New regulations in China pose recycling problem for UK
Wednesday, December 27, 2017 - 14:31:33
Reports regularly reveal that recyclable materials collected from British households often get shipped overseas for processing. But now the lack of domestic recycling facilities may be coming back to bite the UK, according to the Guardian.
This is as a result of changes to legislation in China, which mean that much of the cardboard it currently imports for recycling will no longer be accepted, starting in 2018.
China is trying to clean up its act and take a hard line stance on environmental issues, which includes rejecting mixed recycling and plastic waste imports. Tighter quality controls will mean that if cardboard waste is contaminated when it arrives, it will not be eligible for processing.
There are lots of different ways in which recyclable cardboard can be classed as contaminated, from food waste and grit to staples, plastics and more.
The annual amount of cardboard that the UK sends to China to be recycled currently sits at close to three million tonnes, but experts fear that as the new rules come into place sooner than expected, a lot of this will end up back on British soil.
The speed with which these regulatory changes have been introduced is partly responsible for the likely chaos that is to come in the near future. Various industry representatives have called upon China to push back the deadline to give countries time to prepare, although at the moment its government has not agreed to do so.
It is not just cardboard and plastics that are sent from the UK to China to be recycled, but also many other types of waste products, including old electronics, smartphones and more. Selling an old phone to a British recycling firm is a good idea for anyone who wants to minimise their environmental impact and avoid contributing to this growing issue.
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