“Every year We produce 2,000 million tons. They are everywhere, but since it is something disgusting, we do not think about it. “Oliver Franklin-Wallis, author of the excellent ‘said it.Dump‘(Captain Swing, 2025) and is right.
What happens is that in Europe they forced us to think about it.
And China did. In 2018, China left half the world game and He got fed up being the landfill in developed countries. This may surprise many, under the great speeches of ‘green revolution’ and care of the environment, what there was basically to pack up everything we generated and send it to China.
Until, as I say, Beijing said ‘Enough’. And it wasn’t a joke. During 2019, The importation of plastics of the Asian country fell 99%those of paper 30% and those of aluminum and glass around 20%. Only if we take into account that 95% of European plastics and 70% of Americans end up there, we can understand The magnitude of the problem.
We look for the exit, of course. During the following years, millions of tons of garbage They redirected the Gulf of Guinea, to the Southeast Asia And basically a Any site that was arranged To accept them. But we all knew that the problem was structural: for decades we have been dismantling the continental recycling system. That is, we had no capabilities to assume it.
And, although the European Commission has considered various plans (from promoting the creation of recycling plants throughout the continent to “generate jobs and take care of their own waste” to ‘convince’ the market with taxes that they penalize the products created with new plastics), the truth is that only garbage was buried or burned.
In fact, today, we burn “60 million tons of municipal waste.”
And that worries many. So much that, in recent days, more than 150 organizations They have asked To the European Union “a moratorium throughout the EU On the new waste incinerators (R1 and D10), together with gradual reduction strategies of the existing incineration capacity and an increase in investment in circular economy infrastructure, such as reuse systems, composting and recycling technologies. “
It is not a coincidence. Everyone who is up to date with the problem knows that, without pressures, the expansion of incineration will grow. And that will have climatic consequences (according to the latest studies It generates more carbon than fossil fuels), but also toilets.
The question is if we have an alternative. And, honestly, it is not clear. Europe is increasingly cornered And what seemed before us impossible responses begin to become reasonable exits. “Incinerate as if there was no tomorrow” begins to be in that category of things. Stop it will be complicated.
Image | Jonathan Kemper | The Blowup
In Xataka | We have been recycling the garbage we produce. Experts say it has not served at all
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