No, this is not an article about ninja warriors but about how Chinese policies on waste have impacted recycling and waste management in the UK (and elsewhere).
A bit of history...
We exported our recyclates to China who converted them back into products it sold back to us. The reverse logistics (empty containers from Europe returning to China) at very low cost, made all this possible. Our recycling systems (you putting your paper, plastics, cans and bottles into bins outside your front door) fed Chinese industry. All this has gone on for about 15 years. Recyclates from across Europe, the USA, even Japan and Australia, were sent to China. While you thought you were recycling to drive domestic recycling and industrial re-use, actually about half of those materials were heading east.
See the report issued by the International Solid Waste Association in 2014 on plastic exports if you want a lot of detail on this:
https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/galleries/Task_Forces/TFGWM_Report_GRM_Plastic_China_LR.pdf
Then something changed.
China committed to the Paris Agreement (under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) in December 2015 and it is taking its commitment seriously. Among the ways in which China can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions is better managing its waste. This means more recycling and less dumping. Open dumps burning near cities contribute to poor air quality too, whilst low quality treatment of many waste streams meant that part of the imported wastes ended up in the open environment.
In January 2018, China announced a ban on importing recycled materials with more than 0.5% impurities for as many as 16 different waste types – which will extend to 32 waste types by end 2018.
And all hell has broken loose.
Meanwhile the EU has recently passed new laws requiring us to recycle 65% of our waste by 2035, about twice the current levels (when taking into account the way in which we calculate this will change too). Where will it all go?
Clearly producing new materials is still much cheaper than recycling them (not always, but usually); unless very low standard recycling can find use for them (as it was in China and is now in Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia and so on) or high quality and high purity products can effectively replace virgin materials (for example, aluminium cans) – then recycling works. Usually however, recyclates are contaminated because our collection and treatment schemes do not separate waste very well and this reduces the technical ability to recycle them.
Some short answers, because it's complicated, I will try to simplify.
We need to use less, simply.
Recycle: By this I mean we need to ensure that the materials we want to recycle actually can be. So we need to make materials easier to recycle and to ensure we legislate so that we use recycled materials in new products. Newspapers for example are around 40% recycled content. The Co-Op is introducing a water bottle with recycled content, that won’t look as clear as a virgin product, but ensures plastics are re-used. Ecover the detergent company is using recycled plastic in its bottles; Coca-Cola have committed to tough targets on using recycled plastics in their bottles.
We need to actually recycle, simply.
We need to make more of own our resources, simply.
Subsidise and tax: As we have seen, virgin raw materials still cost less than most recyclates. This is because the externalities of mining, logging, catalysing from oil and their associated CO2 emissions and environmental damage are not priced in. It is crazy that it costs less to dig gold out of the ground than recovering it from used electronic goods where the concentration is many times higher. Which is why mountains of used phones, computers and TVs are everywhere. By pricing in these externalities through environmental taxes (like landfill taxes or Extended Producer Responsibility [EPR] schemes and carbon taxes) and subsidising the cost of recovering and recycling these materials, we can recycle more. The UK pays very little into these programmes, maybe a fifth or sixth of what equivalent programmes cost in Europe, explaining why effective recycling of plastic waste in the UK is only 9% of what is thrown away. At a global level we give four times more subsidies to oil producers than to renewable energy producers. Yes, you read that correctly. Which explains some of the mess we have around not recycling materials and using too much oil and coal.
We need to make polluters pay, simply.