Barges loaded up with plastic from Asia regularly arrive in U.S. ports, but this one is different.
The plastic stuff Malaysia is sending here isn’t cheap junk Americans will buy. It’s actual trash Americans tried to send to Malaysia.
This week, Malaysia announced it’s returning literally tons of nonrecyclable plastic to the U.S., after Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin said the country doesn’t want to take China’s spot as a catchall for Western countries’ waste.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. recycled and composted only 34.7% of its trash, or “municipal solid waste,” in 2015. The U.S. doesn’t always have the resources to recycle waste itself, so it ships its unwanted, hopefully recyclable garbage off to countries such as China.
Last year, however, China banned the import of plastic and paper waste. Now Malaysia has had enough too, and countries including the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia are all about to get back about 3,000 tons of nonrecyclable plastic that they sent to the Southeast Asian country.
That good feeling so many Americans get by tossing an empty can in the blue recycling bin might be a lie. You could just be sending your empty vinegar jug on a longer journey to the landfill.
Thousands of tons of “recycling” have been dumped in landfills just in the past few months, and when the materials are recycled, doing so requires an ironic amount of resources, especially when materials are shipped overseas. A Memphis, Tenn., airport even keeps recycling bins just to throw their contents away with the rest of the trash.
And for a few thousand pounds of plastics, “recycling” simply meant shipping the junk to Malaysia and back.
It turns out that rather than playing the flashy recycling game with which so many manufacturers and local governments are enamored, Americans would help the planet more with a more old-fashioned solution: simply reusing what they have.
