Tag Archives: china

A lot of US plastic isn’t actually being recycled since China put up its Green Fence

By Gwynn Guilford

For many environmentally conscious Americans, there’s a deep satisfaction to chucking anything and everything plasticky into the recycling bin—from shampoo bottles to butter tubs—the types of plastics in the plastic categories #3 through #7. Little do they know that, even if their local trash collector says it recycles that waste, they might as well be chucking those plastics in the trash bin.

“[Plastics] 3-7 are absolutely going to a landfill—[China’s] not taking that any more… because of Green Fence,” David Kaplan, CEO of Maine Plastics, a post-industrial recycler, tells Quartz. “This will continue until we can do it in the United States economically.”

The Green Fence went up…and it’s not coming down

Kaplan is referring to an initiative the Chinese government launched last year ostensibly to reduce pollution. Dubbed “Green Fence,” the policy bans the import of all but the cleanest, most tidily organized bales of reusable rubbish—and bars some types altogether.

The program was supposed to end in November of 2013. Now Chinese industry sources say that Green Fence is here to stay, reports American Metal Market, supporting what many in the US recycling business have suspected.

Before Green Fence, when American households and businesses recycled their plastic, for the most part what they were really doing was sending it for collection at US recycling companies. Some of that plastic trash would be shredded, granulated and packed into bales, while other types were simply bundled up as is. US recycling companies would then export it to China.

The many lives of plastic junk

Why would China import this? Plastic has many lives. That means that what to Americans is just a used Stonyfield Farms yogurt container is actually valuable raw material to Chinese manufacturers, which use the plastic resin from the processed tub to make everything from laptop cases to cosmetics. Chinese recyclers would import the bales of used plastic, sorting the valuable stuff from the chaff, cleaning it and breaking it down into plastic resin that can be remolded by manufacturers.

Recycled plastic resin is much cheaper than “prime”—i.e. new—plastic resin. The vast majority of what’s used in plastic packaging still comes from prime resin, though that can be supplemented by resin from recycled plastics to make it cheaper. Particularly for manufacturers in countries with a high degree of worry about the environment, being able to say that recycled plastics were used to make a product counts as valuable marketing as well.

The US may have Save the Earth campaigns to thank for the embrace of recycling. But more likely, it was made possibly by China’s emergence as a manufacturing powerhouse. The more China made, the more it needed used plastics, eventually sucking up around two-thirds of the US’s plastic scrap each year, worth several billion dollars.

Cheap plastic’s toll on China’s environment

But China’s cheap plastic came at a cost. Anything recyclers couldn’t use was heaped onto China’s growing massif of trash mountains. Worse still, the majority of recycling processors are small firms—often mom-and-pop operations—that pollute heavily but are hard to regulate.

As outrage among the Chinese public over the country’s noxious air and befouled waterways has surged in the last few years, the Chinese government has scurried to respond. Maine Plastic’s Kaplan thinks that’s what’s behind Green Fence.

“Because China got this bad press for pollution, the Chinese government says, ‘You know what? It’s because of importation of plastic scrap. The reason… that people can’t breathe in Beijing is plastics emissions,’” he tells Quartz. “That seems kind of arbitrary.”

Though China obviously has many more severe sources of pollution, Green Fence’s suspension of 247 import licenses for domestic recyclers will force smaller outfits out of business, making environmental regulation easier for the government.

Plus, China actually needs the US’s and other countries’ plastic in order to meet the demands of its manufacturers. Perhaps to take address that, the Chinese government announced plans for 100 pilot Recycling Economy Cities where it will invest in developing infrastructure for recycling.

Time for a US recycling renaissance?

Historically, higher labor costs and environmental safety standards made processing scrap into raw materials much more expensive in the US than in China. So the US never developed much capacity or technology to sort and process harder-to-break down plastics like #3 through #7.

Green Fence might be a chance to change that, says Mike Biddle, CEO of California-based recycling company MBA Polymers. “China’s Green Fence offers a real opportunity to the US government and recycling industry to step up its efforts on recycling and catalyze a strong domestic recycling market in the US,” Biddle said at a recent webinar on Green Fence.

Kathy Xuan, president of Parc Corp, one of the few US companies that processes post-industrial and post-consumer scrap, agrees that Green Fence will be good for the US. “Definitely it’s going to create a lot of job openings,” Xuan tells Quartz, adding that “every job China did can be done here, but it costs more.”

More demand from US manufacturers

China’s virtual monopoly on processing made it so US manufacturers imported raw materials mostly from China. But with Green Fence shutting down processors, supply of plastic resins is much scarcer.

Parc Corp’s Xuan says more US companies are now buying from her company. The lower supply of plastic resin will presumably help other US recyclers because it will raise prices enough to allow them to hire and invest in new capacity.

But it will take time

It might not be that simple, though.

Developing new recycling capacity in the US will “eventually” benefit the country, says Maine Plastics’ Kaplan. For the moment, though, Green Fence restrictions have blocked Chinese demand for his company’s clean, sorted post-industrial scrap. And while US and other countries’ manufacturers need that scrap as well, finding those markets takes time.

Plus, the proximity of Chinese manufacturers to the Chinese plastic processors kept transportation costs down. Green Fence has changed that. New markets for processing and sorting plastic scrap are growing in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. But “after [the plastic is] processed, they send it to China, which costs extra money, which means we get less for the material,” says Kaplan.

With Green Fence remaining in place, unless US manufacturing demand for plastic resins picks up a lot, margins are likely to remain uninviting for all but the biggest US recyclers.

What does that mean for consumers? Given the choice, the best answer’s probably “paper.”

For the full article visit: http://qz.com/122003/plastic-recycling-china-green-fence/

Quick Fixing the Food Crisis

I recently came across this article posted on the Scientific American website A quick fix to the food crisis. The writer, Timothy Searchinger made some really great points. Take a moment to enjoy the article below!

food crisis

 

 

A Quick Fix to the Food Crisis
Curbing biofuels should halt price rises By Timothy Searchinger | June 16, 2011 |


When food prices rose steeply in 2007 and climaxed in the winter of 2008, politicians and the press decried the impact on the billion or so people who were already going hungry. Excellent growing weather and good harvests provided temporary relief, but prices have once again soared to record heights. This time around people are paying less attention.
The public has a short attention span regarding problems of the world’s have-nots, but experts are partly to blame, too. Economists have made such a fuss about how complicated the food crisis is that they have created the impression that it has no ready solution, making it seem like one of those intractable problems, like poverty and disease, that are so easy to stash in the back of our minds. This view is wrong.

To be sure, reducing hunger in a world headed toward more than nine billion people by 2050 is a truly complicated challenge that calls for a broad range of solutions. But this is a long-term problem separate from the sudden rise in food prices. High oil prices and a weaker dollar have played some part by driving up production costs, but they cannot come close to explaining why wholesale food prices have doubled since 2004. The current price surge reflects a shortfall in supply to meet demand, which forces consumers to bid against one another to secure their supplies. Soaring farm profits and land values support this explanation. What explains this imbalance? Crop production has not slowed: total world grain production last year was the third highest in history. Indeed, it has grown since 2004 at rates that, on average, exceed the long-term trend since 1980 and roughly match the trends of the past decade. Even with bad weather in Russia and northern Australia last year, global average crop yields were only 1 percent below what the trends would lead us to expect, a modest gap.

The problem is therefore one of rapidly rising demand. Conventional wisdom points to Asia as the source, but that’s not so. China has contributed somewhat to tighter markets in recent years by importing more soybeans and cutting back on grain exports to build up its stocks, which should serve as a warning to policy makers for the future. But consumption in China and India is rising no faster than it has in previous decades. In general, Asia’s higher incomes have not triggered the surge in demand for food.
That starring role belongs to biofuels. Since 2004 biofuels from crops have almost doubled the rate of growth in global demand for grain and sugar and pushed up the yearly growth in demand for vegetable oil by around 40 percent. Even cassava is edging out other crops in Thailand because China uses it to make ethanol.

Increasing demand for corn, wheat, soybeans, sugar, vegetable oil and cassava competes for limited acres of farmland, at least until farmers have had time to plow up more forest and grassland, which means that tightness in one crop market translates to tightness in others. Overall, global agriculture can keep up with growing demand if the weather is favorable, but even the mildly poor 2010 growing season was enough to force a draw down in stockpiles of grain outside China, which sent total grain stocks to very low levels. Low reserves and rising demand for both food and biofuels create the risk of greater shortfalls in supply and send prices skyward.

Although most experts recognize the important role bio¬fuels play, they often underestimate their effects. Many of them misinterpret the economic models, which understate the degree to which biofuels drive up prices. These models are nearly all designed to estimate biofuels’ effects on prices over the long term, after farmers have ample time to plow up and plant more land, and do not speak to prices in the shorter term. Commentators also often lump all sources of crop demand together without recognizing their different moral weights and potential for control. Our primary obligation is to feed the hungry. Biofuels are undermining our ability to do so. Governments can stop the recurring pattern of food crises by backing off their demands for ever more  biofuels.

 

Photo- Scientific American