Assignment about Plastic Waste Management

THE IMPACT OF PLASTIC BAN BY CHINA TO JAPAN
NAME:
DATE:

Plastic Waste Management
Introduction
In January of 2018, China made a pronouncement that would have an effect globally. The
country had made a decision to halt its entire works on recycling programs which was the
industry’s biggest market in the world (Brooks,Wang & Jambeck 2018). The ban had a far
reaching impact universally especially on plastic production and solid waste management (Wang
et.al 2019).
The Impact
Before the year 2018, Japan was exporting 1.5 million tons of plastics of which 60-70 % was
being exported to China. After the ban, Japan exported only 50,000 tons of plastics to China in
2018 but in earlier years, that was the amount that was exported to China each month. In the year
2019, the amount even reduced further to approximately to 1000 and 2000 tons per month
(Nippon 2019).
Due to this ban, the Environment Ministry of Japan ordered the metropolises to take and dispose
of industrial plastic waste as an emergency responsive step since the quantity of such was had
been increasing since China banned imports. These local governments have been collecting and
disposing only the household waste and the industrial waste was being handled by the recycling
businesses (McCurry 2019).This ban caused a turmoil Japan as the government tousled to come
up with other alternative ways to recycle the nationwide plastic waste. Previously, Japan has
been applying the 3Rs policy which mean Reduce, Reuse and Recycle which has been effective
due to their strict waste separation rules that are observed country wide(Dodbiba & Fujita).
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