DisOrientated - A Weblog by Philip Sen - Plastic Bottles and a New Style of Blocking?

September 21, 2004

Plastic Bottles and a New Style of Blocking?

Try this. UK newspaper The Guardian, always a great source of information, yesterday featured a major article about the collusion between the UK and China on rubbish dumping.

The gist is that all the crap the UK wraps up in black bin liners is being shipped over here where frankly, no-one cares. It's a win-win situation, assuming you're a corporate giant or government official with nothing to lose.

What the Chinese are after are plastic bottles etc. which are reprocessed presumably to turn into more cheap plastic bottles and nasty little toys.

One thing that I'm fairly convinced of in China is that when when I chuck out cans and bottles, someone, somewhere will use them. It doesn't seem to be the case in Shanghai, but in Xi'an for example there's urchins roaming the streets on the lookout for plastic bottles - presumably they get a couple of fen per bagful.

One ragged and possibly mentally-ill tramp jumped onto the train once as it stopped at Suzhou and grabbed every bottle from hard seat - regardless of whether it had actually been discarded or was still in use...

I'm all for recycling, so in a sense it's not a bad thing, and something that should be done more in the UK but the article asserts it's not being done in the name of environmental awareness but pure profit.

In casual conversation with a colleague today we discussed the profit mentality that pervades China - it's at the expense of the safety and welfare of the common people who do the work, the customers who deserve better quality, and of course the environment which answers back even less than the proletariat. Profit, profit, profit. Something's got to give.

But what I'm also getting at is that if you're on the mainland, for part of the day you couldn't read the article. Or at least I couldn't myself. It's worrying - has the great firewall developed a method to selectively block certain stories that are critical of China, or even articles in the mainstream press that even dare to mention China? Have a go - click here and tell me if the text loads quickly for you.

Posted by Sendover at September 21, 2004 12:48 AM | TrackBack

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