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Amid growing environmental and health fears, China shut its doors to all but the cleanest plastics in late 2017. They developed a vast industry of harvesting and reusing the most valuable plastics to make products that could be sold back to the western world.īut much of what America sent was contaminated with food or dirt, or it was non-recyclable and simply had to be landfilled in China. Of the 9% of America’s plastic that the Environmental Protection Agency estimated was recycled in 2015, China and Hong Kong handled more than half: about 1.6m tons of our plastic recycling every year. Officials around the globe have banned particularly egregious plastic pollutants, such as straws and flimsy bags, yet America alone generates 34.5m tons of plastic waste each year, enough to fill Houston’s Astrodome stadium 1,000 times.

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Plastic only came into mass consumer use in the 1950s, but in the Pacific Garbage Patch it is already thought to be more common than plankton. Photograph: Diego Azubel/EPA Where America’s recycling lands

Migrant workers sort through plastic bottles at the Thaiplastic Recycle Group plant in Samut Sakhon, outside Bangkok, Thailand. There have been no global regulations – just a long, dirty market that allows some companies to take advantage of a world without rules.” But the international recycling business sees it as a way of making money. “People don’t know what’s happening to their trash,” said Andrew Spicer, who teaches corporate social responsibility at the University of South Carolina and sits on his state’s recycling advisory board.

One was the US.Ī new Guardian series, United States of Plastic, will scrutinize the plastic crisis engulfing America and the world, publishing several more stories this week and continuing for the rest of 2019. Reflecting grave concerns around plastic waste, last month, 187 countries signed a treaty giving nations the power to block the import of contaminated or hard-to-recycle plastic trash. These failures in the recycling system are adding to a growing sense of crisis around plastic, a wonder material that has enabled everything from toothbrushes to space helmets but is now found in enormous quantities in the oceans and has even been detected in the human digestive system. With these nations overwhelmed, thousands of tons of waste plastic are stranded at home in the US, as we reveal in our story later this week. In some places, like Turkey, a surge in foreign waste shipments is disrupting efforts to handle locally generated plastics. The newest hotspots for handling US plastic recycling are some of the world’s poorest countries, including Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia and Senegal, offering cheap labor and limited environmental regulation. Last year, the equivalent of 68,000 shipping containers of American plastic recycling were exported from the US to developing countries that mismanage more than 70% of their own plastic waste. The consequences for public health and the environment are grim.Ī team of Guardian reporters in 11 countries has found: Tham is paid the equivalent of $6.50 a day to strip off the non-recyclable elements and sort what remains: translucent plastic in one pile, opaque in another.Ī Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of thousands of tons of US plastic are being shipped every year to poorly regulated developing countries around the globe for the dirty, labor-intensive process of recycling. Contact us through the Help Center or ABD Ltd/Ent.Nguyễn Thị Hồng Thắm is paid $6.50 a day to sort recycling on the outskirts of Hanoi.

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