Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 19 Aug 08;
Sending plastic bottles and paper to China for recycling causes less environmental harm than burying them in landfill sites.
The amount of CO2 produced in shipping unwanted waste 10,000 miles to China for reprocessing is less than would be produced by burying it and using brand new materials.
The findings emerged from a study by WRAP - the Government-funded company set up to advise on waste - to assess the environmental impact of exporting materials for recycling.
Greater awareness and a big increase in collection centres has seen household recycling in the UK jump dramatically from seven per cent to 30 per cent in the past 10 years.
The UK now recovers more paper for recycling than the paper industry can cope with but it is in great demand from emerging economies such as China which doesn't have enough forestry of its own.
And it is a similar story with recovered plastic bottles where China acts as a valuable 'sink market' mopping up what the UK cannot cope with.
Exports of recovered paper increased from 400,000 tonnes in 1998 to around 4.7m tonnes in 2007 and exports of recovered plastics increased from less than 40,000 tonnes to more than 500,000 in the same period.
China now accounts for more than half of the UK's exports of recovered paper and more than 80 per cent of recovered plastics.
But environmentalists worried that the benefits of recycling were being cancelled out by the emissions caused in transporting the waste to China.
The WRAP study calculated that sending one tonne of recovered paper from the UK to China produced between 154kg- 213kg of CO2 and transporting one tonne of recovered plastic bottles ranged between 158kg-230kg of CO2.
But the CO2 levels represented less than a third of the carbon savings produced from recycling.
The transport emissions became even smaller - less than 10 per cent of the overall amount of CO2 saved by recycling - because the waste can travel in containers that would normally be empty because the UK imports more than it exports to China.
WRAP's chief executive, Liz Goodwin, said: "It may seem strange that transporting our unwanted paper and plastic bottles such a distance would actually be better for the environment but that is what the evidence from this study shows.
"As more and more of this material is being sold to China we wanted to know the impact that was having on the environment, and specifically whether the CO2 emissions from the transport outweighed the benefits of the recycling.
"Although this study is only part of the environmental impact story, it is clear that there are significant CO2 savings that can be made by shipping our unwanted paper and plastic to China.
"In some cases, we just aren't able to reprocess everything we collect or there isn't enough of it to do so. In these cases, shipping it to China, which has a high demand and need for material, makes sense in CO2 terms.
"WRAP will continue to build both the environmental and economic case for domestic recycling."
Sending waste to China saves carbon emissions
John Vidal, guardian.co.uk 19 Aug 08;
Sending old newspapers and plastic bottles 10,000 miles for recycling in China produces more carbon savings than landfilling it in Britain and making new goods, reveals a study from the government body charged with reducing UK waste.
In the last 10 years annual exports of paper, mainly to India, China and Indonesia, have risen from 470,000 tonnes to 4.7m tonnes, while exports of old plastic bottles have gone from under 40,000 tonnes to half a million tonnes.
Now the counterintuitive conclusions of the report from the Waste Resources Action Programme (Wrap) suggest that the advantage of recycling over landfilling is so great that it makes environmental sense to ship waste right round the world if it can be used again.
The journey taken by the waste involves travelling hundreds of miles within Britain to ports, then thousands of miles on some of the world's biggest ships to China, and then more road travel to recycling plants. But for paper, this odyssey incurs only a one third of the climate-warming emissions that are saved by recycling, the report says. For plastics, the report found it even more advantageous to export for recycling.
There is a further factor in favour of exporting the waste. The imbalance of trade between China and the UK means that the majority of container ships head back to China empty and produce CO2 emissions whether or not they are carrying cargo. "If you take this into account, the transport emissions are even smaller – less than one-tenth of the overall amount of CO2 saved by recycling," says Wrap.
The study estimated the transport emissions from exports to China and compared them with benchmark savings from recycling. It found that 1300kg-1600kg of CO2 was saved for each tonne of waste.
"The growth in exports is in part a success story, reflecting the rapid development of the UK's collection infrastructure and increase in recovery rates. Exports to China are bridging the gap between plastic bottle collections being established and the future development of domestic reprocessing capacity," says the report.
However, the report does not consider the environmental or social advantages of establishing a significant UK manufacturing industry to produce goods from the recycled waste and the authors stressed that it does not show that exporting waste was desirable.
Liz Goodwin, chief executive of Wrap, said: "It may seem strange that transporting our unwanted paper and plastic bottles such a distance would actually be better for the environment but that is what the evidence from this study shows."
"We do not have a manufacturing base here. Ideally, it would be dealt with here. But we would far prefer to see it recycled in China, where it is a resource, than landfilled in Britain", said a spokesman for Wastewatch, an independent group.
