Should we send our rubbish to China?

Discussion on living for a better and more responsible future
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Should we send our rubbish to China?

Yes, all of it
2
11%
Some of it
5
26%
No, none of it
12
63%
 
Total votes: 19

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Meanqueen
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Should we send our rubbish to China?

Post by Meanqueen »

I have been thinking about about this. I read that they are sending a lot of our waste plastics back to China, and what good sense it makes because the ships that do the return journey are full of empty containers, so they might as well be full of something. As we don't want the rubbish, we are only a small island and they have lots more space than us, and our landfills are filling up, why not send it back to where most of it came from? Makes sense to me, does it to you?

rubbish to China

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taff
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Post by taff »

why not just stop using so much plastic, in packaging, and then we wouldn't have to.
And better still, use biodegradable plastic, and even better, recyclable plastic that we can recycle ourselves.
What really bugs me about this plastic numbering system is that most of it can't be recycled, and what irritates me even more, are the companies that print on the packaging that this CAN be recycled, but forget to add, they don't actually recycle anything or use any recycled material in their containers.

We send all our crap to China ( not only plastic, but metals, batteries, and things that can't be recycled or used again), and to Africa to be buried in landfills in their countries. It's just passing the buck, and not actually sorting out the problem.
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Stig
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Post by Stig »

I heard something recently that we (as in UK) are looking into excavating old landfill sites to extract plastic. As it is oil-based it's value has risen dramatically to the point where it is a useful commodity. No wonder the Chinese want to buy it.

Wrap say the UK does not have sufficient resources to reprocess all our plastic waste. I'd be upset to find that the bottles I've carefully washed & ferried to the plastic-bank were ending up as landfill :cry:
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Orfy
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Post by Orfy »

We need to invest in the technology to recycle it here and reuse it our selves.
A lot of the chemical for the plastic and the plastic it's self is made here so we should deal with it.

If it originated from china then they should take it back for free and reprocess it their selves.

This would be impossible to do on an individual basis but look at it this way.
If China Send in the equivalent of 500 million tonnes of goods and that contains 100 million tonnes of plastic they should take back 100 million tonnes.
If we send in to China 30 million tonnes of plastic then they keep it and take back 70 million tonnes from us.
That way each country deals with it's own pollution regardless of where it ends up.
If prices go up because of it then Good.
You should buy your own countries products to cut down on shipping etc!!!!!

Now that is a form of green tax that makes sense.
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mellonia
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Post by mellonia »

The trouble is our friend Magg** sold off british industry. Steel Coal yu name it. So alot of our goods are made in China, maybe they should have some of the byproduct back.

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ged
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rubbish

Post by ged »

:-D
Hi Gang!!!!!
I saw a prog a few weeks back about recycling in china,the place filmed had a community recycling centre with 32,yes 32 different bins!Consequently everything was recycled resulting in zero waste for that community.It should happen here IMHO,but some would just dump all their waste in 1 bin,some would not bother at all......It is a collective responsibility for now and future generations that we wake up to enviromental issues today,not some vague point on the horizon.I applaud the initiative taken by Transition Towns such as Totnes in Devon.
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Meanqueen
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Post by Meanqueen »

I am surprised that the 'No, none of it', is leaping ahead. If the container ships are returning to China with a lot of empty containers on, surely that is a criminal waste in itself? They could take the waste back where it came from and re-use it. How can a small island like us, take vast quantities of China's waste, sooner or later we will sink. Ideally we shouldn't be buying as much as we do from China, but that's another story.

Good point, Ged, what is it with some people that they have such a problem with recycling? The way I look at it is that we are on this earth for a short time, it is our responsibility to look after it. We should not be plundering the earths resources, and then discarding valuable materials. We should be borrowing from the earth, and using it again and again.

Had to get that off my chest, :-D

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misty
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Post by misty »

It's just an other case of how lazy our country is. It is easier to send stuff to other countries (not just China) and pollute their country then to invest in research and do it ourselves. It is easier and cheaper to import foreign workers than train our own, (not just to work but to have a work 'ethic'). It has even got down to importing more footballers, cricketers and rugby players. If it wasn't for the Olympics you could wonder what we were good at.
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saint-spoon
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Post by saint-spoon »

mellonia wrote:The trouble is our friend Magg** sold off british industry. Steel Coal yu name it. So alot of our goods are made in China, maybe they should have some of the byproduct back.

Mellonia

)ot:
A highly political statement there. It might be true but blaming someone who lost power a decade and a half ago for the failure of successive governments to tackle the problem of plastics and landfill is slightly unfair I would tend to argue. On that line of thinking it would be fair to blame her for the recent cases of rickets in our inner cities, after all she did stop the children’s milk backing the seventies.
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saint-spoon
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Post by saint-spoon »

Have a quick look at what the Chinese industry is doing to their country. IMO it’s better to not buy anything or return anything to that nation until they clean their act up although that’s not actually practical. Like the recent Olympics the glossy propaganda surrounding that countries green credentials are a far cry from the dollar hungry and oppressive regime’s reality…… actually not that different from our own reality in many ways.


http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/ ... armer-text
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Richard
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Post by Richard »

A chap got an investment on Dragons Den last night for his initiative on Waste Disposal.

If you missed it, have a look on BBC iplayer, the referred bit is about half way through.

What I seemed to get was that we don't want to use any more land here and it's being priced out the market.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

Interesting
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Meanqueen
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Post by Meanqueen »

I watched that this afternoon Richard, I wondered how those bins were going to cope with the amount of waste a building site throws up, will they get emptied twenty times a day? And how do you fit a pallet into the wood bin? And who sorts the waste, and where does it end up? I was surprised that 2 dragons invested in it, they didn't seem to ask many questions, do they fully understand? I thought they threw that one in just to give the ending a feel good factor.

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bluebell
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Post by bluebell »

I'm with Orfy on this one!! )t'
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Post by Gwenoakes »

From what I understand about China, those ships will be full of our lead that has come from church roofs, been melted down and shipped out!

ETA - Have read in our local paper that our District Council is performing the best for recycling, so at least round here we are all learning.
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