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By AFP
For a few months, the recycling plant in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area has a problem: it has to pay to get rid of paper and plastic instead of selling it because China is no longer buying them anymore arguing that they are too "contaminated".
The 900 tons of waste to be recycled by trucks 24 hours a day, five days a week, on the treadmills of the Elkridge factory, one hour from the US capital, are certainly not clean
In the middle of an infernal mechanical noise and a brown dust cloud, dozens of workers wear gloves and masks, most of the women they separate with their expert hands a hodgepodge of garbage, clothing, wooden objects, cables, tree branches … and obsession with recyclers: plastic bags, which are not supposed to go in containers to be recycled because they entangle in machines.
The aim is to "decontaminate" as much as possible, that is to say, on the one hand, strictly separate recyclable materials from non-recyclable materials and, on the other hand ensure that the final plastic, paper or cardboard piles do not contain any other material.
"We even had to slow down the machines and hire more people" for better decontamination, says plant director Michael Taylor.
At the end of the classification, large blocks of compacted waste were generated. This waste has been purchased for decades by companies, mainly in China, who have cleaned, crushed and processed raw materials for industrialists. But these importers frowned when the plastic balls were too dirty or were not "pure" enough.
Last year, China bought more than half of the recyclable waste exported by the United States. Globally, since 1992, 72% of plastic waste has been exported to China and Hong Kong, according to a Science Advances study.
But since January, China's borders have been closed to most papers and plastics, following Beijing's new environmental policy whose leaders say they want to stop being the dustbin of the planet. Regarding the rest of the waste, including metal and cardboard, Chinese inspectors have established a pollution rate of 0.5%, which is too low for current technologies in the United States, which can not classify waste with as much precision. 19659003] The sector predicts that nearly all categories of waste will be discharged by 2020.
In Elkridge, the factory still sells its PET (plastic bottles) to a South Carolina buyer and its carton abroad. But mixed paper and mixed plastic have no value, so it pays subcontractors to take them.
In other parts of the United States, garbage collectors solved the problem in a taboo fashion: they no longer classify plastic and paper that end up in landfills.
"Nobody wants to say it out loud because no one likes to do it," says Bill Caesar, director of WCA, a Houston-based company.
The American giants Republic Services and Waste Management acknowledged that done at the time, as in Oregon. Small towns, especially in Florida, have simply canceled waste collection for recycling.
The other importing countries, Indonesia, Vietnam and India, can not absorb the tens of millions of tons that China has bought. And few US industrialists have the technology to process these materials.
"China has given the industry very little time to adapt," says Adina Renee Adler, of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a large professional federation.
"Soon we will have so many stocks that we will have to put more and more in landfills if we do not find new markets," admits the president of the National Association of Waste and Recycling, Darrell Smith
The problem is beginning to be noticed in the negotiations of municipal contracts. As many cities have ambitious recycling targets, such as Washington, which wants to move from 23% of household waste to 80%.
The capital already pays 75 dollars for recycling a ton, against 46 dollars for waste, It is burned to generate electricity.
"There was a time when it was cheaper to recycle, but this is no longer the case," says Christopher Shorter, director of public works in Washington. "Recycling will cost us more and more money."
To avoid financial penalties, the city wants to "educate" its citizens so that they stop putting in the blue container waste that does not fit, such as plastic bags.
And to reduce the volume of waste to recycle or burn, consider the collection of organic waste, with a future third container, and the construction of a composting plant. And he plans to make the inhabitants pay for the weight of the garbage they throw away.
But even with these measures, Bill Caesar, in Houston, warns Americans: there is no need to pay more for "the privilege of recycling." "
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