Plastics are now a part of everyday life for billions of people. They are also extensively used in industry. Some 368 million tonnes are produced annually, with Asia accounting for more than half of global plastics production.
But what exactly are plastics? The word refers to a group of synthetic materials made from hydrocarbons. They are formed by polymerisation, a series of chemical reactions on organic (carbon-containing) raw materials, mainly natural gas and crude oil.
Various types of polymerisation make it possible to produce plastics that are hard or soft, opaque or transparent, flexible or stiff. In addition, plastics can be manufactured to be lightweight while retaining many of their other useful properties. This makes them highly popular for packaging.
The first plastic was presented at the Great London Exposition in 1862. Called Parkesine after its UK inventor, Alexander Parkes, the organic material was derived from cellulose, and could be shaped when heated and retained its shape on cooling.
Since then, plastics have undergone numerous stages of development. At the outset, the materials began by replacing ivory and tortoiseshell in billiard balls and combs. This then led on to the creation of synthetic plastics that were cheaper than silk and other natural fibres.
Next came the popularisation of polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, or vinyl, which did not contain any naturally occurring molecules but proved a good insulator and a durable, heat-resistant material.
Wide adoption did not occur immediately, with plastics occupying a relatively small market niche until the mid-20th century. The trigger for the mass spread of PVC was the discovery that it could be made from a petrochemical industry waste product. World War II also created significant demand as PVC was used to insulate cables on navy ships.
These key events marked the start of the rapid and uninterrupted rise of PVC for a huge range of industrial and household products. Alongside, two other plastics gained broad acceptance: polyethylene for making bottles for drinks, shopping bags, and food containers; and polypropylene, which became popular in the 1950s and is used today for packaging, child seats, pipes, and other everyday products. PVC, polyethylene, and polypropylene are now the most widely used plastics in the world.
In Asia, plastic factories were already present during World War II. After the global conflict ended, the civil war in China forced the country’s plastic manufacturers to flee to Hong Kong, where they started the first plastic factories in the mid-1940s. Meanwhile, Japanese companies began to scale up PVC product production.
In the 1950s, Hong Kong began producing plastic toys and flowers, mostly for export to Southeast Asian countries, and Japan became the world’s second-largest producer of PVC.
By the end of the 1960s, Hong Kong's factories were making toys for US giants Hasbro and Mattel, and by 1972, the city had become the largest exporter of plastic toys in the world. Following economic reforms in China in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hong Kong-based manufacturers started moving production back to the mainland but still maintained offices in Hong Kong.
While China and Japan lead the way in plastic production in Asia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines have all seen rapid growth in the past decade, exporting plastic products to Europe, China, Singapore, Japan, and other countries and regions.
Efficient business processes combined with lower labour and production costs have made these factories highly competitive, enabling Asia to garner 51 percent of global plastics production capacity by 2018, and plastic products to become one of the region’s top export industries.
Down the decades, a positive image of plastics contributed to the boom in use worldwide. Plastics were seen as trendy, clean, and modern. They squeezed out existing products and muscled their way into almost all areas of life.
In the 1970s, an enterprising businessman from India pioneered the use of plastic sachets for selling fast-moving consumer goods in micro-retail quantities. Products sold in plastic sachets are now widely used in the region, marketed by both multinationals and Asian companies.
However, the same properties that make plastic appealing to producers have also created problems. To make a single plastic bag takes 13.8 millilitres of crude oil. With eight billion plastic shopping bags being disposed of in landfills each year, that amounts to US$28 million of crude oil literally going to waste every year.
By 2016, plastics also made up 12 percent of global solid waste by mass, with plastic waste rising to 15 per cent in Asia. About half of all plastic waste that ends up in the oceans comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
This mountain of plastic waste is bringing disastrous consequences to Asia and needs to be tackled. A further problem is that Southeast Asian countries continue to be inundated with plastic waste imports from within and outside the region.
Along with reducing and reusing plastic products, the three current approaches for managing municipal solid waste in Asian countries are recycling, waste-to-energy conversion, and disposal at landfills. All have their limitations.
More optimistically, a new generation of bioplastics – made from materials such as sugarcane and cassava – may contribute to solving the plastic crisis. In addition, a novel production process that creates a polymer known as chitosan from crustacean shells is being used to make a biodegradable plastic. However, with little track record as yet, whether such materials can make a substantial difference remains to be seen.
China is the world’s biggest producer and consumer of plastics. For more than two decades, the country was also the dumping ground for foreign nations’ trash as the world’s largest importer. In 2017, the year before China’s strict import ban came into effect, the country imported almost 600,000 metric tons of plastic waste. We take a look at the reasons for the ban and its rippling effects on global plastic management.
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Plastic pollution has plagued China for decades. The country is currently the world’s largest plastic manufacturer with a yearly average of 60 million tons – of which only about 30% is recycled. It also accounts for nearly one-third of the global single-use and virgin plastics production.
Up until 2017, China was also the largest importer of plastic. Between 2010 and 2016, it imported on average 8 million tonnes of plastic from more than 90 nations around the world. In 2016, the highest amount of plastic exports came from Hong Kong – by far the world’s largest exporter to mainland China with nearly 2 million tonnes – Japan, and the United States. Among the many Western European countries sending their plastic waste to China, Germany topped the list with around 390,000 tonnes per year. These imports contributed to an additional 10 to 13% of plastic waste to the already huge amount that China has been struggling to deal with in recent years.
The waste export trend began sometime between the 1980s and 1990s, when China started to take in plastic and other scraps from less economically developed areas to use as raw materials for processing and manufacturing, and to make up for a shortage of domestic resources. It was a win-win situation.
On the one hand, Chinese businesses finally had access to high-quality raw materials. On the other hand, exporting countries took advantage of this substantially cheaper way of dealing with their trash. The imports boomed at the beginning of the new century after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Opening up to international businesses, China saw a dramatic increase in its demand for raw materials due to rapid industrial development.
Several studies proved the advantages of importing recyclable waste, from saving energy, since less production of similar materials from virgin natural resources is required, to guaranteeing a stable supply of high-quality materials and generating high returns for the importing nation’s recycling industry. However, there were also several downsides to it, most notably the environmental repercussions of dealing with such huge amounts of waste. For China, the waste-recycling industry that once contributed to the prosperity and rapid industrialisation of the country had now turned into a low-profit and low-value enterprise. Furthermore, the industry became largely responsible for a massive increase in air and water pollution across the country, a problem that was already out of control. If the country wants to keep its promise to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, emissions need to be drastically reduced and this needs to happen fast. One way to do it is by addressing the issue of plastic pollution. With several interventions and a long-awaited import ban, China is hoping to cut emissions and get a step closer to net-zero.
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In 2017, the Chinese government announced an import ban on solid waste including several types of plastics and other recyclable waste. The 24-item list of materials initially prohibited from entering China included eight types of post-consumer plastic scrap, one type of unsorted paper, a dozen types of used textiles, and four metal slags containing vanadium.
The import ban came into effect on January 1, 2018. However, just two months later, the Chinese government announced an even tighter policy that severely reduced the contamination levels that would be allowed on a number of scrap material imports, an amount so low that basically turned this policy into another ban. According to customs data, the move halved imports of solid waste and nearly ceased imports of scrap plastic in 2018. At the end of 2019, China added another 16 materials to the list, only to announce the following year a ban on all imports of solid waste as well as on dumping, stacking, and disposal of waste products from abroad.
Starting on January 1, 2021, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment stopped issuing import licenses from overseas as part of a series of policies to tackle pollution and force the industry to improve processing. In the same year, China launched a five-year action plan to facilitate the phase-out of manufacturing and circulation of single-use plastics – which are almost entirely made from fossil fuels – while promoting alternatives and boosting recycling. The government introduced several new policies targeting plastic shopping bags and the use of disposable plastics in restaurants.
While the country’s import ban will most likely have a positive impact on Chinese environmental sustainability in the long run by increasing the prospects of mitigation of carbon footprint and plastic waste trade flow worldwide, it also had some dramatic repercussions on countries that highly depended on China to manage their waste. The decision to ban all imports of plastic waste and other recyclables caused immediate and widespread repercussions and huge problems for the global recycling industry. When the ban was introduced, experts estimated that over 100 million metric tons of plastic waste would be displaced because of the policy by 2030. The Chinese government’s decision would also have an impact on more than 676,000 metric tons of waste, worth about USD$278 million.
Countries like the United States – which was exporting around 4,000 shipping containers of garbage to China every day before the ban came into effect – rerouted most of their shipments to Southeast-Asian nations such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. However, when the latter became overwhelmed, it decided to follow China’s strategy and clamp down on waste imports. Indeed, countries around the world – some of which already lacked the adequate infrastructure to manage their own waste – were unprepared to take in such large amounts of trash produced by the rest of the world. As more import markets stopped accepting waste, exporting nations around the world began to accumulate massive quantities.
The US is not the only country to pay the price for the import ban. The decade-long reliance on China has stifled the development of the domestic market and infrastructure for waste management in many European countries as well, including Germany and Belgium. The lack of adequate recycling plants has not only forced many of them to find other markets to export their trash, but it also increased their incineration rates. In England, for example, burned waste was up by 665,000 tonnes in 2019.
However, in the long run, China’s ban could have positive consequences for other nations.
First and foremost, Western countries would finally be forced to find their own way to manage the garbage they generate instead of relying on the help of third countries, with experts predicting an overhaul of waste disposal systems. Furthermore, the new ‘receiving’ countries, like many developing nations in Southeast Asia, could eventually benefit from the increasing flow of cheap recyclable materials, which were the key to China’s successful industrial development at the beginning of the century.
As China tackles plastic pollution at home, its actions – for now – feed the scourge globally. While there is still not enough proof that China’s strategies to reduce the overall amount of plastic – from prohibiting waste imports to phasing out single-use plastics in businesses – are benefiting the country, experts are worried about the repercussions that these decisions are having everywhere else.
It is true, however, that, as the global leader in plastic production and one of the most polluting countries in the world, China had to take action now. And so should other countries. Waste is the fourth-largest sector of emissions and plastic alone is set to generate more carbon emissions than coal by 2030, making plastic pollution one of the biggest environmental problems of our lifetime. While the immediate repercussions of China’s policies are devastating for nations around the world, the ban will also force them to find new ways to deal with their own waste and implement new policies aimed at reducing overall plastic circulation. If nothing else, China is finally acting to tackle a huge, global issue. What are other countries’ long-term plans in terms of waste management?
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