AFPT For illustration: a man working at a plastic recycling company in Tangerang, Indonesia
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 18:35
-
Judith van de Hulsbeek
editor Climate and Energy
-
Judith van de Hulsbeek
editor Climate and Energy
The European Parliament has approved stricter rules for the export of plastic waste to countries outside the EU. Shipping plastic to the vast majority of those countries should be completely stopped within two and a half years. An exception can only be made if countries can prove that they can process or recycle the waste sustainably.
According to MEP Bas Eickhout of GroenLinks, it amounts to a ban. “We have to start cleaning up our own plastic mess.” But can we? Waste processors believe that there is not enough demand and capacity for this in the Netherlands.
The European Union exports millions of kilos of plastic waste every year to countries that are not members of the OECD, an economic partnership of about forty predominantly prosperous countries. A large part of this goes via the port of Rotterdam; in 2022 it was about 170,000 tons.
The main destinations of those ships full of plastic waste: Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia. This is not hazardous waste, its export has been prohibited for some time. Household waste is also largely processed within the EU.
High quality
More than 80 percent of the waste that goes to Asia is plastic foil. Foils used by wholesalers and other companies, such as long rolls of plastic to bind products together on pallets. According to the Council for Transport and the Environment, which last year research did to plastic exports, this concerns “high-quality plastic” that is “easily recyclable”.
However, several environmental organizations previously raised the alarm, because plastic causes pollution in those countries. “We dump our plastic in low-wage countries under the guise that they are raw materials and not waste, but those countries do not have the capacity to recycle it at all,” the NGO Plastic Soup Foundation writes on their website. As a result, the plastic ends up in nature or illegal landfills.
-
NOS
Plastic waste mainly goes to Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia
-
NOS
The Netherlands is exporting more and more waste to non-OECD countries
According to recycling researcher Maarten Bakker from TU Delft, the material we export to non-EU countries is “the waste we don’t want here”. “The foil may be high-quality, but a more important question is: how much does it cost to clean it?” It may be contaminated with dirt, but also with stickers and labels. “That all has to be removed manually.”
Once the law is introduced, this plastic will no longer be allowed to be processed in many low-wage countries. It is expected that more waste will go to Turkey. That country is not a member of the OECD and already imports a lot of our waste.
Correspondent Mitra Nazar previously visited illegal dumps in Turkey. She also found Dutch plastic waste there:
Plastic, plastic, plastic: the Turkish city of Adana is full of them
But the intention of the law is also that Europe “stops exporting its waste problems to third countries” and starts processing it itself. The Waste Management Association anticipates problems there. “We already have too little recycling capacity in Europe to recycle all our plastic,” says spokesperson Jeroen Stein.
Into the incinerator
Stein also wonders whether there is enough demand for recycled plastic. He points out that recycling companies in the Netherlands difficult to have. The company Umincorp recently went bankrupt and other companies are also under pressure; they have large inventories.
According to Stein, this is mainly due to the low prices of new plastic from Asia and the US, so-called virgin plastics. “Dutch companies have to compete with cheap new plastic and with cheap foreign recyclers with different standards.” A level playing field and a mandatory percentage of recycled material in new plastic products could be a solution to this, says Stein.
Harold de Graaf of the Dutch Rubber and Plastics Industry is also sceptical. “Cutting out exports to non-OECD countries means we will get more waste that cannot currently be recycled here. This waste will end up in European incinerators and European landfills.”
Plasticverslaving
That is also the expectation of researcher Bakker. “Given the processing costs and low prices now paid for recycled plastics, I think it would rather go straight into the incinerator.”
According to MEP Eickhout, in order to cope with the plastic waste mountain – and to achieve European targets – we must use less plastic. The EU and the Netherlands have set themselves the goal of being circular by 2050. This means as little waste as possible and as much reuse as possible. “We have to face our plastic addiction.”
2024-02-27 17:35:08
#clean #plastic #mess
