Tom Mooring, Flikr
Who actually knows what happens to the waste carefully sorted by UK households and businesses to be recycled? I thought I did - the glossy council advertisements told me that it was sent off to the nearest recycling centre to be processed into new materials for manufacturing. Yet underneath the propaganda lies an unwelcome truth: more than a third of the waste paper and plastic collected in Britain is actually processed in China - 8,000 miles away.
In its desperate search for raw materials to fuel industrialisation, China is buying up vast quantities of waste from UK councils and businesses. Meanwhile, with EU legislation driving up landfill costs, thousands of tonnes of contaminated waste that could be dealt with in Britain is being shipped abroad without any knowledge of the environmental costs.
“China is buying up everything it can. It is sucking in material from all over the world and it doesn’t give two noodles what it takes,” said one plastics recycler interviewed in an investigation by the Guardian.
This is depriving UK recycling firms of waste to process, and was identified by industry expert Chris Dow as one of the key barriers to the future growth of the industry. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology notes in a report: “The ability of [reprocessors] to attract investment has been limited by… variation in recycling systems across England and the volumes of recyclate being exported.” In other words, the lack of recycling infrastructure in the UK leads to waste being sent abroad, which starves UK centres of waste to process.
