China is weary of our waste - and it could spell disaster - from Linkiesta.it

As China grows greener and greener, it is also growing wearier and wearier of disposing of foreign waste. What can be done? The only answer is to shift to bioplastics – and some Italian companies are already ahead of the curve.

by Arvea Marieni (Innovation Manager – Hamburg)

“Life in plastic, it’s fantastic” echoed the chorus of a pop hit some twenty years ago. But life in plastic isn’t fantastic – and we’re experiencing it first-hand. The sheer mountains of microplastics and plastic fragments that pollute our seas and precious water reserves as well as killing off countless birds, fish and cetaceans are before our very eyes as they morph into billions of pixels swarming the ether via Google, TV and social media.

There has been quite a stir in Italy following the imposition of biodegradable grocery bags, patented by Italian bioplastics manufacturer Novamont and costing consumers two cents per piece. We’ll get back to this later, though.

Since January 1st 2018, China has enacted a plastic waste import ban, effectively outlawing twenty-four kinds of secondary raw materials intended for recycling. The ban applies especially to household waste plastic, namely PET bottles, plastic bags, PVC from shampoo and detergent bottles, food packages, PS from disposable cutlery and many more. The list of banned materials also includes unsorted waste paper, typically contaminated with food residues.

Millions of tons of waste are already piling up in other countries, including developed counties with booming waste recovery and recycling industries. So what can be done with all this waste? Until last year, the British exported 65% of their plastic waste; the Irish only recycled 5% of their waste domestically and even the ever-efficient Germans have managed so far to handle only half of their plastic waste (as a secondary raw material or to produce energy).

Things are looking catastrophic. Furthermore, the price of secondary raw materials is likely to be pulled into a downward spiral, heavily impacting the profitability of recovery operations as we know them today. In so many words, China’s decision is a devastating blow to the refuse management system and to the recycling industry worldwide.

HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?

For twenty years, one of China’s leading growth drivers was waste imported from developed economies. Waste imports grew ten-fold, soaring from 4.5 million tons in 1995 to a staggering 45 million tons in 2016.

More than half of the world’s copper waste, plastic waste and waste paper exports are shipped to China. When I entered this industry in 2002, waste paper imports amounted to around 20 million tons a year. Last year they reached 27 million tons.

According to the Bureau of International Recycling, the world’s leading recycling industry association, in 2017 China imported 7.3 million tons of plastic.

You might be wondering how much this stuff is worth. Well, the commercial value of China’s secondary raw material imports (let’s not call it waste, even when it is) exceeded 18 billion dollars in 2017.

THE CHINESE ARE SICK OF BEING POLLUTED BY OUR PLASTIC

Obviously, as long as the Chinese were willing to import waste, American, European and Japanese companies weren’t going to complain. For years they exploited the price differential offered by China in order to hike their profits. It is, after all, the law of supply and demand. But there was also some dirty work going on. Sometimes – and I experienced this first-hand – the waste sent to China did not meet international quality standards.

Initially, China – much like India and Indonesia – was quite happy to turn a blind eye to these shortcomings. Sometimes, the problem was down to the inherent features of the materials. For instance, PVC releases dioxins into the environment. The infamous polystyrene we use for our take-away coffee and airplane meals releases the highly toxic styrene once heated. Then there are composite materials, such as polyethylene-coated paper and aluminium laminates used for milk and cream cartons and liquid food containers, which are extremely hard to recycle.

Low-quality waste of this kind leads to more contamination and pollution; it also means that much of the waste gets dumped in China since recycling is not an option. And this is one of the main reasons behind China’s ban on plastic waste imports. There are other reasons, too, and they are all linked to China’s new needs and ambitions.

ENVIRONMENTALISM – THE CHINESE WAY

Environmental issues have been acknowledged as possibly the greatest threat to China’s social and economic development and stability. During Xi Jinping’s extensive speech at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party, the Chinese word for environment/ecology (生态) or its synonyms recurred 89 times. In comparison, the Chinese word for economy was pronounced a mere 70 times.

The Chinese government’s industrial policies in key sectors are being heavily influenced by this new environmental awareness, which has been progressively absorbed by the central and local environmental laws. We are witnessing a progressive definition of an increasingly consistent and integrated corpus of laws, as well as increasingly coordinated executive functions, particularly in terms of monitoring, controlling and punishing.

For instance, until the amendments to the 2014 New Environmental Protection Law came into force, the cost of environmental non-compliance for companies responsible for exceeding emission thresholds was around one-tenth of that envisaged by the new law.

Prior to the amendments, polluting companies were happy to pay fines rather than undertake long-term anti-pollution measures. Article 59 of the new law solved the problem by establishing a system of daily penalties that would remain in force until the breaching party’s emissions were effectively brought back within legal limits. Thus was the situation until very recently.

Shortly before the end of the year, the National People’s Congress (the national legislature of the People’s Republic of China) approved the country’s first environmental tax. It was a history-making decision: the pollution tax on emissions is destined to become the main legal lever in environmental matters, with immediate and significant impact on all companies operating in China.

There is also an economic reason behind China’s ban on plastic waste imports. The government intends to support and foster the start-up and development of a national recycling industry, starting with urban waste management. New collection and separation companies will be founded and tasked with creating a circular economy system – “Un vaste programme”, to quote De Gaulle. China has more and tougher long-term plans in the pipeline, too.

According to World Bank estimates, China produces 525,000 tons of rubbish per day and the figure is expected to reach 1.4 million by 2025. This means there is plenty of work to go around. In order to prepare for the challenge, Beijing is set to hire seventy thousand environmental educators tasked with going from door to door to explain how to perform separate collection of waste at home. It is quite a remarkable cultural leap for a people not renowned for its manners (and before we snicker, let us not forget about the broken fridges littering our own streets).

The third reason behind the ban is linked to the ambitious decarbonised economy goals declared and stubbornly pursued by Beijing.

THE BIOPLASTICS CHALLENGE

In addition to being a net waste importer, China is also the world’s leading plastic material producer (thermoplastics and polyurethane), followed by North America and Europe. The overall production in 2015 amounted to 269 million tons. Despite the crisis, the market has grown by an average of 1.5% per annum, reaching 320 million tons in 2017.

By way of comparison, in 2015 the EU28 consumed 49 million tons of plastic (thermoplastics and polyurethane), around 40% of which was used for packaging. Furthermore, packaging had the highest end-of-life recycling rate. Around 40% of all plastic waste is used to produce energy (waste-to-energy), since plastic comes from oil and is highly combustible. Around another 30% is generally buried, with the exception of nine countries (including Germany, Switzerland and Nordic countries) where it is forbidden to send plastic waste to the landfills.

As we can see, it is a florid market and, according to the producers’ organisations, it is also full of promise.

While environmental awareness may have made the public more critical in recent years and led to a timid attempt to limit plastic, we have yet to witness a paradigm shift in the market. Last year, the European market of alternative materials – i.e. bioplastics – amounted to a mere 1% of the traditional plastics market.

But the winds of change are blowing and, one way or another, China’s decisions is bound to play a key role in directing worldwide industrial policies.

There are on-going programmes for the research and development of new biodegradable materials that could prove to be real game-changers. These new materials should be able to replicate the resistance and versatility of plastic. I have witnessed first-hand the interest of major Chinese companies in collaborating with European producers to invest in the field and create the world’s largest bioplastics market.

“Seen from Beijing” says Corrado Clini, who has twenty years’ experience working with China to develop clean technologies, “Novamont’s patents and know-how are a huge Italian asset that is of tremendous interest to the Chinese economy. Instead of placing an indirect tax on compostable bags, the Italian government should have gone all in on highlighting the country’s interest in the experimental wide-scale use of Novamont’s Materbi packaging. This way, Italy could have led the world’s markets by example. The introduction of compulsory biodegradable bags was and still is a chance to show Italians and the world a positive and understandable example of Green Economy in environmental and economic terms. The economic cost of non-biodegradable plastic packaging (bags, bottles, containers), which should be discouraged in order to protect the environment, must also be made evident.”

“This was the explicit goal of my commitment in the Italian Government and in Parliament to emanate and approve Law Decree no. 2 of 2012 which would initiate the legislation in Italy and the rest of Europe concerning the introduction on the market of biodegradable and compostable plastics. Furthermore, no other market is more directly interested than China in the recovery and recycling of so-called heterogeneous plastics which are currently not recyclable due to a lack of adequate technologies; instead, these plastics are sent to landfills or dispersed in the environment (think of the plastic sheets used to cover farmland). In this case, too, Italian technologies and know-how can offer an effective solution.” A small business in Udine has created and is testing nationwide a technology for recycling these types of plastic, which represent more than 60% of plastic waste in Italy; the technology can be used to produce items useful in a vast number of industries.

“This technology was awarded by the President of the Italian Republic as the best green technology for recycling plastic material. Its outlook on the Chinese market promises huge development” points out Mr Clini. “These brilliant examples of innovation are Italian solutions to reduce the planet’s addiction to plastic pollution. It is a chance for development that Italy cannot miss out on.” Italy’s downward path is paved with missed chances. Let us hope green chemistry doesn’t join the fray.