rec
yth
ycl
as
a m
ing
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAA
by sam gibbs Let me set the scene: you’re on your lunch break in between classes, you decide to grab an iced-coffee from your local coffee shop. As you finish your coffee, you toss the plastic cup into the nearest recycling bin. You go about your day, unbothered by the fate of that cup. What if I told you that THAT cup, along with hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic from the United States alone gets shipped to economically developing countries every year? What if I told you that the US has had to switch the country it ships this plastic to because these countries are starting to feel dire effects from the overflowing plastic? The United States ships plastic to poorly regulated countries in order to get rid of it. But wait, what happens to this plastic when it gets to these countries? Do we, as mass consumers of plastic, have a responsibility
to understand the process of recycling and how it affects third world countries? Recycling as we know it is a myth, and I am going to uncover the true nature of this process. According to a study done by The Guardian in 2019, the equivalent of 68,000 shipping containers of American plastic recycling were exported from the USA to developing countries that mismanage more than 70% of their own plastic waste. To mismanage plastic waste means it was dumped or inadequately disposed of in places like open landfills. As an example, Malaysia, a country that is one of the biggest recipients of the US’s plastic, mismanaged 55% of its plastic waste. The United States has been exporting its plastic to other countries for years. In 2015, China and Hong Kong handled more than half of the recycled waste, which can be estimated at about 1.6 million tons of plastic every year. At first, these countries developed a harvesting industry to use this plastic in products to sell back to the US. However, much of the plastic collected was contaminated with food or dirt, or simply not able to be recycled, which means it had to go into landfills. 13
