TRASH TALKING

Indonesia this week returned five container ships’ worth of trash to the United States this week, and following the diplomatic scrap Canada and the Philippines had earlier this year about trash - which only resolved recently - as well as the likelihood of another fight with Malaysia about the same thing coming up in the near future, it’s probably worth talking about it.

Indonesia sent back the ships for the same reason the Philippines did: they agreed to take/purchase recyclable waste and they got unrecyclable waste. See, many people are - let us be tactful about this - perhaps less than diligent about using recycling bins correctly, and then on top of that the companies which contract out to the government to handle the recycling, who are in fact really just sort of being middlemen since they don’t do any recycling themselves, are in turn also less than diligent about making sure that when they ship all of the recyclables out to recycling plants overseas that the recyclables are all recyclables and not, for example, used diapers. (Used diapers get mentioned in all of these stories, because they’re kind of gross and because nursing homes usually dispose of them in large batches. That said, although they’re usually present, they’re not the most common type of non-recyclable trash that shows up improperly. But they always get mentioned, because they’re kind of gross.)

Basically, what we have here is a series of operational and regulatory failures, leading to the point where a recycling company in southern Asia opens up a container and everything inside is rotting in the bad way to the point where it can be actively biohazardous. Even in the best case scenarios, you get instances of recycling companies opening up containers and finding unsorted recyclables - paper with plastic, et cetera. And when this happens, if both countries are a signatory to the United Nations convention on international transportation of hazardous wastes, it then becomes the sending country’s responsibility. (In the Canada/Philippines case, it ended up taking a while because the company that had contracted to ship the trash overseas had mysteriously disappeared.)

All of this is, of course, just the worst end of a larger problem, which is that we don’t actually recycle most of the plastics we think we’re recycling. A peer-reviewed paper last year analyzed the global recycling industry and only about nine percent of all plastic waste gets recycled. All the rest of it ends up in landfills or the ocean. And most of the recyclable stuff doesn’t actually get recycled for all sorts of reasons: it’s a mix of recyclable and non-recyclable plastics or glass, or it’s contaminated with food waste or other types of garbage because it wasn’t cleaned properly, that sort of thing. We all use our blue bins conscientously (I certainly do) but most of the time we don’t use them well enough, and then the company that’s supposed to sort them and clean them doesn’t sort them and clean them well enough (if at all), and then hey presto another landfill.

This problem was a large part of the reason why Justin Trudeau announced his proposed single-use-plastics ban last week, which is honestly a pretty good idea. Yes, losing single-use plastics will be a pain in the ass for our everyday convenience, but on the other hand, we’re literally drowning the world in this shit so maybe the op-eds in Postmedia papers from Koch brothers subsidiary flacks like David Clement worrying that banning single-use plastics will be inefficient and cause more problems than they solve should be, and I am just throwing this out there, summarily ignored.

THE AMERICAN ECONOMY, SUCKAAAAAAAS

The US treasury reported that federal corporate tax revenues dropped 31 percent following the Trump tax cuts, and despite predictions last year that tax receipts would rebound after the initial drop, they’ve continued to fall - they’re down another nine percent on a year-to-year basis so far. Now, most corporate tax cuts eventually rebound, simply because economic growth will eventually make up the difference over time, and in many cases the lost revenue mostly gets made up in between one and three years. (If you look at Ontario’s corporate tax revenues over the last twenty years you can see when the tax cuts take place and when the economy rebounds.) But revenues continuing to drop in the second year is… a bad sign.

That said, in conjunction with last month’s news that the US bond yield curve has inverted, it’s a much worse sign. If that last phrase sounded like an engineer on Star Trek explaining why the dilithium crystals are about to explode, what you need to know is that last month the yield on ten-year bonds fell below the yield on three-month bonds - which means that the market has deemed long-term bonds to be worse value than short-term bonds - and when this happens the “yield curve” is said to be “inverted” because long-term bonds are supposed to be better than short-term bonds, because that’s the entire point of bonds. The yield curve has been inverted for most of the last six weeks now, and most of the time the yield curve is not inverted. In fact, the last time the US bond yield curve inverted was in 2006 - and a year later, bam, Great Recession. The last time before that was in 1998 - and the next year, bam, the tech bubble popped and there was a recession. The last time before that was in 1986 - and the next year was the Black Monday stock market crash and the beginning of the late-80s/early-90s recession.

Basically, when you start seeing an inverted bond yield curve, that’s the economy’s way of telling you that longterm growth is not looking like a great prospect right now, because economic slowdown or contraction is coming soon. Combine that with corporate tax revenue growth recovering more slowly (or, at present, not recovering at all) from a tax cut and that’s an economic predictor that the aforementioned economic contraction is probably going to be a bad one.

THE RAPTORS!

Hey, they won! That’s why this week is shorter than average! How am I supposed to concentrate on all the horrible things that happened this week - seriously, I haven’t written at all about what’s happening in Sudan, partially because it’s still sort of resolving into something that might be good or bad, we don’t know - when MY BOYS ARE THE CHAMPS NOW? The fourth-biggest city on the continent just ended a 26-year major sporting championship drought for both Toronto and the whole of Canada! That’s important! (Okay, honestly - speaking as a Torontonian, it’s fine that the rest of Canada is happy that we won, but this is our team, and we get to be happier than you lot because we help pay for your roads while the Tories you voted into office do their level best to fuck us over.)

Anyway, Fred Van Vleet is a god human come again. That is all.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched and rewatched this week:

The Wandering Earth (2019, Frant Gwo, Netflix) - 2/5

The Mask of Zorro (1998, Martin Campbell, Blu-ray) - 5/5

Men In Black: International (2019, F. Gary Gray, theatre) - 2.5/5

We also finished watching season 10 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, because Netflix takes a while to get seasons, and Aquaria was a fine winner even if I was rooting for Eureka.

In video game news, I finished two games I bought in Steam sales a while back: Distance, a racing/stunt game, cost me about a buck and Moonlighter, a Zelda-ish dungeon-battler, cost me about five, and I think both of those prices were about right for the game experiences.

See you in seven.