On March 22, 1987, the Mobro 4000 left Islip, Long Island loaded with 3,100 tons of New York City trash. Some raised concerns that Islip was nearing capacity, and they pushed to find a solution. The Mobro’s owners planned to sell the waste to landfills in South Carolina at much steeper rates than Islip would pay for the refuse, leaving massive profits for the masterminds of this groundbreaking business model and relieving Islip of the burden.
Unfortunately, South Carolina refused to take the New York garbage forcing the Mobro 4000 to find other markets for its trash. After refusal in multiple states and three bordering countries, the trash barge returned to Islip after two months at sea. The Long Island government ordered the contents of the barge be incinerated and buried in the same Islip landfill where it started. The dramatic failed journey of this trash barge gained national attention, raising awareness about where our trash finds a home.
The nation’s attention to trash soon died out and we’re now facing the same catastrophe on a global scale 30 years later. America ships most of its recycling overseas for processing. China accepts two-thirds of the world’s recycling and has enacted progressively stricter regulations around what can be imported. Our fleet of ships like the Mobro 4000 could be entirely rejected by Chinese officials within the next few years due to the enactment of Project National Sword, a ban on 24 types of recyclable goods from around the world. The consequences of this initiative will be immense.
Necessity breeds invention. China’s government and manufacturers first started accepting our trash and recycling out of convenience. Chinese businesses would ship containers packed to the gills with consumer products to the US only to have empty containers shipped back. Americans found it cheaper to ship unsorted recycling to China via ship than elsewhere in the country by rail or truck.
This shipping arrangement worked out well for the Chinese, too. As a significant leader in manufacturing, raw materials have always seen high demand in China. Factories found convenience in having over ten million metric tons of recyclable raw materials shipped into the county. Instead of buying post-recycled plastic from America after we process the recycling, it’s much easier to recycle the plastics near the same manufacturing plants that use the raw materials. This system streamlined manufacturing but also started the world’s reliance on China in the recycling market.
China wasn’t striking this deal with just the United States, however. Overtime, China became the central processor for the world’s plastic waste. China imported more plastic refuse than the rest of the world combined in 2016. Developed nations, most notably America and Japan, have become reliant on China to process most of their plastic recycling. This trend arose mostly because China’s recycling systems have better efficiency than ours.
The consequences of China not taking international trash are dire. Project National Sword could displace up to 111 million metric tons of plastic within the next decade. Ultimately, we are facing an economic issue, driven by supply, demand, and fluctuating price levels. Without somewhere to ship the plastic waste, communities are seeing costs rise making recycling approach untenability.
For example, Franklin, New Hampshire used to pay $6 per ton for recyclables. The city now faces charges of up to $125 per ton to recycle. With such a large increase in cost, Franklin had no choice but explore other options. Unfortunately, the best alternative is incineration which costs Franklin $68 per ton. With the second-best option over eleven times more expensive than the traditional choice, it’s easy to see why Franklin feels they’re in a crisis driven by price increases.
Some municipalities have found the situation so insidious they’re no longer even accepting recycling to keep costs down. With rising costs, this may be their only chance at survival. Others that continue to pick up recycling have ignored the intention of their customers and simply incinerate all waste once they run out of space to store it.
Therefore, we must ask ourselves, what options do we have that both recycle the plastic and keep us moving towards an environmental utopia? Since the core issue is economic, our solution must be as well. Good intentions, hopes, and dreams do not make markets run smoothly, nor do they reverse economic policies like Project National Sword. Our current plastic market has become stressed with the largest purchaser of plastic bowing out of the game. We’ll need to create new markets to fill China’s void and rethink our relationship with plastic as a whole.
First, let’s examine immediate, short-term solutions. As I mentioned earlier, some municipalities resort to incineration and landfilling to manage the build-up of recycling rejected by China. Unfortunately, they don’t bring us closer to a green planet and, instead, continue to poison our land. Incinerating trash releases toxins into the air and landfills can poison groundwater and soil due to leaching. Also, if we’re incinerating and landfilling our recycling, it’s not genuinely recycling anymore. We’ll have just converted our recycling into garbage, taking us further from our goals.
The sooner new innovative ideas can enter the market, the sooner we can stop relying on the unattractive solutions being used in the short-term. Consumers have little control over the market, so government and private businesses will need to lead the way in recycling renewal.
Some governments have already proposed a plastic tax on plastic production. This tax on manufactures could finance garbage collection systems within nations, ending the need for exports. The economist Ted Siegler proposed a tax of one penny per pound of plastic resin manufactured and estimated it could raise around six billion dollars a year. Taxing plastic production doesn’t only disincentivize the use of plastic in the production of consumer goods, reducing the amount of plastic waste. It also helps fund solutions to the amount of waste we currently produce since this tax could subsidize more than just recycling plants.
Technology in those recycling plants can revolutionize the recycling system itself. China’s recycling infrastructure doesn’t contain superior technology. Often, recycling centers are devoid of machines and rely solely on manual labor. China’s laborers are just more amenable to low wages for hand sorting materials and rampant poverty perpetuates the system. America doesn’t have a labor market to meet all the hand sorting needs we currently have. China relies on this strength of menial laborers to process the massive quantity of recycling imports. Our country can’t replicate this model, so we’ll need to rely on our greatest strength — technology. Technology will ensure we can process as much recycling as China without needing masses of low paid workers.
Recology, a San Fransisco based recycling plant leads the world in high-tech recycling solutions. Recology relies on artificial intelligence to detect specific materials in the deluge of waste brought to the facility each day. For example, as the machine detects different colors of plastic, small puffs of air push the plastic materials into the correct sorting bins. One of the most substantial barriers to Americans expanding their local markets to match China’s is the lack of menial manual laborers. America will never have millions of people lining up for jobs to hand sort materials as China does, so we need to specialize in the avenues where we excel.
These plants can cost millions of dollars to establish, so we need to begin investing now. San Francisco has seen this technology pay off. Despite costing millions of dollars to create, this model hasn’t increased consumer prices. San Francisco residents “pay the same amount or less than residents of other Bay Area big cities do for curbside pickup, but they compost or recycle a greater percentage of their garbage.” San Franciscans now divert up to 80% of waste away from landfills. Low consumer cost and high-efficiency marks prove this system should be replicated as quickly as possible world-wide. Paris has caught on to this idea and hopes to open its own plant based on Recology’s methodology soon.
While innovative recycling methods are helpful, they are not the only solution. In the end, the real solution to the plastic crisis lies in the development of plastics, not the disposal of them. If we’re still consuming plastics, we’ll continue to need to dispose of them. The only way to end this cycle is to break our addiction to plastic. Finding plastic alternatives or alternative ways to dispose of plastic should be our long-term goal when facing this crisis. Japanese scientists accidentally discovered an enzyme that has evolved to break down plastic while examining what bacteria live in landfills. Learning more about the systems at play here could lead to technological breakthroughs that could end plastic waste altogether.
Like the Mobro 4000, we have a very long, convoluted journey ahead of us to solve our trash woes. Just as the waste trade came to existence out of necessity and ingenuity, we must now use our imagination to address an immediate waste crisis as the waste trade sees massive shifts. While traditional methods of landfilling and incineration will alleviate some pressure in the short-term, we must push for innovation in our recycling technology and stimulate businesses that take a unique approach to the use and disposal of plastics. Hopefully, with enough attention, we can end our reliance on plastic altogether and find substitutes for the various uses plastic fills in our lives. If we don’t, we face a future that takes over our land or fills our sky with toxic ash.
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MacKenzie Campbell is a Colorado native currently pursuing a Business degree with plans to pursue data analytics as a career. When not working on school, she works as a financial coach and Enrolled Agent to help liaison between the IRS and those with tax issues. In her spare time she hikes with her dog, Scout, and reads voraciously.
