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Recycle plastic12/28/2023 As in China, the waste is often burned or abandoned, eventually finding its way into rivers and oceans. In October last year, a Greenpeace Unearthed investigation found mountains of British and European waste in illegal dumps there: Tesco crisp packets, Flora tubs and recycling collection bags from three London councils. The present dumping ground of choice is Malaysia. (The US, the world’s most wasteful nation, produces an astonishing 2kg per person per day.) Quickly, the market began flooding any country that would take the trash: Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, countries with some of the world’s highest rates of what researchers call “waste mismanagement” – rubbish left or burned in open landfills, illegal sites or facilities with inadequate reporting, making its final fate difficult to trace. According to the World Bank, 1.3kg of municipal solid waste is produced per person, per day – just above the European average of 1.1kg. The UK, like most developed nations, produces more waste than it can process at home: around 230m tonnes a year. If China doesn’t take plastic, we can’t sell it.” Still, that waste has to go somewhere. “The price of plastics has plummeted to the extent that it isn’t worth recycling. “The price of cardboard has probably halved in the last 12 months,” he says. Westminster council sent 82% of all household waste – including that put in recycling bins – for incineration in 2017/18įor recyclers such as Smith, National Sword was a huge blow. The family lives alongside the sorting machine, their 11-year-old daughter playing with a Barbie pulled from the rubbish. The remainder is often burned in the open air. It is filthy, polluting work – and badly paid. The film follows a family working in the country’s recycling industry, where humans pick through vast dunes of western waste, shredding and melting salvageable plastic into pellets that can be sold to manufacturers. The policy shift was partly attributed to the impact of a documentary, Plastic China, which went viral before censors erased it from China’s internet. Under its National Sword policy, China prohibited 24 types of waste from entering the country, arguing that what was coming in was too contaminated. ![]() Then, on the first day of 2018, China, the world’s largest market for recycled waste, essentially shut its doors. Or, at least, that’s how it used to work. Food, and anything else, is burned or sent to landfill. Paper and cardboard goes to mills glass is washed and re-used or smashed and melted, like metal and plastic. Some of that happens in the UK, but much of it – about half of all paper and cardboard, and two-thirds of plastics – will be loaded on to container ships to be sent to Europe or Asia for recycling. From there, the materials enter a labyrinthine network of brokers and traders. It starts with materials recovery facilities (MRFs) such as this one, which sort waste into its constituent parts. Everything you own will one day become the property of this, the waste industry, a £250bn global enterprise determined to extract every last penny of value from what remains. You drink a Coca-Cola, throw the bottle into the recycling, put the bins out on collection day and forget about it. From there, it will go – well, that is when it gets complicated. The waste stands stacked neatly in bales, ready to be loaded on to trucks. “We’re seeing a significant rise in boxes, thanks to Amazon.” By the end of the line, the torrent has become a trickle. ![]() “Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics, and wood,” says Smith, 40. Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes. On the tipping floor, an excavator is grabbing clawfuls of trash from heaps and piling it into a spinning drum, which spreads it evenly across the conveyor. We are standing three storeys up on the green health-and-safety gangway, looking down the line. “We produce 200 to 300 tonnes a day,” says Jamie Smith, Green Recycling’s general manager, above the din. The line at Green Recycling handles up to 12 tonnes of waste an hour. A photograph of a smiling child on an adult’s shoulders. A crushed Tupperware container, the meal inside uneaten. ![]() Odd bits of junk catch the eye, conjuring little vignettes: a single discarded glove. A momentous river of garbage rolls down the conveyor: cardboard boxes, splintered skirting board, plastic bottles, crisp packets, DVD cases, printer cartridges, countless newspapers, including this one. A n alarm sounds, the blockage is cleared, and the line at Green Recycling in Maldon, Essex, rumbles back into life.
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