taking the cycle out of recycling

There was an old hombre who owned a small lot.
Storing plastics and bottles, which he had not bought.
To China I'll sell them he gleefully said,
Until China sneered bluntly: re-cycling is dead.

OK. I know it is not T.S. Eliot. But neither was the original doggerel.

I wish I knew the man's name, but I do not. But, he has run a plastic recycling operation in Barra de Navidad for years where I have dropped off my empty bottles.

Well, not really a recycling operation. He is the first step in turning used plastics into something useful other than for crab rafts in the middle of the ocean.

Neighbors bring their broken lawn chairs, empty bottles, cardboard boxes to him. But primarily plastic bottles.

No longer.

I took him a bag of plastics late last week, and he informed me he is no longer accepting plastics. He cannot find a buyer for his goods.

I was afraid this day of reckoning would hit our area. Last year, China announced that it would stop accepting garbage from the West for recycling (going green can be a dirty business).

My neighbor was just the first step in an international chain of recycling. He would sell his plastic to a buyer who, several steps later, would cram it into a shipping container and boat it off to China. In China, it would be used for all manner of things.

The rub is that recycling plastics is a major pollutant. China realized that it could not meet its agreements under the Paris Accords if it was a recycling hub. And because it is a Communist dictatorship, when the leadership decides to do something, like cutting off the internet or heads, it just does it.

The news caught the West by surprise. Britain had very little notice that it needed to come up with a method to handle the 80% of its garbage that went to China. It is too bad someone did not work it into one of the Brexit plans. Trashit, perhaps.

Last year, when I talked with the man who owns our local plastic-gathering operation, he told me he had not heard of China turning off the plastic recycling tap. He has now. And a lot of us will now need to find another spot for our plastics other than leaving them on the street corner. The woman who used to pick the bottles out of my trash no longer does. There is no value in them for her, either.

I know there are alternatives. After all,the bottles that are gathered in the giant fish containers on the beach must be going somewhere. And I am certain someone will be happy to volunteer that information.

For now, though, as the man who owns the lot told me, his stacks of plastic are merely an arsenal for the next hurricane that blows through.

That is probably not the concept of recycling that the Davos crowd would like to impose on us.