Report: Recycling Plastic Is Making Ocean Litter Worse
London 28 June: Explosive new report reveals that efforts to recycle plastic are a major cause of the marine litter problem. The report, written by public health expert Dr Mikko Paunio, sets out the case for incinerating waste rather than trying to recycle it.
* Most of the plastic waste comes from just a few countries, mostly in Asia and Africa.
- 25{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} is “leakage” from Asian waste management processes — the rest is waste that has never been collected, but is simply thrown into rivers.
-
But European countries ship inject huge quantities of waste into Asian waste management streams, ostensibly for recycling. As much as 20{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} — millions of tons every year — ends up in the oceans and will continue to do so.
-
Since the Chinese banned waste imports at the start of the year, shipments have been diverted to other Asian countries with even weaker environmental controls (Figure 1).
-
EU recycling is therefore a major contributor to marine waste and increasing recycling will therefore simply increase marine litter.
Author Dr Mikko Paunio says:
“It is clear that the European contribution to marine waste is a result of our efforts to recycle. However, several countries have already shown that they can reduce this contribution to near zero, by simply incinerating waste”.
Despite this success, the EU is trying to redouble recycling efforts and to close down the incineration route, mistakenly believing that this will reduce carbon emissions. As Dr Paunio puts it,
“The effects look as though they will be appalling. We can expect a great deal more plastic to end up in the environment, and in the oceans in particular. If the EU was serious about its war against marine pollution it should consider banning the export of plastic recyclate rather than banning plastic straws or taxing incineration.”
Unable to recycle waste in line with the targets imposed on them, rich countries have chosen to dump it — plastic, paper and cardboard — on poor ones, especially China. Lower environmental standards in much of Asia has made it cheaper to manage waste there and low-quality recycled plastic can sometimes be profitably produced from these waste streams, albeit in highly polluted conditions.
In recent years, the stream of waste delivered to China expanded vastly. Annual imports reached 85 million tons, including 8 million of plastic. The quantity was so huge that inspection at ports became impossible, and the unscrupulous found that even mixed or hazardous waste could profitably be sent, disguised as “recycling” to avoid landfill tax or high management costs in rich countries. Unable to handle this tsunami of refuse, the Chinese were forced to either burn or dump vast quantities. An unknown amount found its way to the oceans.
The consequences for the environment and for public health of this “recycling” madness have therefore been horrendous, and have ultimately proved too high for the Chinese, who have now banned waste imports entirely. Recent figures suggest that recycling businesses in the UK have responded by simply shipping waste to Asian countries with even weaker environmental standards. So even more waste will end up in the oceans in future.
Meanwhile, the EU is doing almost nothing to reduce the flow of waste. It is sticking to its idealistic environmental dreams, claiming to be in the forefront of efforts to save the oceans through a “circular economy” strategy. History tells a different story — efforts to focus on recycling have led to one environmental disaster to another, with the ocean plastic crisis being just the latest.
Readers may recall the waste crisis in the Italian region of Campania, which was overwhelmed by so-called “ecoballs” — the two-thirds of plastic waste that was rejected by its sorting facilities. The streets were awash with rubbish, dioxins spread across the region, and the eventual breakdown of public order.
It should be understood that all recycling schemes – including paper recycling — leak either plastic litter or microplastic to the environment. If we truly care about saving the oceans, then recycling of plastic and paper should stop. And there is a clear and sensible alterative available, namely incineration. Incineration was the way Campania put its waste management system back on an even keel. It is also the basis of the waste management strategy of many EU countries, and as such has proven to be hugely successful on all measures.
Yet despite this clear superiority to other approaches, incineration is being dismissed and discouraged, by EU politicians and bureaucrats, but most importantly by the unholy alliance of “recyclers” and green NGOs, who together lobby for ever-more complicated recycling schemes. If the EU was serious about its war against marine pollution it should consider banning the export of plastic waste rather than banning plastic straws.
As someone once said, “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”. Unfortunately, as far as recycling is concerned the price is paid, not just by ordinary consumers, but by the oceans and the rest of the natural environment.
Dr Mikko Paunio is a Finnish public health specialist and an adjunct professor in general epidemiology at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of the new GWPF paper Save The Oceans – Stop Recycling Plastic
Contact
Dr Mikko Paunio
email: [email protected]
tel: +358 505771968
Trackback from your site.
Alan Thorpe
| #
How pleased I am to see this report. I have found it difficult to understand how so much plastic gets into the oceans but when we see news items showing mountains of our waste in China and Asia it is obvious that it is not being recycled. I also question how waste from a few miles in land from the sea gets into the sea and how it is possible from the centre of continents. It has to be dumped into the sea.
Not all my plastic waste is recycled because my council does not take it all. But I do put it all in bins collected by the council. I am sure that the small amount that is not put in bins by people is not the only plastic entering the oceans. The conclusion has to be the state is responsible for the plastic in the oceans through a failure of the recycling policies. The report is long overdue but I doubt that we will see the politicians admitting their mistakes.
Reply
Hans Schreuder
| #
Having been in the plastics recycling business in South Africa in the early 1970’s I know from first-hand experience that the recycling of plastic waste does not make financial sense. The cost of collecting, then separating, then cleaning, then shredding, then compounding, then bagging and distributing makes recycled plastic wholly uneconomic. It is the usual “green” brain-dead thinking that promotes this kind of bad economics onto equally brain-dead politicians whose only priority is to “appear to be doing something, anything” to give them the impression that they are actually useful. This report will make no indent on the “green” nightmare we’re all living through; what will I do not know.
Reply
Gary Ashe
| #
Plastic roads Hans.
Iv’e seen this idea floated a few times, whether is makes sense is another thing.
Reply
K. Kaiser
| #
Prior to the “green enlightenment,” this city of 500,000 had one garbage collection truck come by once a week. Everything collected was incinerated at a well functioning local incineration plant. With several colleagues, I took a tour there and was at eye height with the top of the incineration stack, perhaps 100 ft away.Other than warm air nothing else could be seen rising from it.
However a local activist claimed that it emitted “toxic chemicals” and pushed for closure of the plant, which eventually happened.
This plant required little extra energy (in the form of nat. gas) to run as the combustion was by and large a self-sustaining process. Furthermore, the residual ash was solidified to a few concrete blocks for use in shore line fortification, etc.
Now, we have three separate trucks come by weekly, one to collect (presorted) “recyclables”, one to collect “compostables”, and one for everything else.
Therefore, the entire collection process alone is three times as expensive as it used to be. Then everything “recyclable” gets stored at various transfer stations, sorted further, before being send elsewhere (like to Asia).
Altogether, this “green process” consumes a multiple of the energy and causes more real pollution (I don’t mean carbon dioxide) than the incineration.
Reply
Climate Heretic
| #
Just 10 rivers carry 90% of plastic polluting the oceans. Two of them are in Africa – the Nile and the Niger – while the others are in Asia: the Indus, Ganges, Amur, Mekong, Pearl, Hai he, Yellow and Yangtze.[1]
Stemming the Plastic Tide: 10 Rivers Contribute Most of the Plastic in the Oceans. Schmidt and his colleagues dug up published data on the plastic concentration in 57 rivers of various sizes around the world.[2]
Regards
Climate Heretic
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/just-10-rivers-carry-90-of-plastic-polluting-the-oceans-11167581
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/
Reply
tom0mason
| #
Just my usual question (that seems to upset so many), where is the evidence that these micro particles of plastic does harm to any ocean animals or plants. Sure the larger bits of junk endanger animals in many ways but the macro/micro plastic particles?
Considering the large amount of energy that could be gained from digesting these particles, I can not imagine that there is not a creature/algae/bacteria that will not thrive on this abundance — the problem will be is it a something we will want to commonly see.
Please be assured that I do not advocate trashing the oceans with plastic waste, I do advocate taking measured and effective action based on the best research to date. Less hysteria, more effective action, with less virtue signaling political nonsense like the EU’s mandate on banning plastic drinking straws, balloon stick and plastic drink stirrers, and the like.
Reply