Steerpike

I just read (sorry, late to the party on this one!) that China stopped taking a whole bunch of recycled materials from the US and Europe as of 1/1/2018. This is causing a massive pile-up of recyclabes such as plastic bottles in recycling centers around the world.

I have to confess, I've been somewhat happy to use single-use (disposable) plastic water bottles and other similar items based on the naive notion that recycling was taking care of the 'waste'. It makes a whole lot of sense to focus instead on re-usable products and I'm going to make an effort from now on to do so ... glass instead of plastic, re-fillable bottles, non-plastic packaging, etc. I'm always amazed at how much wasteful packaging still goes on in the retail space, even though there has been some progress away from things like expanded polystyrene. It's interesting to read (in the articles below) how various European countries are planning to eliminate 'single use' packaging by some date in the future ... can't imagine our Mr. Trump getting on board with such a concept.

Some interesting background reading on the topic:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/w...ables-ban.html
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0dc592a0dd7b9
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-e...-idUSKBN1FI2E2
https://earth911.com/business-policy...-ban-plastics/

scrubbedexpat091

Causing issues in Canada as well. Recycling facilities are finding they now have to pay to have the material taken since there is not enough demand for the supply now that China is gone, and has caused some companies here who operate the facilities to not have enough money based on current contracts since the revenue stream has stopped and now they are needing to pay. In Quebec one facility has become a mountain of recyclable material due to issues.

As for less packaging, companies need to fix that especially goods from China. I have an aquarium and most is made in China and comes with excessive plastic and other packaging, the few items from Germany and Italy are basically just placed into a snug box to keep the item from moving, no plastic, no foam, just 1 box.

A lot if stuff that is technically recyclable still ends up in the dump even if placed in a recycling bin.

Octang Frye