China and Plastic Waste

One way we consumers can intuit the out-of-balance manner in which we live in late-stage capitalism is the amount of plastic waste that we produce. As I have mentioned before, it seems to me that the each purchase is consecrated with a carapace of plastic.

No greater bounty of refuse plastic can be found than in your average takeout order. Walking to a coffee house yesterday at lunch I crossed paths with a young woman toting a billowy white pillowcase of a plastic bag holding plastic clam shells containing her meal.

The main story, "Food Delivery Apps Are Drowning China in Plastic" by Raymond Zhong and Carolyn Zhang, in yesterday's business page of The New York Times manages a twofer: 1) it sketches the importance of the growing popularity of takeout orders made by smartphone in the planet's burgeoning plastic pollution problem; and 2) it maligns China.

Zhong and Zhang are not so successful in the former. China still produces less plastic waste per capita than the United States, and, come to find out, a lot of U.S. plastic recycling was based on its ability to export it to China, something now endangered since China banned the importation of many types of plastic:

People in China still generate less plastic waste, per capita, than Americans. But researchers estimate that nearly three-quarters of China’s plastic waste ends up in inadequately managed landfills or out in the open, where it can easily make its way into the sea. More plastic enters the world’s oceans from China than from any other country. Plastic can take centuries to break down undersea.

Recyclers manage to return some of China’s plastic trash into usable form to feed the nation’s factories. The country recycles around a quarter of its plastic, government statistics show, compared with less than 10 percent in the United States.

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China is home to a quarter of all plastic waste that is dumped out in the open. Scientists estimate that the Yangtze River emptied 367,000 tons of plastic debris into the sea in 2015, more than any other river in the world, and twice the amount carried by the Ganges in India and Bangladesh. The world’s third and fourth most polluting rivers are also in China.

Takeout apps may be indirectly encouraging restaurants to use more plastic. Restaurants in China that do business through Meituan and Ele.me say they are so dependent on customer ratings that they would rather use heavier containers, or sheathe an order in an extra layer of plastic wrap, than risk a bad review because of a spill.

[snip]

This deluge of trash might not be such a big problem were China not in the middle of a monumental, if flawed, effort to fix its recycling system. Recycling has long been a gritty, unregulated affair in the country, one driven less by green virtue than by the business opportunity in extracting value out of other people’s leavings.

The government now wants a recycling industry that doesn’t spoil the environment or sicken workers. The transition hasn’t been smooth.

China recently banned many types of scrap from being imported into the country, hoping that recyclers would focus on processing domestic material instead. That killed off a lucrative business for those recyclers, and left American cities scrambling to find new dumping grounds for their cardboard and plastic. Some cities have been forced to end their recycling programs.

No doubt most neighborhoods in the U.S. will eventually be impacted by China's ban. Mine is. The silver lining here is that a domestic fix will have to be devised.

(By the way, Naked Capitalism regularly covers plastic pollution issues.)