Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "How China Broke the World's Recycling" video.

  1. That's a pretty bad, unfair title... sorry. I understand the conclusion of the video fixes it, but it's not right for it to be there in the first place, particularly with the current political climate. Matter of perspective I guess. Like said, China didn't so much break the world's recycling as it's forcing it to be changed so responsabilities and management is distributed more fairly. It's fixing what was broken from start. Not that it was done purely out of China's altruistic heart or anything like that... it's just that with China's growth, economic rise, and modernization processes, as well as, ironically, pressures from the international community for China to "clean up it's act", both recycling industries became less attractive as a way for profit, and China itself started generating as much plastic as developed countries, so it's overburdened with it's own trash already. Want proof of that? Simple. Do you see a lowering of chinese exports due to lack of raw materials? Nope. China generates more than enough plastic to be recycled by itself already. It doesn't need trash from other countries. And it doesn't need to rely on cheap labor and cheap unregulated recycling processes that ends up with tons of people dying from diseases related to it. Because the fair way of looking at such things is, each country should deal with their own trash, period. US, as the global biggest producer of trash should clean up it's act and stop thinking that trash magically disappears into thin air when it's actually being exported to pollute and cause disease to citizens of poorer countries. I feel that there should be some sort of action for this to become clearer to US citizens. You know one way to make people quickly realize how bad the trash problem is? Stop trash collection for a month. You'll see how quickly people start adapting and changing how they face the problem. Alas, it's obvious that countries, particularly developed ones, don't want to deal with that. Evidenced by the shift that is happening. You'd think with China blocking up trash imports that countries would get more responsible, but now the trash is simply going to poorer more vulnerable asian countries instead. It's just getting redistributed to countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philipines and others, often via illegal criminal trade. Something that the video didn't go through a lot, but I've seen in other docs. There's a lot of developed nations trash getting illegaly into unsanctioned criminal recycling centers... or rather, illegal trash dumps in poor asian countries. Weak port regulations and criminal factions are being used to illegaly bring in developed nations trash into countries that don't want it. That's how bad the situation is. Developed nations are not only dumping their crap onto others, they are also giving money to organized crime and knowingly violating local laws. Several developed nations should be facing sanctions for the stuff they've been doing, but you know how these things go. And then comes a bunch of uneducated people from these countries criticizing the pollution and the unregulated dumping ground practices of poor countries. It's as insulting as it can get. There are more than a few ways of solving it, and given the scope of the problem and it's consequences, it shouldn't be seen as completely unviable... hard to achieve, yes, but not unviable. And honestly, they've been proposed and around for the best part of the past half millenia or so. It should be easier to do than cleaning up power generation, if only there was a will to do it properly by people in power. Consumers shifting it's purchases for products that use recycled or truly biodegradable plastics is one way, yes, but it's not a very effective one, particularly in nations that are currently divided in tribalistic political stances. People remain too uninformed or uninterested to do much about it en masse. Regulation is a major one that should've been done from start. Companies making products with virgin plastic should be responsible for taking care of the end result of it too. They can solve it by using less plastics, and/or using recycled plastics. Taxation can be calculated in such a way, either adding more or releaving tax burdens depending on the performance of these corporations, not on arbitrary stupid utopic ideals like "they will potentially create more jobs" and other crap like that. Do it first, receive the benefits later on. It also optimizes the processes as they'll be more interested in making products that can be recycled or discarded safely. It's not really a new thing. There are countries that standardized the production of pet bottles and the way they get recycled in order to optimize the process. It's not a matter of whether it can be done, it's a matter of forcing them to do it with methods that are already working elsewhere. And the other option that was also shown in the video is to fund better and accelerate research on breaking down plastics and making them safer for the environment. We don't know what sorts of results these will give, but we likely need all potential alternatives at hand. Also, it's not like we didn't have any progress... we did have some wins in recent years. But it's not enough. We need political will and mass movement towards this. Enough is enough.
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