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opinion
trash / recycling / global waste trade
In the global waste trade, much of what is dumped in American landfills enters a global system of trading and burning, with almost no regulation.
This system perpetuates environmental degradation abroad and chills reform at home, and its consequences affect everybody.
Limited ability among buyers to verify the environmental claims in the waste trade has distorted market incentives and inspired rampant fraud.
Waste is sorted and mixed in the United States before export, but recycling claims in receiving nations, like Indonesia, often prove false. Salvesen, who teaches at Canada’s York University, and his colleague Kursieva stress in the journal article, now circulating, that informal and unregulated collection schemes in the United States argue the environmental benefits of technique, pointing to the huge volumes claimed to be saved — 10 million or more tons annually through recycling in Chicago’s border states. The authors worry about whether enough time has passed for follow-up assessment of those programs’ actual results.
The United States sends trash out through this system to China, India, Vietnam, Thailand and so on.
International undertakings to certify recyclable materials generally dodge environmental enforcement.
The authors admire the European Union’s waste hierarchy, putting prevention first, then preparation for reuse, high-value recycling, energy from waste and only then incineration or landfilling.
They also note that cascading measures allowing rich countries to ship their worst emissions abroad — in a circular economy aiming to reduce consumption — fail to safeguard weak countries’ environmental needs and are thus dysfunctional in poor ones.
The United States pushes much of the world’s worst wastes on its less fortunate neighbors.
In the global waste trade, no regime stands because no nation state’s sovereignty is respected. At this point nobody learns whether the environment anywhere is better for having bought wrapping paper from China, or clear bottles or paper bags from Indonesia. In Indonesia, domestic warehouses stuffed with American trash burn like funerary pyres, thus speeding that nation’s warming of the earth.
This whole mess shows that durable goods rule in reform of consumption. The Chinese have forever advanced the virtues of stuff they do not throw out until everything is reduced to disrobed atoms. Otherwise their air and water remain foul.
United States prevention accidents reflect manufacturing’s liquid evolution to obsolescence. The country now buys ever more goods just to consume them in a cycle of buying, using and throwing away. Until C.E.O.s engage that problem, awful trading continues.
Garbage in, garbage out is true of both cows and countries.
Nations join the global waste trade because trade stimulates growth, and growth stimulates life. So long as banks help shore up economies of garbage while exploiting labor markets and cutting environmental deal costs around the planet.odorful and unconscionable trade of turning America’s trash into third world trade continues.
Then, national sovereignty for environmental enforcement will no longer be a barrier against adoption of environmental legislation and related regulatory reform in receiving third world nations.
This will road a path toward controlling both prostitution and international environmental regulation in simultaneously benefiting the environment and poor countries’ governance of the international trading of wastes.
In developing nations there is frequent resistance to this composting model.
Earlier this decade, Mr Shamieh spent two years with The Economist, covering the euro zone debt crisis. He was previously a print reporter for a national daily newspaper in India for five years, and has written from India, Indonesia, Lebanon and Pakistan. “A chapter investigating the role of religion in contemporary conflicts and societies would have been an excellent complement to an already impressive work.” — International Journal of Middle East Studies review of The Arab Shia: Modern Protest.
Why is China capable of limiting the traffic in the global waste trade, while the United States fails to do so?
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