Recycling from Western Countries Covers China in Filthy Garbage

China-waste-538317

Recycling is a scam. I’ve said it before. It does nothing for the environment. It does plenty for the wallets of the well connected who have recycling businesses. That’s the only reason for recycling.

Western countries dump their “recycling” into Third World countries in heaps indistinguishable from the old bad landfills. Except the difference is that they’re in major cities.

These filthy photographs show monstrous mounting piles of waste overflowing into streets and even blocking roads in the city of Shenzhen in southern China’s Guangdong Province.

The smell is so bad nauseous residents have taken to wearing masks.

Tonnes of plastic recycling being sent from Britain and other European countries is being blamed for the backlog, as tough EU laws have forced local authorities and businesses on the continent to recycle more.

One local Sun Fu, 33, said: “We have been forced to wear masks to deal with the smell, and sometimes roads can be blocked as the rubbish heaps topple over when they get too high. Something has to be done about this.”

Don’t recycle. It’s bad for people. It’s bad for the environment.

  • SoCalMike

    Recycling in California has been such a success it has turned a large segment of the formerly prosperous middle class into part-time and full-time trash collectors.

  • http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/ Edward Cline

    I live in an apartment complex in Williamsburg. Here’s how I “recycle” — I stuff plastic supermarket bags into my empty plastic containers. I have a box I use to place bulky flat containers and drafts of my political columns and empty wine bottles. I do all this for space reasons, and not for environmentally “responsible” reasons. And I have a carton of “Hefty” trash bags for the stuff that would grow odiferous (food scraps and the like). Guess where it all goes? Into any one of the regular trash bins out back. There are recycle bins, and that’s where I put the perishable stuff. So, sue me. Yes, recycling is a scam and I refuse to perform unpaid trash collection.

  • Pete

    You have to do a cost benefit analysis.

    I am sure some ‘business’ people (crony capitalists) and their brothers and sisters on the other side of the fence (concerned politicians) have made such analysis in regards to their checkbook.

    If you ship garbage half way around the world, there is something wrong. I would expect that people are not sorting well enough and that the cronies cannot force the the cost of recycling onto the population at this time so they are shortcutting the system (but not their profits) by dumping the problem on another population.

    I believe in recycling, but not at the barrel of a gun. Which is the usual way of the LEFT.

    Cardboard is a big item to recycle. I forget the exact figure but at the factory we got something like $200 a dumpster instead of paying 200 for a dumpster to be taken away. That is a $400 difference. Of course the cardboard had to be clean. No stuff like wood could be mixed in.

    What drives me up the wall is when environmentalists are so concerned they want to recycle the waist bands of baby diapers and turn it into something like shoe strings. Of course they say there is no problem. Yeah,right!

    McDonalds’s produces a lot of eggshells. it cost a lot to put in the landfill. A company find a way to separate the egg white containing collagen from the shell. It was in Businessweek;’s “developments to watch” (pre-Bloomberg). An expense to turned into a small secondary stream of income.

    So I believe in recycling. It just depends, on who is doing it and how they are going about it.

    I especially believe in it, when it comes to metals.

    THE DOD PRECIOUS METALS RECOVERY PROGRAM

    “Precious metals are not just gold, silver, platinum, but also platinum family metals such as palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium, and ruthenium. “

    • Douglas J. Bender

      I agree. Recycling, done right, makes sense.

    • ebonystone

      In some cities, McDonald’s and other fast food joints sell their used deep-fryer grease to the bus companies, to be blended with diesel fuel.

  • ebonystone

    I don’t see what the Chinese have to complain about. They ship plenty of garbage to us, so why shouldn’t we ship our garbage back to them? The ship has to sail both ways, so why not give it a load or cargo both ways?

  • laabckids

    Google terracycle. They make all kinds of products from recycling juice pouches like Capri Sun. And they even pay schools for them. But besides that, they have many recycling programs. Watch some of their videos on the website. Very interesting. They even take cigarette butts…ew!

  • pcmustgo

    I recycle and reuse and donate everything. I never throw out anything reusable or recyclable. I’ve heard of a Chinese female billionaire who made her money shipping American recycled paper back to China on those empty ships (as we sell nothing to China) and recycling it there. It all depends on the context. I’ve heard metal recycling is very cost effective and easy.

  • jean-luc scherer

    IMHO you got it slightly wrong… You are mixing up the results of bad policy making with the noble cause of recycling. Recycling is GOOD, but unfortunately many businesses are not acting in a socially responsible way and take shortcuts wherever they can to secure a good bottom line. Policy makers need to shape up in order to avoid loopholes and secure a global positive impact of recycling policies.

    I find it very sad to see articles like these, downplaying the importance of recycling just because large corporates take advantages of poor policies. Why don’t you start a debate on the real problem which is a proper revisiting of recycling policies…