Recycling is piling up in the United States because China does not want more
11 juilelt 2018
For the past few months, the metropolitan Baltimore-Washington recycling plant has had a problem: it has to pay to get rid of the paper and plastic it sorts, instead of selling them. Because China does not buy any more, affirming that they are too "contaminated".
The 900 tons of recycling spilled by 24 dump trucks on 24, five days a week, on the conveyor belts of the Elkridge factory, one hour from the US capital, are certainly not clean.
In an infernal mechanical din and a cloud of brown dust, dozens of gloved and masked workers, mostly women, remove from their expert hands a bazaar of rubbish, clothes, wooden objects, cables, tree branches. and the obsession with recyclers: plastic bags, which are not supposed to go into the bins to recycle because they get tangled in the machines.
The goal is to "decontaminate" as much as possible, that is to say on the one hand to strictly separate recyclable materials from non-recyclable waste, on the other hand to ensure that the final piles of plastics, paper or of boxes do not contain any other material.
"We even had to slow down the machines and hire more people" to better decontaminate, says the manager, Michael Taylor.
At the end of sorting, large cubes of compacted waste (paper, cardboard, plastics, etc.) are produced. These wastes had been bought for decades by companies, mainly in China, who cleaned, crushed and transformed them into raw materials for industrialists. These importers turned a blind eye when the plastic bales were too dirty or not "pure" enough.
China, last year, has bought more than half of the recyclable waste exported by the United States. Globally, since 1992, 72% of plastic waste has ended in China and Hong Kong, according to a study published in Science Advances.
But since January, Chinese borders have closed to most paper and plastic, a consequence of a new environmental policy in Beijing ... Chinese leaders saying they want to no longer be the trash of the planet, or even its dump.
For the rest, including metal or cardboard, Chinese inspectors have set a contamination rate of 0,5%, too low for current US technologies that can not sort the waste so accurately. The industry expects that almost all waste categories will be rejected by 2020.
- Brutal transition -
In Elkridge, the factory still sells its PET (plastic bottles) to a buyer in South Carolina, and its carton abroad. But mixed paper and plastic are worthless: it pays subcontractors to take them back.
Elsewhere in the United States, recyclers have resolved to a taboo act: they no longer sort the plastic and paper, which end up in landfills.
"Nobody wants to say it out loud, because nobody likes to do it," Bill Caesar, boss of WCA, a Houston-based company told AFP.
The American giants Republic Services and Waste Management have acknowledged having done punctually, as in Oregon. Small towns, especially in Florida, have simply canceled the recycling collection.
Other importing countries, Indonesia, Vietnam or India, are unable to absorb the tens of millions of tonnes that China imported. And few American industrialists have the technology to process these materials.
"China has given the sector too little time to adapt," says Adina Renee Adler of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a large trade federation.
"We will soon have so much inventory that we will have to put more and more in the landfills if we do not find new markets," admits the president of the National Waste and Recycling Association, Darrell Smith.
- More and more expensive -
The problem is beginning to be felt in cities when renegotiating municipal contracts. Especially since many cities have ambitious recycling targets - like Washington, which wants to go from 23% of household waste to 80%.
The capital is already paying 75 dollars to recycle a ton, against 46 dollars for garbage, which is burned to generate electricity.
“There was a time when it was cheaper to recycle, but it's not anymore,” said Christopher Shorter, director of public works in Washington.
"Recycling will cost us more and more," he warns.
To avoid financial penalties, the city wants to better "educate" its citizens so that they stop putting bad waste, such as plastic bags, in the blue bin.
To reduce the amount of waste to be recycled or burned, she is considering the collection of organic waste, with a future third bin, and the construction of a composting plant. And she thinks to make pay the inhabitants to the weight of waste.
Even with these measures, Bill Caesar, in Houston, warns all Americans: soon they will have to pay more for "the privilege of recycling".