economies such as China are hungry for raw materials.
Over the past decade, the export of waste paper and plastic bottles has increased tenfold.
Liz Goodwin, WRAP's chief executive, said: "It may seem strange that transporting our unwanted paper and plastic bottles such a distance would actually be better for the environment but that is what the evidence from this study shows.
"As more and more of this material is being sold to China we wanted to know the impact that was having on the environment, and specifically whether the CO2 emissions from the transport outweighed the benefits of the recycling.
"Although this study is only part of the environmental impact story, it is clear that there are significant CO2 savings that can be made by shipping our unwanted paper and plastic to China.
"In some cases, we just aren't able to reprocess everything we collect or there isn't enough of it to do so. In these cases, shipping it to China, which has a high demand and need for material, makes sense in CO2 terms.
She added that recycling waste produced by the UK in the UK where possible was still the preferred option.
"WRAP will continue to build both the environmental and economic case for domestic recycling," she said.
Regardless of what WRAP may like to greenwash with its report, the fact is and remains that shipping such materials abroad should not, in fact, have to happen. Such sorting and recycling of such materials should be done here, at home. Not only in order to create jobs but mainly to save the environmental costs of shipping the stuff all over the globe – for it does not just go to China – and also so that it could be guaranteed that the recycling be done in a proper manner. However, it seems to be considered better to have the stuff out of sight and therefore out of mind.
The other excuses, as can be seen above, seem to be that it is better for the environment so send our recyclables abroad as otherwise we would have to dump them into landfills. Why would we have to do so. There is no excuse, and that given by WRAP is just a feeble one, for not processing this all here in the UK. Time we got some action going in this country.
Alas, we have the NYMBYs that will not want to have a recycling plant here or a recycling business there, and they always win the day – amazingly. Same as when it comes to waste burning electricity generating plants or CHP ones.
In many instance the waste is not going to the right places for recycling as recent finding showed but end up on refuse dumps in other countries, such as in Africa, in the case of electronic waste, much of which is toxic.
The biggest problem with Britain is that we are no longer interested in producing anything whatsoever in this country and hence we send everything abroad to be processed and no amount of greewashing from a government-sponsored Quango alters that fact nor the fact that sending shiploads of recycling materials abroad to be processed is NOT sustainable in any way, shape or form.
All we get from government, and not just that of the UK, is lots of talk as far as the environment is concerned and sustainability, and lost of fines but no incentives, but, unfortunately government has no idea how to walk the walk.
© M Smith (Veshengro), September 2008
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Exporting recycling to China – and elsewhere - is 'better than binning it'
