Ships full of used cardboard leave for China every month.
To what extent are we sending our garbage to China without having guarantees that recycling there is carried out in accordance with European requirements?
Despite its economic slowdown, China retains much of its thirst for raw materials to manufacture and transport the objects sitting on shelves around the world. These goods travel in cardboard boxes and on ships that return to China empty, a result of the Asian giant's trade imbalance with the rest of the world. This is where cardboard from European ports plays an important role. As a country with limited raw materials, China depends on European countries; last year, it consumed a third of the world's recycled paper and cardboard.
An added problem is environmental dumping. That is to say, to what extent we are sending our garbage to China without having guarantees that recycling there is carried out in accordance with European requirements. The European Commission has recently launched a proposal precisely to determine who is responsible for proving that such recycling is carried out “with equivalent environmental criteria” in the country of destination. The truth is that the paper and cardboard circling the planet is such that any environmental aspiration is necessarily decaf if transport emissions are computed.
Source: El Pais
