The US plastic waste exports to Asian countries with a poor waste management system, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, increased by 32 percent over the first eight months of 2020, as China has been curbing imports of solid waste, Dianna Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Plastic Pollution Coalition, a US-based environmental alliance, told Sputnik
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th December, 2020) The US plastic waste exports to Asian countries with a poor waste management system, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, increased by 32 percent over the first eight months of 2020, as China has been curbing imports of solid waste, Dianna Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Plastic Pollution Coalition, a US-based environmental alliance, told Sputnik.
Last week, the Chinese Ecology and Environment Ministry said that it would introduce a total ban, also referred to as "the sword," on the import of any solid waste starting at the beginning of 2021.
"I know that this year, just between January and August, the US plastic waste exports to Asian countries with poor waste management and high ocean plastic pollution rates have increased by 32 percent," Cohen said.
The US plastic recycling rates diminished over the last years, while the public has been misled about the plastic waste being recycled when in reality it was shipped overseas, the activist noted.
"Prior to 2018, our recycling rates for plastics in the US were less than 9 percent and when this China Sword took place, there is a chemical engineer who works with us and she researched it, and she came out with the projection that due to the China Sword, by the end of 2018 recycling rates would drop from 9 percent to 4.4 percent and by the end of 2019 to 2.6 percent for plastic," Cohen added.
In the 1990s, China increasingly needed raw material for industrial development, forcing the country to rely on the import of solid waste, such as plastic. Since 1992, the country has received 196 million tonnes of plastic waste annually. In late 2017, China began to ban the import of some types of solid waste to improve the environmental situation. This greatly affected the global recycling industry, since China had been the largest world importer of solid waste. The Chinese decision to ban the import of solid waste has also influenced other Asian countries, such as Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, which have faced increased imports of solid waste from the United State and Europe.
