While on my way to Allotment there was a whole piece on R2 about the plastic to China thing it seems a lot more of what we faithfully put in our bins can't be recycled for various reasons. Madness!
Hormones in animal feed- and antibiotics for that matter.
As I said before law of unintended consequences all for short term gain & profit.
As polythene is difficult to recycle & not many places do it, perhaps we should lobby GW to revert to paper envelopes to send out our monthly magazine, & the RHS for that matter.
Third world countries don’t have electricity and plastics duck, they are the most environmentally friendly countries out there - the problem is countries that are currently first and second world with heavy, badly regulated, industry like China, India, and America. The good news is that they all signed up to new environmental agreements this year, which is why China has decided to stop being the world’s landfill and taking on our statistics along with their own.
Learnincurve & Paul B3 I agree but some "undeveloped" countries point the finger at "us" and say you chopped down your forests & dug up your land for minerals how dare you tell us we can't do the same. I know some are saying what we did was a mistake & we want them to take a different path, but we should help them go straight to sustainable technologies & we certainly shouldn't dump our waste on them.
We've already ruined out environment ; maybe financial incentives not to ruin theirs would be an option .
I didn't know anything about our 'exportation' of plastic to China until recently . Incredible!!!!
What horrifies me is the amount of fuel that must have been consumed in this process ; a friend of a friend in the Navy told me that the average cruise-liner consumes fuel at an average rate of 200 gallons per mile(!!!)purely to entertain wealthy people with nothing else better to do . Point A to point B then back to A !
How much was used during the needless transportation of supposedly recycled plastic to what is very nearly the opposite side of the planet ?
What they were saying on the programme was that consumer goods were coming in from China & that the containers would have gone back empty so they were filling them with plastic & other things for them to re-cycle. It was stuff that was uneconomic for us to re-cycle, in the case of a lot of the plastics they were mixed with other things that needed separating by hand and their labour costs are lower than ours. I am not advocating it but that's the excuse they were using. As someone else said if they didn't wrap all their exports up in so much packaging we would not be having to send it back. I expect the truth is in there somewhere but you can bet either way someone is making a load of money out of it.
Posts
Fine mesh would trap the marine life too.
While on my way to Allotment there was a whole piece on R2 about the plastic to China thing it seems a lot more of what we faithfully put in our bins can't be recycled for various reasons. Madness!
Hormones in animal feed-
and antibiotics for that matter.
As I said before law of unintended consequences all for short term gain & profit.
As polythene is difficult to recycle & not many places do it, perhaps we should lobby GW to revert to paper envelopes to send out our monthly magazine, & the RHS for that matter.
As I said earlier on this thread (05/12/2017) :-
"What an almighty mess we've made of this planet "
Paul B3 -How sad but true our little blue dot is suffering from "us" but how do we change it.
IainR
Whatever we do in the 'developed' world (that's a joke in itself) , seems to be negated by the so-called third world countries .
I've really no idea what the future holds for this planet , or the flora & fauna supposedly co-existing with us
.
Third world countries don’t have electricity and plastics duck, they are the most environmentally friendly countries out there - the problem is countries that are currently first and second world with heavy, badly regulated, industry like China, India, and America. The good news is that they all signed up to new environmental agreements this year, which is why China has decided to stop being the world’s landfill and taking on our statistics along with their own.
Lets hope they follow the agreements then
Learnincurve & Paul B3 I agree but some "undeveloped" countries point the finger at "us" and say you chopped down your forests & dug up your land for minerals how dare you tell us we can't do the same. I know some are saying what we did was a mistake & we want them to take a different path, but we should help them go straight to sustainable technologies & we certainly shouldn't dump our waste on them.
I agree IainR
We've already ruined out environment ; maybe financial incentives not to ruin theirs would be an option .
I didn't know anything about our 'exportation' of plastic to China until recently . Incredible!!!!
What horrifies me is the amount of fuel that must have been consumed in this process ; a friend of a friend in the Navy told me that the average cruise-liner consumes fuel at an average rate of 200 gallons per mile(!!!)purely to entertain wealthy people with nothing else better to do . Point A to point B then back to A !
How much was used during the needless transportation of supposedly recycled plastic to what is very nearly the opposite side of the planet ?
The mind boggles
Last edited: 04 January 2018 14:51:02
What they were saying on the programme was that consumer goods were coming in from China & that the containers would have gone back empty so they were filling them with plastic & other things for them to re-cycle. It was stuff that was uneconomic for us to re-cycle, in the case of a lot of the plastics they were mixed with other things that needed separating by hand and their labour costs are lower than ours. I am not advocating it but that's the excuse they were using. As someone else said if they didn't wrap all their exports up in so much packaging we would not be having to send it back. I expect the truth is in there somewhere but you can bet either way someone is making a load of money out of it.