Trash Piles Up in U.S. as China Closes Door to Recycling
August 3rd, 2018Via: PhysOrg:
For months, a major recycling facility for the greater Baltimore-Washington area has been facing a big problem: it has to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic it would normally sell to China.
Beijing is no longer buying, claiming the recycled materials are “contaminated.”
It would be interesting to identify where the unrecyclable materials that were going to China ended up. Is there an enormous landfill in China filled with the contaminated portions (in a country still working on infrastructure). Or given that it was all arriving at ports, could it have accidentally ended up in the Pacific garbage patch… even if they didn’t originally intend for this