Plastics and the Waste Stream
May. 28th, 2020 05:28 pmIn the wake of countries like China and India deciding (for good reason) not to accept the rest of the world's plastic waste anymore, I have to wonder what's been happening to all the previously recycled plastic waste recently. Is it just being landfilled? Dumped in the ocean? Where is it going? I know a lot of countries scaled back their recycling systems immensely after they started shipping that stuff out of country, so they simply don't have the capacity to recycle most of that. So it's definitely not being recycled for the most part, I'd guess. Even before the recent changes a lot of things people thought were being recycled weren't either because they weren't actually suitable to be recycled or because they weren't properly prepared beforehand (I understand that different recycling plants all have different rules on what they'll accept based on how the plant is set up, but the general public is rarely made aware of these rules).