With China’s Ban on Waste Imports, Europe Announces New Recycling Initiatives


Bali, Kuta beach. Photo courtesy of: © Claude Graves. “The unprecedented plastic waste tide plaguing our oceans and shores, can become as limited as our chosen relationship with plastics, which involves a dramatic behavioral change on our part…” — © SAF — Coastal Care

Excerpts;

In the wake of China’s ban on the import of foreign garbage, which took effect earlier this month, countries across the globe are scrambling to figure out what to do with the thousands of tons of trash piling up at their ports. Now, Europe has announced it is launching an aggressive new recycling initiative to reduce plastic waste and garbage exports.

The project will take aim at “single-use plastics that take five seconds to produce, you use it for five minutes, and it takes 500 years to break down again,” said Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the European Commission…

Read Full Article, Yale E360 (01-16-2018)

Plastic, Poverty And Pollution In China’s Recycling Dead Zone; Guardian UK (07-31-2014)

Meet Rajeesh, The Man Who Has To Live With Our Plastic Pollution; Huffington Green (04-09-2015)
Imagine if you were confronted with overwhelming plastic pollution every single day…

Paradise Lost: Filmmakers Document the Maldives’ Trash Island, Weather News- Travel (10-06-2014)
It may be known as a tropical paradise, an archipelago of 1,200 coral islands in the Indian Ocean. But the traditional image of the Maldives hides a dirty secret: the world’s biggest rubbish island: Thilafushi.

Paradise lost on Maldives’ rubbish island, Guardian UK (01-02-2009)
It may be known as a tropical paradise, an archipelago of 1,200 coral islands in the Indian Ocean. But the traditional image of the Maldives hides a dirty secret: the world’s biggest rubbish island…

All Human-Made Objects on Earth Amount to 30 Trillion Tons; LiveScience (12-05-2016)

World’s urban waste mountain a silent problem that is growing daily; Guardian UK (06-06-2012)

POcean Oddities: Pacific’s Plastic Island; Surfline (06-06-2017)
Ever since people invented trash, the sea has served as our favorite dump…

Plastic Waste Causes $13 Billion In Annual Damage To Marine Ecosystems, UN (06-24-2014)

Navy investigating disks of compressed trash littering Outer Banks beaches; Virginian Pilot (05-16-2017

Only 14% of plastics are recycled – can tech innovation tackle the rest? Guardian UK (02-22-2017)
Billions of pounds of plastic waste are littering the world’s oceans. Now, an organic chemist and a sailboat captain report that they are developing a process to reuse certain plastics, transforming them from worthless trash into a valuable diesel fuel with a small mobile reactor that could operate on land or at sea…

Plastic Pollution: “When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide,” Coastal Care

Ridding the oceans of plastics by turning the waste into valuable fuel; Science Daily (04-03-2017)

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