Pollution: Europe struggles with plastic mines issues

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European waste policies “need to become much more nuanced because some landfill might actually be quite good,” a top academic, Prof. Ian Boyd, has said.

Boyd, who is chief scientific adviser for the British government’s department of environment, food and rural affairs, told the Media on Friday.

“I’m putting out a challenge to the current system,” he said, referring to the fact that waste policies in Europe either ban or limit landfill.

”The system do little to restrict what has been dubbed “skyfill” – the release of pollutants into the air.

Europe has favoured the construction of power plants that burn waste for electricity or heat.

Land is said to be scarce and landfills produce toxins and greenhouse gases such as methane as organic waste – from food to nappies-rots.

Waste-to-power plants produce greenhouse gas emissions too, but in most of Europe they are exempt from carbon taxes that stand at about 14 euros a tonne in an industrial market.

Boyd said buried plastic could become a valuable resource only if the penalties for emitting greenhouse gases, both in making plastics and burning them, were far higher than today.

Globally, plastics accounted for 390 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in 2012.

The amount covers from production to incineration and equivalent to the emissions by a nation such as Turkey, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a think-tank that specialises in recycling.

The plastics industry takes issue with such assessments, saying they ignore the vast contribution of plastic in reducing other emissions by for example preserving food and reducing the weight of transport.

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The Confederation of European Waste-to-Energy Plants (CEWEP), said burying and then mining back plastic was a fantasy.

CEWEP is a group of some 400 plants using 90 million tonnes of municipal waste to provide heat and electricity for millions of people.

“Digging waste into landfills and then waiting until a magic technology pops up in the future is not a responsible option,” CEWEP managing director Ellen Stengler said.

He added that the idea was a minority view she heard “here and there” in Europe.

Just cleaning plastic waste before burial would be hugely expensive, plastic would degrade underground and there would be risks such as fire, she said.

Europe has sent half the plastic waste it used to ship to China and Asia since Beijing’s environmental crackdown closed the world’s biggest recycling market in January.

The knotty problem is what to do with the rest.

Some of the surplus is piled up in places from building sites to ports, officials say, waiting for new markets to open up.

Recycling closer to home is held back by the fact that the plastic is often dirty and unsorted, the same reasons China turned it away.

Countries led by Malaysia and Vietnam and India imported far more of Europe’s plastic waste in early 2018 than before, European Union data show.

Radical ideas, such as putting oil derived plastic back underground to “mine” back when recycling becomes more sophisticated, are being aired as Europe tries to work out what to do.

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