Exporting Waste for Recycling Is Better Than Landfilling It, Study Says

Shipping newspaper and plastic bottles around the world to be recycled in China is far more beneficial to the environment than landfilling them in Britain and producing new items, according to a British government study. The Waste Resources Action Program said that shipping plastic bottles and paper 10,000 miles to China still creates far fewer greenhouse gases than producing new products, in part because many of the container ships carrying exported goods from China to the U.K. would be returning empty anyway. In the past decade, annual exports of paper and old plastic bottles from the U.K. to recycling centers in China, India, and Indonesia have increased 10-fold. The U.K. has no large-scale recycling facilities, and the report said that reprocessing the bottles and paper domestically would be more desirable than shipping them overseas.