Indonesia Cracks Down on the Scourge of Imported Plastic Waste – Yale Environment 360
When China banned plastic waste imports in 2018, exporters in wealthy countries targeted other developing nations. Faced with an unending stream of unrecyclable waste, Indonesia has tightened its regulations and has begun to make progress in stemming the plastics flow…
Recycled plastic can be more toxic and is no fix for pollution, Greenpeace warns – the Guardian
“Plastics are inherently incompatible with a circular economy,” the global environmental network said in a report that brings together research showing recycled plastics are more toxic than their virgin constituents.
The report, timed to coincide with the beginning of fresh talks for a potential global plastics treaty, comes as separate research has found breaking down plastics for recycling scatters microplastic pollution into the environment…
American cities want to recycle their plastic trash in Mexico. Critics call it ‘waste colonialism.’ – the Grist
Just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl in February, the City of Phoenix, Arizona, published a peculiar press release touting its strategy for waste diversion. Thanks to its relationship with Direct Pack Incorporated, a multinational company that makes and recycles plastic, the city said it would be able to send much of its plastic waste to Mexico for recycling…
Stop ‘wishcycling’ and get wise: how to recycle (almost) everything – the Guardian
From contact lenses to blister packs and used dental floss, there are items that perplex even the most dedicated recycler…Labelling often requires a doctorate in semiotics to decode, kerbside collections are a postcode lottery and council recycling centres are often difficult to access without a car. At home, packaging piles up…All of it amounts to us collectively wondering whether recycling is ultimately pointless because it’s all going to end up in landfill in the developing world…
Why Recycling Isn’t the Answer to the Plastic Pollution Problem – Scientific American
For many years, the transition to a circular plastic economy has been understood to require a combination of efforts… ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. The principles are based on the top three levels of the waste hierarchy, whereby reducing is better than reusing, which is, in turn, more favourable than recycling. In practice, however…
Corporate Greenwashing
Advertising is an incredibly powerful tool for convincing us to buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. Last year the United States spent nearly $300 billion on advertising, and now that we are only about six weeks from Christmas, we can expect to be inundated with ads to convince us to get out our credit cards and close out the year on a spending spree. According to the latest data from the National Retail Federation, individual American consumers spend an average of $998 on gifts and holiday stuff each Christmas, which is the same as the median pre-tax weekly salary of $1,001…