
India Imposes Complete Ban on Solid Plastic Waste Imports - howard941
https://thewire.in/environment/india-solid-plastic-import-banned
======
andrewstuart
The dumping of "recycling" onto other countries just goes to show what a lie
recycling actually is.

It's not recycling, it's just garbage, but the word recycling makes us feel
good about sending it to some other country to be dumped.

With India and China refusing it, look to the "recycling" companies to make
deals with countries that don't have the political will to say no to accepting
the worlds plastic and paper garbage.

Why are we spewing out an infinite quantity of single use plastic and
packaging?

It's all about the packaging industry and profit.

The thing that annoys me most is the in almost 100% of cases, the solutions
discussed are about "how do we make use of all this plastic and other waste?",
instead of asking the question "why haven't we turned off the tap?"

~~~
quakeguy
You are absolutly right. To others seeing this comment, i‘d recommend you
watch the Documentary named „Plastic China“. It is on YT, but you support the
makers here:

[https://www.plasticchina.org](https://www.plasticchina.org)

We need to stop plastic polluttion now, or im afraid the earths ecosystem will
collapse sooner or later.

~~~
djsumdog
I feel like the debate on human induced climate change is a red haring. It's
so abstract, it basically invites conflict and CO2 is absolutely nothing
compared to issues of mass consumption. There are huge floating patches of
plastic waste our oceans, being swallowed by sea life, killing fish and making
its way into our food supply. There are massive lakes of sludge in Chinese and
South Pacific factory cities used to make our electronics and PC components.
There are disasters in the US like the Kingston Fossil spill where a coal
plant containment damn breached and left a toxic slurry of coal ash and sludge
flood the valley and enter the watershed.

Overall consumption needs to stop. Buying a new electric car requires all the
waste that comes with making a car, plus the lithium and other metals needed
for batteries that have to be replaced every ten years.

We cannot spend our way out of this. Humanity needs to consume less, to not
replace cellphones and laptops every 2~4 years. Anything that fights real,
tangible and easily measurable environmental disaster will also reduce CO2
emissions as a byproduct, but emissions themselves should not be and end goal.

The end goal is much much more difficult: convincing the people who run Intel
and Apple and Samsung that it is in the planet's best interest to not have
higher sales each year and that a better goal are products that last four
times as long, where the sale of replacement parts are much higher than that
of actual products. It requires fundamental shifts in the way our global
economy works.

~~~
noufalibrahim
A low hanging fruit in the attempt to reduce consumption (which is the only
real solution) is to stop single-use items. e.g. paper napkins, straws, carry
bags from the local grocery shops etc. Just assuming that it's biodegradable
or being recycled doesn't take into account the amount of energy and materials
that went into production which are just wasted since the items are not
reused.

~~~
tsimionescu
While being low-hanging fruit, these things are also fully irrelevant. If the
entire world stopped using them tomorrow, it would barely be a blip on any
climate model or ocean pollution model.

~~~
titzer
Wearing the dressings of smart people, we do nothing, while telling others to
do nothing, because the something they would do would be a "blip."

~~~
MisterTea
> Wearing the dressings of smart people, we do nothing, while telling others
> to do nothing, because the something they would do would be a "blip."

Talk is cheap. If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself. The
only way to effect change is to work towards it yourself and gently encourage
others to do so. Be prepared to make sacrifices and/or compromises (this is
what stops most people, humans are selfish and lazy).

Don't like plastic waste? Make an effort to reduce it. Take reusable cloth
bags with you when shopping. A big trend among young people today is takeout
food. It seems that fewer and fewer people cook for themselves. This is a
massive source of plastic waste. Don't buy new gizmos just because they are
new or for status. Use things until they break. Then fix them until they cant
be fixed.

Just imagine if everyone stopped talking a good game and started taking small
steps to making the world a better place.

~~~
titzer
My irrelevant "blip" for 2017 was picking up 300 bags of trash off beaches
with my own bare hands. I didn't lead with that, but you brought it up.

------
torgian
Nothing perturbs me more than the whole plastic problem we have.

China and India's plastic and garbage pollution is one thing, but Japan is the
place that irks me the most when it comes to plastic use.

I bought bananas that were wrapped in plastic (go figure, right? ) And what
did the cashier do? She wrapped it in more plastic! THEN she gave me a plastic
bag to put it in!

That blew my mind. Like, why? Just _why_?

Go to any supermarket in Japan and you'll see fruit and vegetables wrapped in
plastic for no good reason at all. It's one of the reasons I typically buy my
produce from the local farmers instead of the market now.

I mean, why would you _individually_ _wrap_ oranges?

~~~
jor-el
Its very much same in Singapore as well. In supermarket, more often than not,
cashier puts one item in one plastic bag, so if you are buying a weeks
grocery, you easily get 10-12 plastic bags just like that. The vegetables are
pre-packed covered with plastic. Some fruits are packed with another harder
plastic - apart from the laminated plastic. And the thing that bothered me the
most is during chinese new year, each mandarin is covered in plastic
individually. Why do you want to cover each mandarin, for a fruit which
already has a thick peel!!

With developed countries, with all educated residents, are finding hard to
curb plastic use (or lack of effort), it looks humanity is still some distance
away to make a serious dent to use of plastic overall.

~~~
reactor
I read that Singapore waste management/disposal is top notch, those plastic
would most likely end up in incinerator and eventually to man-made offshore
Semakau Landfill which itself is an attraction spot.

[https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/a-rare-
glimps...](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/a-rare-glimpse-into-
the-processes-behind-singapore-s-waste-dispo-7960348)

[https://thesmartlocal.com/read/semakau-
landfill](https://thesmartlocal.com/read/semakau-landfill)

~~~
mrpopo
This is just throwing more (fossil fuel) energy into collecting and burning
avoidable trash and into building more structures to accomodate it. How is
that "top notch"? This might solve the short-term plastic pollution issue, but
goes against all recommendations for climate change mitigation.

It's time to start considering CO2 emissions as our transparent, unmanageable
trash. Each Singaporean is generating 10 tonnes of it yearly, and each
American is generating 16 tonnes of it yearly.

~~~
azernik
Incineration actually _recovers_ energy from trash - plastics are made from
fairly complex petrochemicals, and so have a decent energy content.

The climate change issue is that, when burning it, you release carbon just
like when burning any other fossil fuel.

~~~
mrpopo
Technically, it's even worse than other fossil fuels, because of all the extra
steps involved in the plastic life-cycle, increasing its carbon footprint.

Waste-to-energy is a growing part of Singapore's energy mix, and that's not
exciting news.

------
WheelsAtLarge
India should have done this long ago.

Recycling items is way harder than it needs to be.

First companies need to re-engineer their products to minimize the solid waste
and maximize recyclability

Second, people need to easily understand what can be recycled and what can not
so they can make an informed decision

Third, communities should not have the option to ship out their waste and have
someone else deal with the problem. By shipping out their problems they never
have to deal with the consequences.

Solid waste is as much pollution as smog has been in large cities. Clean air
laws have changed the whole environment in cites like Los Angeles.It's time we
start doing the same with solid waste.

~~~
greeneggs
> Solid waste is as much pollution as smog has been in large cities. Clean air
> laws have changed the whole environment in cites like Los Angeles.It's time
> we start doing the same with solid waste.

As much as smog "has been"? Los Angeles today is still full of SUVs belching
smog. The air quality is still insanely awful. Yet the dialog has moved on
(maybe because SUVs are for the wealthy?).

Why care about landfills? Air pollution kills people, in addition to hurting
them less severely and blocking the views. And on a global scale, climate
change is going to hurt everyone on Earth. Landfills in the United States,
where they should be properly lined so they don't leak poisons, don't hurt
anybody. Plastic in landfills even sequesters carbon.

~~~
wutbrodo
> As much as smog "has been"? Los Angeles today is still full of SUVs belching
> smog. The air quality is still insanely awful. Yet the dialog has moved on
> (maybe because SUVs are for the wealthy?).

Meh, there's no need to resort to conspiracy theories to explain why the
conversation has dropped off the radar. The level of smog in LA is
_drastically_ lower than its peak, both quantitatively (as one figure, ozone
levels are 40% of what they were in 1970) and in terms of how the man on the
ground experiences it. Most people stop caring about a problem when it stops
being so dramatically visible.

------
zaroth
I don’t know if this is correct, but here is my theory;

Container ships have to make the voyage from the US back to China, why do it
empty? They need massive tonnage to bring back, and the US just doesn’t export
enough into China so let’s carry recycling? (This assumes the ships that bring
X from China to the US can bring Y from the US back to Chine without expensive
reconfiguration, and perhaps also that the ports of entry are reasonably
close?)

Also, the amount of money that China was willing to pay for the material (or
be paid for taking the material) was so outside the market price as to
essentially be “dumping” (economically speaking) their recycling waste capture
product on the US. In the presence of Chinese dumping no US facility could
fairly exist in the market, so they all shut down. Now that the Chinese
economic dumping had ceased, the US is left without a functioning market.

Yes, it pleases me to no end to frame the problem of US recycling as China
dumping. No, I haven’t been able to determine if there is any factual basis to
this hypothesis!

~~~
mschuster91
> In the presence of Chinese dumping no US facility could fairly exist in the
> market, so they all shut down. Now that the Chinese economic dumping had
> ceased, the US is left without a functioning market.

So, uh, basically the business model of venture capitalism? Go into a market,
_crush_ all the competition with massive amounts of cheap money and then jack
up prices?

Don't call me surprised when China opens its ports for waste again but at 10x
or 100x the price...

------
olliej
Eventually those of us in America and Europe will have to start actually
recycling rather than just saying we are while shipping it to other countries.

Obviously part of the solution is going to necessarily require companies stop
putting so much waste packaging on products.

~~~
avip
We need reducing, not recycling. Recycling is an amazingly inefficient and
polluting solution to a problem that should not exist (in its current
magnitude) in a sanely-managed planet.

~~~
Apes
Reduce is fine to a point, but populations are increasing faster than any
policy of reduction can keep up with. Reuse is scalable, but is being
completely ignored in our current disposable consumerism environment.

There is almost no focus on reuse in the US. If you want to get groceries, you
don't take a container to fill, you buy your food wastefully prepackaged. Fast
food restaurants don't give you a plate and glass, they give you disposable
wrapping and a plastic cup. Even clothes are meant to be disposable - most
people don't repair their shoes, they just throw them out and buy new ones.

I don't see this mentality changing any time soon, and it's really sad. We
should start changing companies for the disposal costs of their products and
packaging, rather than hiding the cost in environmental damage.

~~~
JetSpiegel
In many European countries, single use plastic bags for groceries almost
disappeared overnight after a flat tax of 10 cents was slapped on it, I think
they used less than 50% in 1 year or something like that.

The supermarket sold some sturdier and bigger bags for like 50 cents, who can
be reused for years and they even replace it for you if the bag is ruined for
some reason, but using this was socially frowned upon. After the tax, it is
socially acceptable to reuse bags now.

It is possible to change this on a society level, and the change can be vary
fast on our current hyper-connected economy.

A similar thing happened with lunches. Before 2008, people would never carried
their own lunches from home, it was a total social faux-pa. The mix of
economic downturn (even if the same people did not feel it), healthy
lifestyles are trendy and the classic one-upmanship between who would bring
the fanciest lunch lead to droves of people carrying their lunches on public
transit almost overnight, special stores that sell thermos and special bags,
and hundreds of cook books.

------
dbg31415
I thought these were just depressing... but yeah, likely more truthful.

Pick one, they're all just as depressing as the next.

* Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk)

* Penn & Teller - Recycling - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jac96QNtRmU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jac96QNtRmU)

* Debunking recycling paper (P&T segment) - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7czKngCUASM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7czKngCUASM)

* The shocking scale of our waste - and the myth of recycling | Irene Rompa | TEDxMidAtlantic - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTgTWLYCeOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTgTWLYCeOU)

------
mjevans
Single stream recycling is a really poor idea.

A better set of ideas that might actually help:

Reduce - as suggested elsewhere, eliminate parts of the packaging that aren't
strictly required (outer seals, etc).

Reuse

    
    
      * Create a set of standardized, rugged, containers that seal around foods.
      * Actually use them to pack foods in standard containers.
      * Which are then returned for cleaning and reuse.
    
    

Recycle

    
    
      * Many bins, one for each type of allowed recyclable plastic.
      * Also a compost bin
      * Which would be different from a yard waste bin
      * Make sure the reusable containers are also easy to recycle.
      * Also, make an easy to read (human and machine) /large/ 'number' label.
    

Ban difficult to recycle things such as plastic fused to paper.

~~~
titzer
> * Create a set of standardized, rugged, containers that seal around foods.

We used to actually have this: it was wooden/plastic crates and boxes,
pallets, burlap bags, and glass milk/juice/beer bottles.

We're moving backwards, and it's all due to economics. Reuse of those
materials back then was motivated by the cost and difficulty of producing
those containers. It simply was not economically feasible to produce a single-
use crate or glass bottle--too expensive. Economics and the wonder-engine of
capitalistic progress has now given us the ability to manufacture _trillions_
of single-use containers for literally less than a penny a piece. It's just
far cheaper and less of a headache to just produce, wrap, and then toss the
waste. No one wants to deal with all the niggling details of carting bottles
back and forth, washing, them, filling them. Just too much of a pain in the
ass. So we get what we have now. Clean, no fuss, no mess. Just toss it.

In many ways, our older economies--full of poor working saps who had to lug
bottles back and forth--was far more sustainable than today's system. But
today we're rich and lazy and awash in our own trash. Progress!

~~~
MandieD
Germany and neighbors still do _some_ deposit bottles and jars, and at least
in Germany, are better at the re-intake than they were 15 years ago.

Unfortunately, we've also lied to ourselves about our Gelbesacks (packaging
recycling bags) to the extent that there are a lot more things in single-use
containers and a lot of fruit and veggies are in pre-weighed, plastic-wrapped
packages.

~~~
titzer
I know, I live in Germany. The Pfand and bottle reuse system is pretty nice.

------
paulstovell
As I read this I was reminded of how trees in prehistoric times piled up
because no bacteria had evolved to eat them yet:

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01/07/the-
fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth/)

We don’t feel so bad about using paper or wood because it now biodegrades, but
if those organisms hadn’t evolved, we’d be worried about wood and paper the
same way we worry about plastic.

This article suggests there are some bacteria that has already evolved to eat
kinds of plastic:

[http://theconversation.com/how-plastic-eating-bacteria-
actua...](http://theconversation.com/how-plastic-eating-bacteria-actually-
work-a-chemist-explains-95233)

Maybe in a few decades with more research, we’ll have solutions for plastic
that don’t involve sending it across the world?

~~~
ndnxhs
If plastic was biodegradable that would be pretty much the same thing as
burning it. We need to keep it underground in the form of oil

------
leggomylibro
I wonder if this trend will inspire more people to look into DIY recycling.
Plastics are pretty easy to melt down and reuse, if you know what sort of
plastic you are working with.

You should research the types of recycleable plastics and how they are
marked[0] - some types can release toxic fumes which are bad for both you and
the planet. I've heard you can develop allergies to plastics from breathing
some of the nastier fumes, and while that may be an urban legend I would
definitely advise caution.

Still, HDPE and LDPE seem fairly safe and easy to recycle without adding
things like plasticisers, and HDPE bricks make for great CNC stock.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_codes)

~~~
sydd
You can buy a machine for $300 that recycles plastic at home for your 3D
printer. [https://www.filastruder.com/collections/filastruders-
accesso...](https://www.filastruder.com/collections/filastruders-
accessories/products/filastruder-kit?variant=338125655)

~~~
Razengan
In the game FTL, the universal currency is "scrap", presumably because of 3D
printers/fabricators/replicators that can turn it into anything else.

[0] [https://subsetgames.com/ftl.html](https://subsetgames.com/ftl.html)

~~~
leggomylibro
Haha, yeah - if I ever get to make a game in the apocalypse/hoarder genre,
'polyethylene' is going to be a core resource.

It doesn't lend itself to 3D printing because it is similar to Teflon/PTFE in
not wanting to stick to anything, but it is still astonishing stuff. You can
melt/press it into molds, and if you toss it in a toaster oven you can even
knead it like putty through welding gloves if you're careful. Metal tools will
chew through it like butter with hardly any wear, and it is very light for its
strength. You can even melt down the shavings. And if you need to, you can
often "glue" it to things with anything from a soldering iron to a blowtorch.

------
elchief
Saw this on my feed today:

A relatively painless guide to cutting plastic out of your life

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90312169](https://www.fastcompany.com/90312169)

~~~
xfitm3
The article suggests glass shampoo bottles? No thanks. Plastic is a great
material, it is just abused.

~~~
sykic
Plastic is not a great material for the environment and your comment
illustrates the crux of the issue for humanity. We tend to optimize for local
maxima and not global ones. As other commenters have pointed out pricing in
externalities would be a great step forward. Plastic shampoo containers may
not be so great in your eyes if their cost became prohibitively expensive.

~~~
triplewipeass
Plastic is a great material for some uses, but it’s also a very durable
material. I’d love to purchase shampoo in the form of a refill of the plastic
shampoo bottle I’ve already purchased some months ago. Why buy a new bottle
every time? That’s the part which doesn’t make sense.

~~~
emiliobumachar
What would the refill package look like?

~~~
205guy
A large vat at the store, with a spigot to refill the bottle you brought with
you. I've seen this for cooking oils and honey, not sure it exists for
cosmetic products.

------
ggm
Presumably people notice this is explicitly targetting the consequences of
China banning them the same way: when china moved, the feedstock moved to
India.

~~~
sydd
I guess that it will move now sadly to other poor countries in the far East or
Africa

~~~
ggm
I think that it's moving to incineration domestically. Thats the trend here in
Australia, combined heat and power is being touted as probably better (the
smoke is an issue, the ash is an issue)

------
Waterluvian
I want to live in a world of reusables. Where I show up to a grocery store
with glass bottles to be swapped out for filled ones of soda and milk. Give me
yogurt in glass, even. I don't care.

We have this complicated recycling sorting program in Waterloo. And months ago
I noticed that they simply stopped giving a crap about the sortedness or
cleanliness of anything that isn't aluminum.

Are papers still decently recycled?

------
k0t0n0
within India, we use lots of Plastic bags. GOV of India tried to ban it so
many times but public and shop owners are not willing to give it up. on other
hands, GOV doesn't oppose big corporations producing consumer food packages
using plastic. This is really a big issue where I live (animals eating
plastic; big dump of plastic in public place). in my view, we should totally
ban plastic bags for consumers and for corporation usage.

------
hedora
Vaguely on topic: I used to work in one of the tall buildings in downtown
Berkeley, so I could see the bay.

Every day, I’d spot at least one garbage scow hauling stuff off to be dumped
somewhere in the bay/ocean.

That was about the same time they banned single use plastic bags. The
hypocrisy of inconveniencing everyone to make a show of doing something while
still allowing the garbage scow pisses me off to this day.

I wish these environmental greenwash programs came with a legal requirement to
do a end-to-end impact study after implementation.

------
dang
This issue was discussed yesterday from the China side:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346342)

------
stunt
Positive move. It is not like India is on a different planet. Plastic waste
export limitations will force us to find better solutions including reducing
plastic waste.

------
itissid
I have seen a few biodegradable things used for takeout like in chipotle. Can
someone tell me why those are not more popular in at least some processed
food, e.g. my hummus.

~~~
WheelsAtLarge
The cost makes it hard to use biodegradables. They are way more expensive so
companies won't buy them if they don't have to. Industries like fast food
restaurants survive on a very tight profit margin so a few cents makes a
difference. Also, if they aren't properly handled so they can decompose they
are just as bad since they won't break down.

~~~
maxxxxx
If they were forced to use biodegradable everybody would have to raise prices
by a few cents and nobody would notice.

I agree with the concern about not being handled properly. How many
biodegradable really end up in a compost pile>

------
hbarka
What happened to the futuristic plasma furnaces that were supposed to be able
to melt all this stuff into elemental components?

~~~
AlphaSite
Carbon is not that useful on its own.

------
mschuster91
Scientifical question: most plastics can be dissolved using acetone or other
solvents. What keeps us from simply doing what von Laue and Franck did
(dissolving their Nobel prize medals in aqua regia to hide them from the
Nazis), just not with gold medals but with plastics?

------
doorbellguy
I like this move.

------
jackfoxy
Thank God.

Hopefully everyone learns from this. Recycle where it makes economic sense, or
bury in an approved manner. It will be interesting rock in less than 1M years.

------
gzeus
This is just funny for me. India already is one of the countries where you can
see waste everywhere.

~~~
nonamechicken
Depends on the area. Some areas are clean, some areas are filthy. The city I
live in is successfully reducing the usage of plastic. They banned plastic
bags that are at a certain thickness (the kind you get in grocery stores).
Everyone uses paper/cloth bags and lot of times its reused. Now the government
authorities are talking with restaurants to see how they can reduce plastic on
take out food.

At home, they collect plastic waste once a week. We are expected to clean the
plastic properly and dry it before handing them over. I was really surprised
to see how much plastic waste we generate every week in our 2 people
household. Seeing that has motivated me to reduce waste as much as possible.

They are also replacing all the city public transport buses with electric.
They had some trial runs and electric buses made good amount of profit for
them. So hoping to see an all electric fleet in another 5 years. Another major
source of pollution is the 3 wheeler auto rickshaws (tuk tuk). News reports
say they will also eventually become electric.

