Striving to maintain, Finland exports plastic waste

Finland has determined to export plastic waste because it needs the potential to process all of the discarded plastic sorted by households.

Particular dumpsters for plastic started emerging in Finnish housing firms around one year ago. At the same time, public campaigns motivated residents to stop throwing plastic out with mixed household waste.

But now a state-owned energy firm operating Finland's only plastic recycling plant says it can't process the plastic waste waves arriving on-site. This means excess plastic gets shipped abroad.

The firm can process 20,000 tons of plastic waste annually, but that count is expected to increase to 30,000 tons this year.

An official stated that when they built the plant, they didn’t expect households will increase their plastic recycling at this scale.

Now that they have answered the call to recycle plastic, there's insufficient potential. A two-year plan is now ready to export a quarter of all plastic waste accumulated in Finland to facilities in Germany or Sweden for re-purposing and sorting.

An official of an umbrella company promoting plastic recycling said that they tried to prepare and they could. However, the increase in plastic waste in 2019 was more than they expected. He highlighted that increasing Finland's potential to sort plastic waste needs private sector investment.

It is always a good thing to process waste in your nation. This means more investments and jobs at home.

It was earlier stated that transporting plastic long distance is more environmentally friendly than allowing it to decompose naturally in the environment. At one of the plastic recycling facilities, plastic packaging passes via many processing stages resulting in plastic pellets being sold to manufacturers.

However, experts have criticised Finland for urging citizens to recycle plastic the nation was unprepared to handle.