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The truth about reusable shopping bags

Some bags are only beneficial after more than 100 uses

By Quentin Fottrell

Los Angeles is the latest American city to ban the use of single-use plastic grocery bags, but experts say their most common replacements—paper and reusable bags—come with environmental and financial costs of their own.

Indeed, some reusable bags need to be used over 100 times before they’re better for the environment than single-use plastic bags. Polyethylene bags need to be used four times, a polypropylene bag must be used at least 11 times, and a cotton bag must be used at least 131 times, according to a study by the U.K. Environment Agency .

Starting Jan. 1, the Los Angeles City Council prohibited the use of plastic bags, joining nearly 90 other cities around the country in banning what environmentalists say have been the scourge of oceans for decades. Consumers in L.A. will now have to pay 10 cents for a paper bag provided by the supermarket or bring their own reusable bag to the store. But the cost of paper and reusable bags goes beyond just the 10-cent fee. “If we are really going to change behavior we need to come up with some other way than relying on shoppers to buy paper bags or carry their own bags,” says Phil Lempert, CEO of grocery information site SupermarketGuru.com . In other words, find an alternative to both single-use “carryout” and reusable plastic, Lempert says.

The widespread use of single-use carryout plastic bags raises significant environmental concerns, according to a 2010 report by professional technical-services company Aecom Technology Corp ACM -2.03% . It cited the short and long term adverse effects to marine ecosystems, solid waste management, global resource consumption and litter. In most instances, a switch to reusable bags provides the greatest environmental benefits, the report found, “if used at least a minimum number of times.” Many major retailers sell reusable bags in biodegradable canvas, plastic or “bioplastics” manufactured from natural materials. But some of these materials “are very, very energy intensive material to manufacture,” says Stephen Joseph, counsel for the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, a San Francisco-based coalition of plastic bag manufacturers.

People may not want to carry food in the same bag for extended periods for fear of contamination, experts say, although cotton bags may be the most easily washed and reusable. At the end of their life, only 5% of reusable plastic bags are recycled in the U.S., according to a 2011 report by California State University, Chico, and Clemson University. That’s the same recycling rate for single-use plastic bags.

Another problem: Many reusable bags being sold at the country’s major retailers are imported. Wal-Mart WMT -0.67% sells reusable bags with slogans like “A little green goes a long way.” In fact, many have also come a long way—over 7,000 miles. Wal-Mart’s standard reusable bag (50 cents) is made in China. Whole Foods has a variety of 99-cent “ Better Bags ” that are made from 88% recycled materials, but they’re not exclusively made in the U.S., a spokesman says. (Whole Foods shoppers are offered a rebate of 10 cents for each reusable bag they use.) Home Depot HD -0.87% also touts a store-branded orange nylon tote (99 cents), which is made in China. And Trader Joe’s polypropylene reusable bags (99 cents) are made in Vietnam.

Paper bags are biodegradable, but some experts say cutting down trees is no answer either. Some 46 million tons of paper and paperboard were recovered in 2011—a recycling of almost 66%—and accounts for over half of all recyclables collected in the U.S. by weight, according to the government’s Environmental Protection Agency. That includes all paper, of course, and not just bags. “By volume, it’s still enormous,” says Joshua Martin, director of the Environmental Paper Network, a global coalition of over 100 nonprofit organizations. Still, Martin welcomes the move away from plastic bags in L.A. and elsewhere, and favors a surcharge for each paper bag to encourage more people to think twice—and then some—about recycling. “You won’t find a whale washed up on the beach with its belly full of paper,” he says, “so I support the ban.”

To read the original Market Watch article click here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/are-reusable-bags-worse-for-environment-than-plastic-2014-01-09

When I ran across this article I knew that I needed post this as a blog. This is a fantastic article and the comments are very telling with the reality of the situation we face when it comes to solving global environmental problems. There really is no arguing the pros and cons of plastics in our lives. The introduction and development of plastics was and continues to be a significant innovation to the improvement to the quality of life and at the same time it also is a growing environmental problem.

This article and the comments are great examples and a sample of how our society is trying to address the environmental problem we have created with using plastics. The truth is that innovation got us into this mess and innovation will have to get us out of it. It is extremely frustrating to see society desperately trying to do something with most of what is trying to be done will take decades to get habits changed or make even a slight difference on a large scale. The truth is that what we are doing is barely making a dent in the problem we already have and is not even close to keeping up with global growth of plastic use.

It’s frustrating at the least to listen to the arguments about using reusable bags verse single use bags. Most of what is being done whether it is using reusable bags, recycling, trying to reduce plastic use, etc is trying to solve a huge problem using tiny approaches. Sure it feels good as an individual to use reusable bags or to choose to throw everything into the recycle bin, but these approaches will not solve our global plastic pollution issue. We must think big and bring big solutions to the discussion of how we are going to solve this issue, otherwise we are going to look back 10, 20 , 30+ years from now and see that the problem has only gotten worse.

ENSO Plastics has developed a renewable plastic resin which is made from agriculture waste, it is marine degradable and completely safe if consumed by humans or other animals. So why are we still dealing with figuring out if we should use reusable bags or if they should come from china or all the other little issues, when there are technologies that exist today that would make bags that would biodegrade (in landfill and compost), are marine degradable within a few weeks, would break down within months if littered (based on climate moisture) and if consumed by wildlife would do no harm and is digestible?

Using ENSO RENEW resin to manufacture bags would cost a fraction of what is being proposed for paper bags of ten cents. This is a no-brainer in my mind and is the passion behind ENSO Plastics to solve the global plastic pollution issue. This technology and others like it are available today and consumers should be demanding large scale solutions like these to address the large scale plastic pollution issue.

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”

I recently ran across a quote by G. K. Chesterton, “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.” This quote is a powerful reality and sums up the environmental issue that our planet faces when it comes to plastic pollution. It got me thinking and I thought I’d write a blog about it.

There is no doubt that the global population is rapidly growing and will continue to do so. We have exceeded 7 billion humans on this planet. The planet we live on is a closed system, meaning that the amount of natural resources we have available to sustain our needs and wants will not change. We can certainly take resources and change their form, but the overall fundamental is that as the population grows we will continue to place a greater burden on the environment to mine, process, develop and use resources to sustain the global needs.

In today’s global perspective, developed countries do not see the massive problem that is being created from the way we are currently using plastics. We live in an environment where the convenience of placing items in a black, blue or green bin and having that material go away makes the problem much less visible.

In underdeveloped countries where the global population is the largest, the problem is much more prevalent and problematic, as they don’t have the resources available to discard their plastic garbage or recycle. People living in those conditions are faced with the problem on a daily basis with plastic litter being a serious problem. Litter at this level blocks water ways, increases illness, kills wildlife, destroys the landscape and this material is not going away anytime in the next hundred years.

There is a sad irony to today’s situation in that the largest concentration of human populations are in underdeveloped countries. Both China and India each have a population of over 1.2 billion people. Both of these countries have poor infrastructure to handle waste and almost no recycling. The United States falls way behind in total population with just over 300 million people.

The irony is that the 300+ million people in the United States consume the planet resources at a rate of over four times the rest of the world! So we are consuming at a level that far exceeds the rest of the world, but with our developed infrastructures we become blind to the problem. Sure, we have recycling, biodegradable and compostable solutions but the truth is the development of our infrastructures makes it convenient for us to see the solution, but not the problem, and therefore we take our time with implementing solutions that will matter most.

The big question lingers in everyone’s mind of What’s going to happen when these underdeveloped nations begin consuming at the level we are currently consuming at? Both China and India are increasing their middle class and that results in more and more people wanting the “convenient and finer things in life”. Considering the fact that the population in the US is only a fraction of the global population, when these underdeveloped nations reach a point where their citizens are consuming a fraction of what we currently do; the planet and its inhabitants are in for serious problems.

It makes sense for brands, manufacturers, retailers, and consumers to get involved in solving this problem. The truth is that consumers will not be able to solve this problem on their own. The biggest opportunity to addressing this issue and making the most impact is within the industry. We are the biggest consumers of resources and control the greatest deal of the problem from sourcing to end-of-life. ENSO Plastics is an environmental company and brings to the table renewable, landfill biodegradable, compostable (home and industrial), marine degradable and products with lower carbon footprints so that industry can take control and reduce its impact on the environment.

The team here at ENSO is dedicated to helping brands, manufacturers and businesses solve the plastics pollution issue facing the world. We would love the opportunity to sit at the table and be a part of the conversation of how your company can take control of the plastic materials being used and implement solutions that make sense and will have the most impact. ENSO Plastics has a proven track record and we ask that you just give us the chance to show you what can be done.

China recycling cleanup jolts global industry

Business Week By Joe Mc Donald October 03, 2013

BEIJING (AP) — China for years has welcomed the world’s trash, creating a roaring business in recycling and livelihoods for tens of thousands. Now authorities are clamping down on an industry that has helped the rich West dispose of its waste but also added to the degradation of China’s environment.

The Chinese campaign is aimed at enforcing standards for waste imports after Beijing decided too many were unusable or even dangerous and would end up in its landfills. Under the crackdown dubbed Green Fence, China has rejected hundreds of containers of waste it said were contaminated or that improperly mixed different types of scrap.

It is abruptly changing a multibillion-dollar global industry in which China is a major processing center for the world’s discarded soft drink bottles, scrap metal, electronics and other materials. Whole villages in China’s southeast are devoted to processing single products, such as electronics. Household workshops break down discarded computers or appliances to recover copper and other metals. Some use crude smelters or burn leftover plastic and other materials, releasing lead and other toxins into the air. Green Fence is in line with the ruling Communist Party’s pledges to make the economy cleaner and more efficient after three decades of breakneck growth that fouled rivers and left China’s cities choking on smog.

Brian Conners, who works for a Philadelphia company that recycles discarded refrigerators, says buyers used to visit every week looking for scrap plastic to ship to China for reprocessing. Then Beijing launched its crackdown in February aimed at cleaning up the thriving but dirty recycling industry.

“Now they’re all gone,” said Conners, president of ARCA Advanced Processing.

American and European recyclers send a significant part of their business to China and say they support higher quality standards. But stricter scrutiny has slowed imports and raised their costs. The decline in the number of traders buying scrap to ship to China has also depressed prices American and European recycling companies can get for their plastic and metals.

“While we support Green Fence, it has increased our cost of doing business,” said Mike Biddle, founder of MBA Polymers, a plastics recycler with facilities in California, Europe and southern China. “It takes longer and there are more inspections.”

At the same time, people in the industry say recyclers that invest in cleaner technology might be rewarded with more business as dirtier competitors are forced out of the market. The crackdown also might create new opportunities to process material in the United States and Europe instead of shipping it around the globe.

China’s recycling industry has boomed over the past 20 years. Its manufacturers needed the metal, paper and plastic and Beijing was willing to tolerate the environmental cost. Millions of tons of discarded plastic, computers, electronics, newspapers and shredded automobiles and appliances are imported every year from the United States, Europe and Japan.

But environmentalists have long complained the industry is poisoning China’s air, water and soil. And Beijing, ever vigilant about possible threats to the legitimacy of one party rule, now wants to be seen as addressing increased public awareness and concern over pollution.

“The waste recycling system in China really needs to be updated to reduce pollution,” said Lin Xiaozhu, head of the solid waste program for the Chinese group Friends of Nature.

In 2011, recycled scrap supplied some 21 percent of the nearly 100 million tons of paper used by Chinese industry, according to the state-run newspaper China Daily. It said that resulted in a savings of 18.7 million tons of wood.

In Europe, electronics recyclers recover about 2.2 million tons of plastic and metal annually and send about 15 to 20 percent of that to China, according to Norbert Zonnefeld, executive secretary of the European Electronics Recyclers Association. Its 40 member companies include electronics manufacturers and copper smelters.

European recyclers welcome China’s tighter enforcement because it will help them comply with European Union rules on tracking waste and ensuring it is properly handled, said Zonnefeld. Still, he said, some traders have run into trouble.

“I have heard material has been sent back,” said Zonnefeld. “Of course, they should have known. They were just gambling.”

The United States relies even more heavily on China to recycle its waste.

Americans threw away 32 million tons of plastic in the form of packaging, appliances, plates and cups last year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. About 1.1 million tons was collected for recycling.

About half of plastic soft drink and water bottles collected in the United States for recycling are sent to China, according to Kim Holmes, director of recycling for the Society of the Plastics Industry in Washington. She said nearly all plastic from U.S. electronics waste is exported to Asia.

“The export market is a major component of the broader U.S. recycling industry,” said Holmes in an email.

China allows waste shipments to contain no more than 1 percent unrelated material. But Customs officials say some were found to be up to 40 percent unrecyclable trash.

“Some unscrupulous traders, in order to maximize profit, smuggle medical and other waste inside shipments, a direct threat to everyone’s health,” said a Shanghai Customs Bureau statement in April.

Despite a ban on imports of used tires, inspectors intercepted a 115-ton shipment of them in March, the bureau said. They were labeled “recycled rubber bands.”

ARCA Advanced Processing dismantles about 600,000 refrigerators a year and recovers 80 tons of plastic a week, plus copper, aluminum and other metals, according to Conners. He said those still are sold to traders who ship much of it to China, but the number who can satisfy Beijing’s requirements to separate and clean waste has plunged.

“There used to be guys who would come to our facility probably once a week to buy our plastic to take back to China,” he said. “That has gone down to where I have two vendors who still are able to do business to get it into China.”

In a reflection of more stringent controls, customs data show Chinese imports of waste plastic fell 11.3 percent in the first half of this year compared with a year earlier to 3.5 million tons after soaring over the past decade.

MBA Polymer’s facility in the southern city of Guangzhou, in the heart of China’s manufacturing industry, can process 40,000 tons of plastic a year, according to Biddle. It transforms waste into pellets to be used as raw material for new products. Buyers include Chinese manufacturers that work for companies such as computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. and consumer electronics giant Philips NV.

Biddle said he welcomes Green Fence despite the disruption of imports because higher standards will favor more responsible companies.

“We’ve had to compete for raw materials with people who treat the materials not in ways that protect workers or the environment,” Biddle said by phone from California. “I see China moving toward encouraging companies like ours to develop.”

Conners said that by raising the cost of dealing with China, Green Fence might make it profitable for more Western companies to conduct the whole recycling process themselves. He said his company is looking at possible ventures to do that with partners.

“The advantage China had has been reduced considerably. That advantage was low-cost processing,” he said. “This is going to spur investment in the United States to process materials here.”

To read the original article:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2013-10-03/china-recycling-cleanup-jolts-global-industry

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/

Plastics Recycling-Where Did We Go Wrong Mentally?

Ok before the recycling folks and their allies come Para Trooping into my office and try to seize my computer, I need to get out right away that recycling IS good and should be pursued to every extent possible. This rant is about how best to accomplish this without essentially putting our heads in the proverbial sand!!!

I came across an interesting article in Waste & Recycling, “Coffee makers wrestle with recyclability of single-serve pods” where it speaks to the challenges with recycling single serve coffee pods made by Keurig which was acquired by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. Apparently since 2009, the company Terra Cycle has been able to capture 25 million of similar discarded single-use cups, and has been attempting to make good use of them, but it sounds like it is very difficult to nearly impossible to recycle them. Also, the article says that, “approximately 13% of the U.S. adult population drinks coffee using these single-use cups.”

So let me get this straight: Approximately 40 million (13% U.S. Population) of these containers are discarded EACH DAY, and the recycling efforts over a 2 year period to recover these cups has amassed a whopping 25 million? Of which there has not been any useful value found for these lucky cups? Am I the only one that sees a problem here? In 2 years it has taken a noble attempt by Terra Cycle (I have much respect for this organization, awesome innovators!) to get nearly half of ONE days worth of consumption of cups, to then turn around and make a useless pile of cups, all in the name of recycling!!!??? Is there no other way to approach this end of life issue? Is this the best thing we can do with this issue right now –today? Why does recycling feel so good for the marketplace? I repeat; 1/2 days’ worth of material collected over the span of 2 years, with no outlet in sight, yet we turn a blind eye to this complete failure because it is labeled “recycling”…so many questions and comments.

So at this point, I should proclaim the easy answer -after all it is easy to be a critic and to point at what is not happening -or flat out failing. But I do not propose to have an easy answer or “silver bullet” to cure all, but I do have sense enough to see that we need to quit being so brainwashed into thinking recycling is the silver bullet as well. It is clearly not working alone in that only 7-9% of all plastics are being recycled. And lets not forget that a vast % of our recycled plastic WAS going to China, and now may not find a home as China’s “Green Fence” is clearly revealing. We need to incorporate a multifaceted approach to our waste issues and material resources.

What if these cups were made to biodegrade in a landfill where they most likely belong? 75.8% of all Municipal Solid Waste goes into landfills that capture the biogas created by biodegradation. There has been unprecedented growth in utilizing Landfill Gas to Energy (LGE) in the U.S. recently as the experts now understand that it is better to promote and capture this alternative source of energy, rather than try and stop nature taking its course and entomb or dry landfill our waste. The “no smoking” signs on an old landfill turned golf course has to make one nervous and draw some obvious conclusions-we cannot stop nature from taking its course. (:

Lastly, the Utopian Societyists say we need to move to 0% landfills. I say that this is wrong and absolutely impractical. We should rather be saying we need to achieve 0% waste. If composting is considered Organic Recycling (which by the way creates 0% energy and captures LITTLE to no emmissions) then similarly, LGE is a valuable alternative to creating useful end of life values towards 0% waste. Picture that huge pile of unusable “lucky because they were recycled” coffee cups and tell me I’m wrong. Can we PLEASE do more than bury our heads in the sand and actually address today and tomorrow and not let “best” practices get in the way of the good we could do NOW? If the total recycling rate of all plastics is 7-9%, that means roughtly 91-93% of our plastics is going to a landfill where it has no further value. If they were biodegradable plastics like the kind ENSO Plastics assists brands and manufacturing to create, they would slowly biodegrade and be an excellent feedstock to LGE. If you are one that thinks that recycling is the only answer, I ask you to shift your mentality and question status quo, question what is popular as “best practices” with our waste and push for a multi-pronged approach to our sustainability. People are smart if they open their eyes and minds to innovations and bury their head in a more progressive endeavor like answering the question, “What more can we do? Today?”

-Del Andrus

US states banned from exporting their trash to China are drowning in plastic

Article by Gwynn Guilford

Being green is getting a lot harder for eco-friendly states in the US, thanks to the country’s dependency on overrun Chinese recycling facilities. Recycling centers in Oregon recently stopped accepting clear plastic “clamshell” containers used for berries, plastic hospital gowns and plastic bags, as the Ashland Daily Tidings reports. Yogurt and butter tubs are probably next. In Olympia, Washington, recycling centers are no longer accepting plastic bags. California’s farmers are grappling with what to do with the 50,000 to 75,000 tons of plastic they use each year.

“The problem is we don’t have a market for it,” Jeff Hardwood, an Olympia-area recycling center manager, tells Washington state’s KIRO-TV. ”China is saying we are only going to accept the high-value material we have a demand for now.”

Hardwood is referring to China’s “Green Fence” campaign banning “foreign garbage” (link in Chinese). China has rejected 68,000 tons (61,700 tonnes) of waste in the first five months of 2013, when the program was officially launched. The Green Fence initiative bans bales of plastic that haven’t been cleaned or thoroughly sorted. That type of recyclable material, which costs more to recycle, often ends up in China’s landfills, which have become a source of recent unrest in the country’s south.

Instead of investing in the sorting and cleaning technologies required to process soiled and unsorted recyclables, which both China and the US have been reluctant to do, China’s Green Fence policy blocks the import of those plastics. As a result, US recycling centers that once accepted scrap plastic for recycling are being forced to send it to American landfills.

As we’ve discussed before, Americans generally don’t recycle their plastic; they export it. And more than half of the $1 billion a year business goes to China.

The full-year projection for 2013 is based on January-June data.

Green Fence has contributed to the 11% decline in export value of US plastic scrap in the first half of 2013, compared with the same period in 2012. China’s customs data reflect that too. It imported 20% less plastic scrap in Q2 than the same quarter of 2012, a value of $300 million less.

And yet, Chinese processing factories desperately need US plastic. Once reprocessed, it’s used to make everything from polar fleeces to stadium seats. China imports around 40% of the world’s plastic scrap, collecting the rest domestically. Now that China’s plastic scrap supply is being squeezed by Green Fence bans, plastics smuggling at ports and in cities (links in Chinese) is on the rise.

For every ton of reusable plastic, China has received many more tons of random trash, some of it toxic. That has helped build “trash mountains” so high they sometimes bury people alive (link in Chinese). For a country facing environmental crisis after environmental crisis, this is no longer tenable.

Discarded plastic bottles imported from Australia are seen at a plant in Hong Kong’s rural New Territories August 24, 2011, before a process which separates plastic waste from them. The “Plastic Waste-to-Fuel System” is designed to provide a practical and cost effective solution to plastic waste management with energy regeneration. A prototype machine can process three tonnes of plastic waste into 1,000 litres of fuel oil per day. With further refinement, the fuel oil is suitable for diesel engine usage, said Ecotech Recycling Social Enterprise Managing Director Ming Cheung. Picture taken August 24, 2011. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

Because US trash exporters haven’t been forced to spend on technology or labor to sort and clean trash piled up at its recycling centers—Chinese laborers have handled that part—those shipments have been profitable for US exporters. But Green Fence is shifting those economic incentives; It costs the US around $2,100 per shipping container to return rejected trash to California ports.

Those high costs may drive the US to expand its own recycling capacity. Until then, American pollution will no longer be piling up in China; It will be festering at home.

To view the full article:
http://qz.com/117151/us-states-banned-from-exporting-their-trash-to-china-are-drowning-in-plastic/

Firm: Technology spurs degradation of rubber in landfills

Written by: Mike McNulty, Rubber News

AKRON—ENSO Plastics L.L.C. is moving quickly to gain a foothold in the rubber industry with new technology that a company official said accelerates the natural biodegradation of synthetic rubber in landfills.

The producer of biodegradable and biobased products has come out with a new technology, ENSO Restore RL, that issues in a new age for rubber, according to Teresa Clark, vice president of product development for the Mesa, Ariz.-based company.

Restore RL “is a unique material designed not only to attract specific naturally occurring microorganisms, but also to induce rapid microbial acclimatization to synthetic rubbers and resulting biodegradation,” Clark said.

“The method of biodegradation caused is strictly enzymatic and is designed to utilize naturally occurring microorganisms within waste environments, including landfills.”

Its new development opens the door for ENSO to begin servicing the rubber industry, she said. Previously, it primarily served the plastics sector.

Basically, the company has transferred its knowledge of biodegradable plastics to the rubber industry and developed ENSO Restore RL, Clark said. The rubber industry, she noted, has produced little technology regarding environmental remediation until Restore came along.

From plastics to rubber

“We were founded in 2007 to find solutions for plastic waste, and at the time we didn’t have a product,” she said. “We ended up forming a joint venture, and eventually the company came to market with a product for the plastics industry.”

“We’re a young company that’s growing,” said Clark, one of the firm’s founders.

Clark discussed ENSO and the new technology at the International Latex Conference, held July 23-24 in Fairlawn, a suburb of Akron. She also gave a presentation at the meeting, titled “Advancements in Rubber and Latex Disposal—Biodegradation and the Environment.”

Restore RL is an additive used during the manufacturing of rubber products “in such a way as to disperse the additive throughout the matrix of the rubber,” she said.

It does not “involve an initial abiotic breakdown as is seen with degradable products in other industries,” according to Clark. “A novel aspect of this material is its inertness to the host rubber resin; it does not contribute directly to any degradation of the rubber, thus leaving the shelf life of the rubber article in¬- tact.”

She said independent laboratory testing shows nitrile treated with Restore biodegrades about 17 percent in the first 20 days compared to nitrile showing no biodegradation during the same time frame.

Similar biodegradation test results were found in polychloroprene, polyurethane and other synthetic materials when treated with the product, the executive said.

According to Clark, the material increases the biodegradation of synthetic rubber within natural microbial and municipal landfill environments.

“Given the unique properties of rubber materials, the overall use of rubber for a large number of applications is constantly on the rise and becoming an ever increasing focus of concern … not only in industrialized countries but also in less developed nations,” she said.

The ENSO executive said testing shows significant increases in the rate of biodegradation in various synthetic rubbers when treated with Restore RL “and with the biodegradation being in anaerobic environments offers a unique waste disposal solution.”

Restore’s purpose is to impact biodegradability without affecting the physical characteristics or the shelf stability of treated rubber products, Clark said, which is in contrast to other methods, including degrading materials through oxygen or UV exposure, which risks the stability of rubber goods.

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If you would like to learn more or if you missed the presentation at the International Latex Conference join ENSO’s free upcoming webinar titled; “A New Solution for Rubber Waste”.

Perils of forgeting the rubber…

Photo Courtesy of Malaysian Rubber Board

For hundreds of years we have relied on rubber to produce superior products and materials, and the importance of using rubbers in our daily lives has increased significantly. In fact, more rubbers are used today than have ever been used in history. Yet somehow we forget about the waste of rubber products when we discard them.

Plastic has received the brunt of the attention, but rubbers have historically flown under the radar when it comes to waste management. Interestingly enough, municipal waste is comprised of 13% plastic (which we hear about every day) but Rubbers make up over 8% and no-one says a word.

Additionally, rubber is very seldom recycled meaning that almost all of it goes straight into the landfill where it remains for hundreds of years. That equates to over 40 billion pounds of rubber waste every year going to US landfills.

Are we OK with this?

When will we begin to hold the rubber industry accountable as we have the plastics industry?

There is no reason today to have rubber waste sitting stagnant in the landfill. Technologies such as ENSO RESTORE RL allow rubber materials to biodegrade within the landfill and produce methane that we can capture for clean energy. This means that rather than hundreds of years, the rubber waste I throw into the landfill can be gone during my lifetime.

The solution is available, all we need to do is quit ignoring the problem.

How do you propose we hold the rubber industry accountable?

Researchers Unveil New Solution for Rubber Waste

ENSO Plastics’ lead researcher will make a major announcement for latex and rubber waste at this year’s International Latex Conference.

Mesa, AZ — (SBWIRE) — 07/17/2013 — The increasing amount of landfilled rubber and latex waste is an imperative concern for government entities and environmentalists worldwide. Teresa Clark, researcher for ENSO Plastics will be presenting “Advancements in Rubber and Latex Disposal – Biodegradation and the Environment” at this year’s International Latex Conference, July 23-24 in Akron, Ohio.

Revealed at the conference will be the groundbreaking development, ENSO RESTORE™ RL; a revolutionary technology that accelerates the natural biodegradation of synthetic rubber in landfills, as well as an unexpected discovery about natural rubber that may change the entire rubber industry.

Biodegradable plastics have been the big hitter in the past 10 years, with various compostable plastics such as PLA, PHA, Starch, and ENSO RENEW™; as well as products like ENSO RESTORE™ that enhance the biodegradation of traditional plastics. However the rubber industry has produced little technological advancements regarding environmental remediation, until now.

The research break-through that lead to the development of ENSO RESTORE™ RL issues in a new age of rubber, one that focuses on the environmental disposal. ENSO RESTORE™ RL is a unique material that increases the biodegradation of synthetic rubber within natural microbial and municipal landfill environments. Independent laboratory testing shows nitrile treated with ENSO RESTORE™ RL biodegrading 16.9% in the first 20 days compared to Nitrile showing no biodegradation during the same time period. Similar accelerated biodegradation results are seen in polychloroprene, polyurethane and other synthetic materials when treated with ENSO RESTORE™ RL.

As a society it is crucial that we address the huge amount of rubber waste going into landfills. Plastics have traditionally received most of the attention regarding waste with programs such as recycling, biodegradable, compostable and renewable solutions being offered. Unfortunately rubber waste, although just as important, has not received the same attention.

ENSO Plastics™ is committed to addressing the environmental impact of rubber and plastic waste and continues to lead the market with products that solve plastic waste issues with products like ENSO RENEW: A compostable, marine degradable and renewable biopolymer; and ENSO RESTORE: A family of products that accelerate the biodegradation of polyester, polypropylene, polyethylene, PVC, rubber and other materials.

About ENSO Plastics™

ENSO Plastics, LLC is an environmental plastics solutions company with proprietary biodegradable and biobased solutions, bringing to market cost competitive cutting-edge solutions to meet the market demands of sustainability, home or industrial compostability, landfill biodegradability, marine degradability and recyclability.

ENSO Plastics’ mission is to solve the global plastics pollution issue by bringing the best technologies to market, finding solutions with the greatest and most productive impact for the plastics industry and providing answers that can be trusted to integrate seamlessly – a platform that companies can stand behind with confidence.

Learn more about ENSO Plastics technologies visit us at http://www.ensoplastics.com or call (866) 936-3676 or +00-1-602-639-4228.

http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/researchers-unveil-new-solution-for-rubber-waste-283962.htm

China puts up a green wall to US trash

Written By:
Peter Ford, Christian Science Monitor, June 19, 2013 Beijing

US recyclers are nervous about losing their largest market after China began enforcing new environmental laws this year.

Have you ever wondered what happens to the soda can that you toss into a recycling bin? Chances are high that it ends up in China – like 75 percent of the aluminum scrap that the United States exports. Or 60 percent of its scrap paper exports. Or 50 percent of its plastic.

But a new Chinese edict, banning “foreign rubbish,” has thrown the international scrap and waste trade into turmoil and is posing a major new challenge for US recyclers.

Operation Green Fence, a campaign by Chinese customs to strictly enforce laws governing the import of waste, “could be a game changer,” says Doug Kramer, president of Kramer Metals, an international scrap dealer in Los Angeles. “A lot of companies have used China as a dumping ground, getting rid of … substandard scrap and trash,” Mr. Kramer says.

As China’s government seeks to raise environmental standards, he says, “I understand China’s need to take a hard look” at its imports.

That hard look, involving stepped-up inspections of containers filled with scrap metal, paper, and plastic at Chinese ports and a merciless application of the rules, has intercepted more than 800,000 tons of illegal waste since the campaign began in February, according to the customs agency.

Now nervous traders are refusing to ship consignments of recyclables that might contain unacceptably large amounts of unrecyclable materials (anything from unwashed items to the wrong kind of plastic to random bits and pieces of garbage that get mixed in with the recyclables). And cities and towns across the US and Europe are finding there is no longer a ready market in China for their poorly sorted and often impure bales of plastics, paper, and other waste.

“A butterfly in China has caused a tornado in Europe,” Surendra Borad, chairman of Gemini, the world’s largest collector of waste plastic, told the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR), an international federation of recyclers, at its annual convention in Shanghai last month.

Why China needs the West’s scrap

However, China is not bringing down the hammer on every kind of scrap (and “scrap” is the preferred term of art). The country has few resources of its own, and its fast-growing industry relies heavily on reprocessing other countries’ plastic soda bottles into fabrics, or their junked metal into machinery.

“Making proper use of this scrap supplements China’s resources, helps save energy, protects the environment, and boosts economic efficiency,” Li Xinmin, a former pollution inspector at the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, told a recent meeting of the China Metals Recycling Association.

But in China, much of the imported plastic scrap, for example, is recycled in primitive, family-owned workshops with no facilities to treat waste water before it flows into local rivers. And Chinese recyclers “have got used to expecting 20 percent trash” in the bales of mixed plastics they buy from the US, according to David Cornell, technical consultant to the Washington-based Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers.

That trash has to be sorted from the recyclables, then buried or burned, further degrading China’s environment.

Though Chinese regulations have long banned excessive levels of contamination in imports of recyclables, they were rarely enforced until Green Fence was launched, traders say. “Before, we were able to import dirty materials and bottles, but not any longer,” explains Sun Kangning, who owns a small plastics recycling plant in the village of Laizhou in Shandong Province (see sidebar on the industry’s woes).

Since February, he says, 24 shipping containers of plastic waste that he had bought from the US have been turned away by customs – about 20 percent of his business.

Because the government finds it hard to control all the mom and pop makeshift recycling workshops, it appears to have chosen to enforce environmental standards on imports at the pier.

Those imports have been skyrocketing in recent years. Scrap was America’s top export to China by value in 2011 – worth $11.3 billion, according to US trade figures. (Last year, record soybean sales knocked scrap and waste into second place.)

Also in 2011, the US exported 23 million tons of scrap (a little less than half of everything that was collected for recycling). Two-thirds of it went to China, according to figures from the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) in Washington. ‘We don’t have the capacity’

The international trade has boomed partly because the US cannot dispose of all the waste it generates; the country has neither enough recycling facilities nor sufficient manufacturing demand for all its scrap.

“If the US border were closed, most of the scrap that is exported today would go to landfill,” says Robin Wiener, president of ISRI. “We don’t have the capacity to absorb it all.”

The rising overseas sales of paper, aluminum, copper, plastics, and steel also have to do with the nitty-gritty economics of America’s trade deficit with China.

Because China exports so much more to America than it buys back, the shipping containers from Shanghai that are full of computers, mobile phones, and TVs on the journey to Long Beach, Calif., risk returning empty for the trip back.

Shipping companies, seeking to cut their losses, offer bargain rates on their westbound freighters: It is cheaper to ship a 40-foot container full of iron scrap from Los Angeles to a Chinese port than it is to send it by train to a foundry in Chicago. US and Chinese scrap merchants have not been slow to take advantage of the deals.

At the same time, sorting and recycling is a lot cheaper in China, where wages are a fraction of US levels. At Mr. Sun’s courtyard processing plant, for example, women using box cutters to strip labels from plastic soda bottles before they are ground up earn about $15 for a day’s work.

Such factors have made the world “over-dependent on China” for scrap recycling and vulnerable to sudden changes in the rules, such as Green Fence, worries Mr. Borad. “That is a matter of concern.”

Some traders say the new policy in China has forced them to sell their scrap in different countries, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, where it is either reprocessed or simply sorted and cleaned to the new Chinese standards and then shipped on to China.

“We’ve seen a pretty good uptick in shipments to Southeast Asia,” says Joe Pickard, ISRI’s chief economist. But capacity there “is not sufficient to take up the slack from China,” he adds.

Nor are the new destinations likely to tolerate being the planet’s trash can indefinitely, predicts Kramer, who sells American scrap iron and nonferrous metals in several Asian countries. ” ‘If you can’t send it anywhere else, send it here’ is not the kind of message anyone wants to send,” he says. How long will this last?

Some businesses do not expect Chinese customs officials to go on being so zealous for long. Indeed, previous similar crusades have petered out in the past, and the General Administration of Customs in Beijing has announced that its current campaign to “reinforce inspection and prevention work in key areas” will end in November.

But well-placed observers do not think that the old lax habits will reassert themselves. “Before Green Fence, both companies and customs officials were unclear about the laws and regulations,” says Wang Jiwei, secretary-general of the China Metals Recycling Association. “After the campaign, both sides will understand the laws better, and I think they will continue to be enforced.”

The first four months of the campaign have certainly hit the Chinese recycling industry – raising prices for some recyclable materials that are now in shorter supply. “Our industry is really facing a very big adverse impact from the stricter environmental standards,” complained Huang Chongsheng, chief executive officer of aluminum scrap smelter Ye Chiu Metal Recycling at last month’s BIR conference.

US recyclers, too, are beginning to feel the effects, especially those who collect, sort, or trade low-end materials, such as the cheaper sorts of mixed plastics often extracted from household waste.

“The market for mixed rigids [such as plastic yogurt containers, margarine tubs, or buckets] has gone to hell in a handbasket,” says Jeff Powell, publisher of Resource Recycling magazine. “Mixed paper and mixed plastics are being put into landfill” now that they cannot be sold to Chinese recyclers, he adds.
What next?

“We used to send garbage because it was the cheapest thing to do and because the Chinese would accept it,” Mr. Powell explains. The new Chinese policy, he says, will force US recyclers either to sort recyclables more carefully, or to recycle more material in the US, or both.

“We are going to find ourselves forced to be much more innovative” in dealing with waste, predicts Michael Schipper, a scrap trader with International Alloys in Mendham, N.J. “We will have to find ways of processing that material here in a much more cost-effective way.”

US processors “are beginning to dip their toes into” that future, says Mr. Schipper, but they are constrained by the cost of more sophisticated machinery.

Already, however, US businesses handling scrap are dealing with it more carefully, according to Steve Alexander, spokesman for the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers. “People who took the easiest route” before by baling and selling heavily contaminated material “may be running it through a second sorting step, putting it through optical sorters,” he says, because that is what the market now demands.

That means that more of the plastic ends up where it is meant to be, and less gets thrown away or burned, either in the US or in China. “Environmentalists love Green Fence,” says Powell.

“We are at a turning point in our business,” Gregory Cardot of the French waste management firm Veolia Propreté told the BIR conference. “We have to seize this opportunity … for a sustainable environment for our planet.”

If the new Chinese policy lasts, predicts Borad, “the fly-by-night exporters will be eliminated. Green Fence will be a blessing in disguise for our industry.”

Written By:
Peter Ford, Christian Science Monitor, June 19, 2013