Recycling
By Sam Fischman
Reduce, reuse, and recycle. These three tenets of environmentalism are what we have been taught our whole lives. Unfortunately, Recycling is not the bastion of environmentalism as it is often advertised. Not only does recycling require ludacris amounts of water, but when plastic is exported to third world countries for recycling it is often processed incorrectly, it can often end up in the ocean.
For years China has been importing the US’s recycling, and for years, Americans have not been properly cleaning their recyclables. In early 2018, China passed a policy called National Sword, which banned the import of recyclables except if they were in the very best of conditions. This has increased the cost of recycling dramatically, but this might be a good thing.
To recycle plastic, it must be thoroughly washed, and cleaned of any possible contamination, only specific plastics can be recycled, and at least in the past, plastics had to be shipped across the world for if they were to be processed. Glass is a better alternative to plastic, because it can be reused, but Recycling glass suffers from many of the same problems as plastic. Paper should be recycled, and especially Aluminium, which is extremely difficult to refine, and thus should be recycled in all circumstances. But this is only true if the materials are recycled properly.
Much of the recyclables that were exported to China were not being processed safely with plastic particles or at all. Much of the recycling ended up being dumped into waterways. This mass dumping combined with domestic plastic use in china and third world countries has contributed to the plastic in the Pacific ocean gyre far more than the occasional plastic bottle on the beach.
Because of the rising cost to export recyclables, the US has been taking matters into its own hands, some large cities can afford to send their recyclables to a processing plant, but others are simply giving up and putting their recyclables in landfills, or incinerating them.which does not take as much water as recycling. The future of recycling is not certain, but for now it might just be best to throw your plastics in the garbage.
Sources
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-should-we-recycle