European Union lawmakers and member states have reached a deal to revise the bloc's waste shipment regulation and end exports of certain types of waste to third countries unable to process it properly, the EU Parliament said on Friday.
Uhm yes? You bought it, it's yours. You made the decision to buy something that contains plastic or is wrapped in it or whatever, that's where the responsibility went to you.
People generally have a poor understanding of what is and is lot recyclable in their own waste collection areas. I don’t know what kind of plastic or polymers are in each product. Only the manufacturer has the knowledge, capital and power to choose more environmentally supportive materials. They’d be more likely to actually do it if they had to process them afterwards.
Is there another option available though? When was the last time you saw a loaf of bread sold in anything other than a plastic bag?
While the consumer does bear responsibility in what theh choose to purchase, we cannot shift the blame for the entire product and it's packaging onto them unless there are truly viable alternatives.
Put a recycling charge directly onto the manufacturer so that those with the ability to make real change are the ones bearing the cost of not doing so.
If it were like that producers would not care a bit about how cheap (and easy) packaging is to dispose of properly. You may have seen this logo on stuff which means that the manufacturer has paid for disposal of the packaging, but responsibilities go further, e.g. the consumer generally doesn't pay for disposal of electronic devices at all.
Let's say I buy a large appliance like a washing machine, or maybe a electronic device like a tv. My thinking is why at the end of the life of the product does the whole thing need to go to a landfill? Which is paid for from by the government from "our pockets" in a sense. These items have plenty of plastics/metals/rubber in them, things we as consumers have no idea (and maybe we don't really need to know)
Each brand or company should be responsible to take back their products once its "end of life" is reached. Either the consumer takes it to the manufacturer direct or a "collection service" forwards the product. And the manufacturer should have full capabilities to disassemble it and re-use or recycle each item fully and safely in-house.
Just throw it in the trash. We dug it out of the hole; CO² is what happens with the processed oil
sooner or later anyway, be it by burning or deteriorating via UV. And trash burning facilities have better filters for sulfur & co than the ocean, and it doesn't cause agonizing deaths on the way.
PARIS, Nov 17 (Reuters) - European Union lawmakers and member states have reached a deal to revise the bloc's waste shipment regulation and end exports of certain types of waste to third countries unable to process it properly, the EU Parliament said on Friday.
It added that compliance with international workers' rights would also be taken into account.
The European Commission in 2021 proposed a revamp of EU rules on waste shipments to make it harder for member states to offload their trash into poorer countries.
"The EU will finally assume responsibility for its plastic waste by banning its export to non-OECD countries", Danish lawmaker Pernille Weiss said in a statement.
EU countries must stop shipping plastic waste to poorer nations within two and a half years of the legislation coming into force, the Parliament said, adding that rules for plastic waste exports to countries inside the OECD - the group of the world's main rich countries - will also be tightened.
In previous years, around half of the EU's waste exports went to non-OECD countries with weaker waste management rules than in the EU - effectively shipping EU pollution abroad.
The original article contains 228 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 16%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!