Are we fooled by Plastic waste and recycling?
Data taken from the European Parliament.
“The production of plastic has increased exponentially in just a few decades – from 1.5 million tons in 1950 to 359 million tons in 2018 (globally) – and with it the plastic waste. After a marked reduction in production in the first half of 2020 as a result of covid-19, production has resumed again in the second half of the year.
In Europe, energy recovery is the most common way to dispose of plastic waste, followed by recycling. 25 percent of all generated plastic waste ends up in the landfill.
Half of the plastic collected for recycling is exported to be processed in countries outside the EU. The reasons for exporting include a lack of capacity, technology and financial resources to handle the waste locally. The EU’s export of waste to countries outside the EU amounted to 32.7 million tonnes in 2020. The majority of the waste consists of ferrous and non-ferrous metal scrap as well as paper, plastic, textile and glass waste and goes mainly to Turkey, India and Egypt.
Previously, a significant portion of exported plastic waste was shipped to China, but with China’s recent ban on imported plastic waste, EU exports are likely to decrease further. This means that the risk of the waste being incinerated or ending up in landfills increases in Europe. In the meantime, the EU is looking for circular and climate-friendly ways to manage its plastic waste.
The low percentage of plastic recycling that takes place within the EU means large economic and also environmental losses. It is estimated that 95 percent of the economic value of plastic packaging material is already lost after the first use.“
Comments by Windmush.
The world’s population grew from an estimated 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.9 billion in 2021.
Since 1950, plastic production has multiplied by 239, while during the same time the world’s population has multiplied by 3.15 times.
What have all the governments and scientists done in the last 70 years to prevent the progress of plastic? Apparently not much! Obviously, this is only due to financial gain in the short term, without thinking about the future of the environment.
An example is the pharmaceutical industry, in the past (1950) mainly glass and paper packaging was used. Whereas nowadays each pill is encapsulated by plastic or aluminum material. This development is hardly beneficial for the population, but rather for the plastic/packaging industry.
According to the EU information at the beginning of the article, we do not have the capacity to recycle these materials, but send millions of tons to other countries who do not inform what happens to all this waste. There are, honestly speaking, garbage that has changed the environment in countries through the formation of garbage mountains, just because they get paid to receive it. However, this is not shown in the presented environmental declarations which are then presented in the famous COP meetings. There has even been talk of such an idiotic idea of sending garbage to the moon!
This is too much for me, now I will end my post and come back another day.
Thank you for reading my post.
#Windmush / #curtbergsten
