Sending waste to China saves carbon emissions

· 4.7m tonnes of paper exported by UK each year· Advantage of recycling abroad over landfill can be tenfold
John Vidal
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday August 19 2008 16:03 BST

Britain exports 500,000 tonnes of plastic bottles a year for recycling. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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.