The United States is now experiencing a serious garbage crisis, this crisis has lasted for 18 years, even if the garbage that has been sorted and recycled, it will still be pulled to the landfill for landfill, the reason for this is because the amount of garbage generated by the United States every day is too large, the United States only accounts for 4% of the global population, but produces 12% of the world's municipal solid waste.
According to the U.S. Environment Agency, there were 250 million tons of solid waste generated in cities and towns across the United States as early as 2008, and the amount of garbage discarded per capita rose from 3.66 pounds per day in 1980 to 4.5 pounds per day. It is equivalent to almost half of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. One of the most important sources of this waste is discarded food, which Americans waste 40 million tons of food each year, equivalent to about 30 percent of all food produced, harvested and purchased.
Because of the excessive amount of garbage generated every day, 60% of the states in the United States are facing the garbage problem, with mountains of plastic materials, paper materials, no other market, and can only be thrown into landfills like non-recyclable garbage.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="56" > China helped the United States digest most of its garbage</h1>
In the past, the United States had a very good way to digest garbage, that is, shipping to China, in 2016, China reportedly received about half of the world's garbage, imported more than 7 million tons of waste plastic, a total value of billions of dollars, and most of this is from the United States garbage, in 2017, according to a study in the Us journal Science Advances, China bought half of the waste in the United States. U.S. scrap exports to China are worth $5.6 billion, the sixth largest category of U.S. exports to China, with China and Hong Kong buying 49 percent of U.S. exports of waste plastic, 55 percent of scrap aluminum, and 53 percent of waste paper. Between 1993 and 2017, the United States exported 278 million tons of all solid waste to China.
An American environmental group once conducted a survey: 200 trackers were put on discarded electronic products in the United States, and found that most of them crossed the sea to Asia, of which 10 came to Chinese mainland and 36 remained in Hong Kong.
China began in 1996, the implementation of solid waste import management, when China in the plastic raw materials, paper raw materials, rubber raw materials have a certain degree of lack, hope through the moderate import of solid waste to supplement the shortage of these raw materials. However, with the passage of time, solid waste has shifted from low-value, heavily polluted waste plastics and waste paper to high-value, low-pollution scrap metals. And the amount is also getting bigger, causing serious damage to China's environmental ecology, and from 1992 to 2018, China recycled 72% of the world's waste plastic.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="63" > China banned the import of garbage, the United States and Britain have blamed China</h1>
In 2017, China began to make a decision to ban the import of 24 kinds of garbage, and in July issued the "Ban on the Entry of Foreign Garbage to Promote the Implementation Plan of the Solid Waste Import Management System", proposing a comprehensive ban on the entry of foreign garbage, such a decision was accused by the United States, in 2018, the United States asked China to continue to buy American garbage, in response, China's domineering response: will stop buying another 32 types of garbage. And proposed that from January 1, 2021, China will ban the import of solid waste in any way.
After this ban, in 2017, 2018 and 2019, the national solid waste imports were 42.27 million tons, 22.63 million tons and 13.48 million tons, respectively, compared with 46.55 million tons in 2016 before the reform, a decrease of 9.2%, 51.4% and 71% respectively. Without waiting for January 1, 2021, China has achieved the goal of zero imports of solid waste by the end of 2020.
And since 2017, China banned foreign garbage, the United States has been continuing to blame China, not only the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries to accuse us, in 2018, the British media said that in 2012-2018, the United Kingdom exported 2700,000 tons of waste plastic to China, accounting for 2/3 of the UK's total plastic exports. China's ban means that the UK may need to immediately increase its annual waste disposal capacity by 350,000 tons to make up for the gap, which the UK does not have, and China's decision has led the UK into a garbage crisis.
Britain even blames China for not accepting British garbage, which will have a negative impact on the global environment. "If China stops importing garbage, the pollution of garbage to the ocean and land may be more serious, because the act of dumping garbage without permission will become more frequent, and plastic pollution will continue to expand." ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="65" > 18 years ago, the United States began to fall into a garbage crisis</h1>
As a result, waste-importing countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and India are unable to absorb tens of millions of tons of waste previously exported to Chinese mainland, and only a few industries in the United States have the ability to dispose of this waste, so plastic and paper waste will be sent to landfills.
Analysis by Verisk Maplecroft, a global risk consultancy, shows that far more garbage is made in the United States than in other developed countries, and recycles far less garbage than other developed countries, and the garbage recycling rate in the United States is only 35%, the worst performance among developed countries, only half of Germany's waste recycling rate.
In 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that the U.S. generated 262 million tons of municipal waste, more than half of which was sent to landfills. About 13% of this municipal waste is plastic waste. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than a quarter of that 262 million tons of waste are recyclable.
The result of this is that garbage continues to be hoarded in the United States, and in the United States in 2021, the garbage crisis has had a serious impact on the lives of americans, and the streets of Jacksonville, the largest city in Florida, are full of garbage. Many of the garbage at the entrance of the yard was piled up for six weeks without being cleaned up.
Garbage feces, littered with garbage, homeless people sleeping on all corners of the street, such scenes take place in many cities in the United States, and it is hard to believe that this is the United States of 2021.