How can we win the war on plastic waste?
In the next 10 years, an estimated 111 million tonnes of plastic waste will be produced, with nowhere to go.
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China’s trade war with America may be the biggest issue capturing international headlines, but it is its war on waste that may have a much more lasting impact.
When China banned the importation of plastic waste in January 2018, it sent shockwaves across the world. From 1988, the country had taken half the world’s plastic garbage, recycling it into new products. Sounds like an environmental win-win, but China’s government worked out it was having a devastating impact at the local level.
Most plastic is already contaminated with food or liquids, or covered with labels, and many of the estimated 6000 factories in China were dumping that unwanted residue into rivers, incinerating it into the atmosphere, or burying it.
So China moved fast. Following the ban, it shut more than two-thirds of the factories that previously processed plastic waste, prompting many factory owners to take their plant and equipment to southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. Malaysia and Thailand, and now Indonesia, seeing the toxic build-up, reacted swiftly too and have also banned waste imports.
It’s creating a global disaster. An evaluation of the impact by the University of Georgia in the US calculated that by 2030 there would be 111 million tonnes of plastic waste with nowhere to go.
“We’re drowning in plastic waste,” says David Hodge, CEO of Plastic Forests, an Albury-based recycler of soft plastics such as cling film and bread bags, and a manufacturer of recycled products. “China had 6000 recycling facilities at its peak, and 1300 after the crackdown. To give you some perspective, Australia has around a dozen recycling plants.”
That leaves plastic as one of the least recycled products in Australia, with the Department of Environment and Energy’s national waste report showing that just 12 per cent of the 103kg of plastic consumed per person was recycled in 2016-17. More than 87 per cent went to landfill.
Unfortunately, says Hodge, China’s crackdown has made the situation in terms of local recycling worse, not better. Now that one of the world’s largest consumers of plastic waste has dropped out of the market, so has the floor price.
“Soft plastic film waste like stretch wrap or bread bags used to fetch $200-600 a tonne from China, now at best it is worth $100 a tonne for export to Asia, or worse, it costs up to $400 a tonne to dispose of in landfill,” Hodge says.
“Only very large recyclers, close to a shipping port to supply China with the resin or pellets, can survive on such low margins. It certainly doesn’t attract more entrants into the recycling market and there are very limited markets for recycled LDPE products in Australia.”
“What’s occurring in China is a truly a gift for all humanity because it’s forcing us to rethink the entire recycling infrastructure globally”
But with consumers increasingly conscious of the waste they’re creating, businesses throughout the supply chain are getting nervous. From consumer goods companies to supermarkets, there is a growing urgency to demonstrate they are part of the solution, not the problem. A ban on single-use plastics would radically shift the industry.
“What’s occurring in China is a truly a gift for all humanity,” says David Katz, founder of The Plastic Bank, a social enterprise trying to tackle waste. “It’s long overdue because it’s forcing us to rethink the entire recycling infrastructure globally.”
Katz founded the Plastic Bank to help reduce the amount of plastic waste finding its way into the ocean, and discovered that the poorest countries were the largest contributors to ocean-bound waste.
He saw that two issues had the potential to be solved concurrently: extreme poverty and waste. Beginning in Haiti, and now in the Philippines and Indonesia, Plastic Bank sets up recycling centres in poor communities, where citizens collect and sort the various types of waste. That product is then sent off for recycling into pellets, which Plastic Bank sells to partners looking for a more ethical product. So far it has signed up German giant Henkel and SC Johnson as customers.
The process uses IBM Blockchain technology to track the entire cycle of recycled plastic, from collection, credit and compensation through delivery to companies for re-use.
It’s part of Katz’s vision to get people to realise the value of plastic rather than treat it as waste.
“There’s a giant demand for the material,” he says. “I think of it like an acre of diamonds. If there was no store where you could sell the diamonds, they would sit on the ground worthless. It’s really the infrastructure that truly reveals the value.”
That’s why blockchain technology makes such a difference, Katz says. At one end of the spectrum, it allows Plastic Bank to demonstrate clear transparency to the end buyers about where the plastic has come from and help ensure it hasn’t come at the exploitation of child labour, for instance. It charges a 10 per cent premium for its “socially conscious” product.
At the other end of the spectrum, it is helping impoverished people become part of a banked sector, helping them break some of the cyclical barriers of cash-based subsistence.
“It allows for a safe and authentic transfer of value,” says Katz. “When we transfer money into the account of collector, it’s safe against robbery. We pay in US dollars to counter their home country’s currency fluctuations. And then they can transfer value within the ecosystem safely and authentically too. They can use the blockchain to pay school fees or buy insurance or health care, and that will transfer from our account to those institutions in currency.”
Ultimately the goal is to create a community-driven model with exponential opportunities for expansion, with local groups operating their own centres and the products tracked and brokered by Plastic Bank.
The scale of the problem will require many such innovative ventures. David Hodge at Plastic Forests in Australia warns that the cheap cost of producing virgin plastic works against recyclers. The massive investment into fracking in the US has produced hundreds of millions of barrels of oil that is highly suitable for virgin plastic feedstock.
“People feel bad about using all this plastic at home, and good when it goes to recycling, but that is only part of the chain,” he says. “People have to minimise their use of plastic, and also find ways to consciously support products recycled from it.”
Plastic Forests manufactures a wheel stop in Australia that uses the equivalent of 155 shopping bags, and produces recycled products for the garden as well.
Hodge says consumers need to purchase products made from recycled content to support reprocessors and care for the environment. Katz agrees, and wants to appeal to consumers’ humanity too.
“This year the world’s going to produce 350 billion kilos of plastic. Almost all of it is going to end up in landfill,” he says. “Its value is no less than a dollar a kilo. So we — humanity — are throwing away hundreds of billions of dollars every year, a trillion dollars in three years. It’s estimated that $500 billion could eliminate extreme poverty globally — eradicate it — and yet carelessly, as humans do, we throw it away.”
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