“Facebook removed two posts from a Republican member of Congress representing Louisiana on Tuesday in which he threatened demonstrators against police violence, suggesting he would shoot and "drop any 10 of you where you stand" if they took to the street armed.”
Rep. Clay Higgins has spoken at events organized by militia groups. When a rumor spread of a Black militia group protesting police brutality, he said their armed presence would be considered a threat and he'd "drop any 10 of you where you stand."
"The global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic could triple by year’s end, with an additional 1.9 million deaths, while a fall wave of infections could drive fatalities in the United States to 410,000, according to a new forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
"This new estimate reinforces warnings by many experts that cooler, less humid weather and increased time spent indoors, could lead to a surge in viral transmission this fall and winter — something typically seen with other respiratory viruses.
"The institute’s forecasts were influential earlier in the pandemic in guiding policies developed by the White House coronavirus task force, but they have been criticized by some experts for making projections further into the future than can be done reliably.
"The U.S. death toll from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, now stands at 183,000, according to health data analyzed by The Washington Post. The IHME model projects that under the most likely scenario, 410,451 people in the U.S. will have died by Jan. 1. The best case scenario is 288,381 deaths, and worst-case is 620,029.
"Exactly how the fall and winter play out depends heavily on how people choose to behave in terms of following public health protocols like social distancing, as well as on government policies, researchers at IHME and elsewhere have noted.
“We are facing the prospect of a deadly December, especially in Europe, Central Asia, and the United States,” Christopher Murray, director of IHME, said in a statement. “But the science is clear and the evidence irrefutable: Mask-wearing, social distancing, and limits to social gatherings are vital to helping prevent transmission of the virus.”
"With rigid adherence to social distancing and mask-wearing, 770,000 lives could be saved globally by year’s end, IHME projected.
"In recent weeks, the daily number of U.S. infections and deaths have gradually slowed, but experts warn that could all change this fall and winter for several reasons. There is evidence that colder, dryer temperatures with less sunlight may allow the virus to stay viable longer and help its transmission.
"One key insight in recent months is that the virus is much harder to transmit outdoors, but as that temperature drops, people will spend more time indoors. Schools and universities have also reopened in some areas, which could speed transmission. Public health leaders also worry that people may ease or give up on social distancing from fatigue or lack of vigilance.
"Few models forecast as far into the future as the IHME does. Many models do not project further than four to six weeks ahead.
“Beyond that, it’s all conjecture and guesswork because there are so many factors we just can’t predict and factors about transmission that truthfully scientists don’t understand very well yet,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious-disease expert who leads the modeling team at Columbia University. “What happens the next few months really depends on what we do as a society the next few weeks.”
"One of the most useful tools for public health officials and others has been an “ensemble model” — an aggregation of several of the country’s leading models to make a more reliable forecast. One of the most heavily used ensemble models — assembled by Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts — shows deaths declining slightly but maintaining a fairly high rate of more than 5,000 a week for the next four weeks, with a likely total of 205,093 before the end of September.
"Another model — developed by Lauren Ancel Meyers at University of Texas at Austin — takes into account the extent of social distancing using cellphone data. That model forecasts the daily number of deaths increasing in September from roughly 1,000 deaths a day to almost 2,000.
"Currently, about 910,00 people globally are known to have died from the virus, according to IHME. The true death toll is likely higher, with many people dying either at home or without having been tested for the virus.
"The “most likely” scenario produced by IHME is for 2.8 million deaths by the end of December. The best-case scenario would about 2 million, and worst-case about 4 million."
We are again off to very slow start on this month’s funding drive. What this organization needs to function extraordinarily minimal. Take a moment to chip in. Your help really does matter.
"I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn't going to do that."
ver since a member of the right-wing “Patriot Prayer” group was shot and killed during a violent rally in downtown Portland August 29, the police investigation has reportedly focused on 48-year-old Michael Forest Reinoehl, an Army veteran and father of two who has provided what he called “security” at Black Lives Matter protests.
The Wall Steet Journal reported earlier that Reinoehl was a person of interest in the killing of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, who was taking part in a massive pro-Trump caravan that began in Clackamas earlier in the day.
VICE News has not independently verified details of his story.
“You know, lots of lawyers suggest that I shouldn't even be saying anything, but I feel it's important that the world at least gets a little bit of what's really going on,” Reinoehl said. “I had no choice. I mean, I, I had a choice. I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn't going to do that.”
The killing of Danielson is the first linked to an antifacist protester in recent years. It happened one week after 17-year-old pro-Trump protester Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot three protesters at a march in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two. Rittenhouse’s lawyer is claiming he acted in self defense.
Reinoehl had been a nightly presence at Black Lives Matter protests in Portland for months. In early July, he was arrested for carrying a loaded handgun at a protest and resisting arrest. The WSJ reports that the case remains open. Later that month, he was shot in the arm while attempting to wrestle a gun away from a right-wing protester during a skirmish.
Reinoehl said he became aware of the pro-Trump truck parade when he saw what he described as “hundreds of trucks with flags on them,” while driving around Portland earlier in the day with his teenage son.
“I notified my friends of what I had seen and finished what I was doing with my son, got home and then received a phone call that it might be a good idea to come down there,” he said. “Security may be needed not knowing what that would entail. I had no idea what I was getting into.”
“I’m seeing all these vehicles with hatred, people in the backs of the trucks yelling and screaming and swinging bats and sticks at protesters that are just standing there yelling at them,” he said.
At 8:45 p.m., Reinoehl said he went to the aid of a friend surrounded by trucks laden with armed pro-Trump protesters. “I saw someone that is a dear and close friend of mine in the movement by himself basically confronting all these vehicles,” Reinhoel told Farley. “And so I let him know that I'm here, parked my vehicle and joined up with him, found myself in the intersection in front of the food trucks surrounded by trucks and cars that had weapons.”
Reindoehl stressed that people participating in the pro-Trump caravan were heavily armed in those trucks, and that they carried “not just paintball guns,” as reported in the press.
He found himself in a confrontation with a man who he says threatened him and another protester with a knife. “Had I stepped forward, he would have maced or stabbed me,” Reinoehl said.
Bystander video from multiple angles show a man who resembles Reinoehl and appears to have the same neck tattoo fire two shots at Danielson and then walk away. “I was confident that I did not hit anyone innocent and I made my exit,” he said.
Since the shooting, Reinoehl said he’s gone into hiding, and moved his children to a safe place after shots were fired into his house just hours after the incident. “They're out hunting me,” he said. “There's nightly posts of the hunt and where they're going to be hunting. They made a post saying the deer are going to feel lucky this year because it's open season on Michael right now.”
He had not turned himself in, he said, because he believed right-wing protesters were collaborating with police, who will not protect him or his family.
He said at the time of the confrontation and the shooting, there were no police present to help. “There was definitely nobody in sight, no police officer, nobody at all that could intervene. It was a free-for-all. And the police were letting it happen,” he said.
Two days later, he said he had no regrets about his actions. “If the life of anybody I care about is in danger, and there's something I can do to prevent it … I think that any good human being would do the same thing,” he said.
Reinoehl said he’s spoken to attorneys who say he’s “got a viable case for self-defense and protection because there’s a definite threat to my life.”
On Thursday, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said the investigation into the incident is still in early stages. “We don’t even have all the facts yet. We haven’t been able to speak to all of the witnesses. We haven’t been able to process all of the video that’s come from local businesses,” he told KOIN 6 News.
“I feel that they're trying to, you know, put other charges on me. They’ll find another way to keep me in,” Reinoehl said when asked why he didn’t tell his story to the police. “Honestly, I hate to say it, but I see a civil war right around the corner,” he said. “That that shot felt like the beginning of a war.”
Richard Nixon. (photo: Katherine Young/Getty Images)
'The Politics of Racial Division': Trump Borrows Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' Daniel Strauss, Guardian UK Strauss writes: "Donald Trump has warned that if Joe Biden replaces him as president the suburbs will be flooded with low-income housing. He has backed supporters who have sometimes violently clashed with Black Lives Matter protesters across the country."
Republican politicians of the 1960s exploited white voters’ fears and prejudices – and Trump is stoking the fire for November
The US president has even refrained from directly condemning the actions of a teenager charged with killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
And Trump has also called the BLM movement a “symbol of hate”.
With such rhetoric, the president is taking a page or two out of the 1960s “southern strategy”: the playbook Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater used to rally political support among white voters across the south by leveraging racism and white fear of people of color.
But Trump’s own version of the southern strategy is an updated one for 2020. It’s not a carbon copy, and the president has mixed this angle with other pitches to voters. Yet as tensions over police and protests have increased across America, Trump has increasingly made these arguments the centerpiece of his campaign in the closing months of the election.
“He’s throwing gasoline on a fire. He knows what he’s doing. He’s making a political calculus that by stoking the worst parts of the American psyche that he can somehow gain political leverage from that,” said Isaac Wright, a Democratic strategist who specializes in rural campaigns and southern voters.
Wright pointed to when neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville and the president defensively said there were “very fine people” both among the marchers and the counter-marchers.
“I think this is what he did in 2016 – he’s just becoming more blatant and open of who he is and what he’s doing,” Wright said.
The southern strategy was the plan used effectively by Nixon to increase voting among white voters in the south. Nixon’s campaign put a heavy emphasis on law and order and states’ rights to attract white voters concerned about racial integration. Critics argued the language used in this strategy was a thinly veiled appeal to racists and an ugly response to the successes of the civil rights movement.
Nixon was fiercely criticized for this approach in 1968, but nonetheless won the election. He and the segregationist George Wallace, running as an independent, carried all the states in the south except Texas, while the Democrat vice-president Hubert Humphrey won just 13 states – most of them in the north-east.
“There’s a long history of these kinds of campaigns in the country,” the Biden campaign’s chief strategist, Mike Donilon, said during a press briefing with reporters on Friday. Donilon added: “They tried to reformulate it as a law-and-order campaign. That has been his focus now for several weeks. And there was a lot of speculation that when he did that, that would work to his benefit and drive the election there. That didn’t happen. The public is still primarily focused on the central issue in their life which is the virus.”
However, in some races, Trump’s version of this strategy has already been effective. The former Indiana Democratic senator Joe Donnelly, who lost re-election in 2018, described his own defeat as a “dry run for this. They tested this model.
“I think the president’s strategy was fear and division and to scare people to the polls, and it worked in my case, and I think that’s what they’re doing now,” Donnelly said. Trump, Donnelly said, “convinced people that if they didn’t come vote for him their way of life was going to disappear”.
The attack line hasn’t been lost on the Biden campaign, which is seeking to blunt it by addressing it head-on.
Talking points sent out to Biden campaign surrogates and obtained by the Guardian said: “Trump may believe mouthing the words law and order makes him strong, but his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows you how weak he is.
“Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected?”
The talking points also said: “President Trump failed to protect America so now he is trying to scare America.”
Trump’s warnings about what will happen if Biden wins the presidential election are becoming apocalyptic – and contain a series of lies. He has warned that the country would fall into a new Great Depression and “your taxes will be doubled, tripled and quadrupled”.
“You could forget about the second amendment if we lose this election,” Trump warned in August.
Democrats say the scaremongering is a naked appeal to his own overwhelmingly white base.
“I think what’s really stark about it is how clear he’s being that he feels his obligation to the people he’s talking to, and not the people who needs low-income housing,” the Democratic strategist Maya Rupert said. “It’s making it abundantly clear he sees himself as representing a certain segment of this country, and those are people that are living in the suburbs and don’t want low-income housing. He is making it abundantly clear that he is talking to white people.”
Last Sunday, Trump retweeted a video of a caravan of Trump supporters planning to counter-protest Black Lives Matter supporters in downtown Portland with paintball guns and pepper spray. Those clashes turned violent and resulted in a shooting.
Trump had a similar line of attack in 2018 when he consistently warned of a caravan of migrants making its way through Central America to the southern US border. But it did not work. In that year’s midterm elections Democrats ended up retaking control of the House of Representatives and winning seven governor’s races.
Part of Trump’s approach has been what he has not said, as much as what he proclaims at speeches or over Twitter. When he visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, the site of the most recent clashes between police and protesters, he refrained from discussing systemic racism and instead focused on law enforcement.
Rory Cooper, a Republican strategist and longtime aide to the former House majority leader Eric Cantor, suggested that this approach might backfire.
“Part of Donald Trump’s problem since the beginning is that he has a very low view of his base voter. He believes that all white suburban center-right voters have the same view of racial justice that he does,” Cooper said.
“And that’s not true. The numbers have not really borne that out and he’s been bleeding white suburban voters since he was elected. He is losing white voters with a college degree. So he’s not going to get the white college degree suburban college voter back with the politics of racial division. That’s just not going to work.”
Trump’s critique is puzzling to some political veterans. Most of the dire warnings he is offering – about civic unrest and economic collapse – have actually already happened on his watch.
“The weirdest thing I find about it, to be honest, is this aspect of the incumbent president touring smoldering cities and be like, ‘This is coming your way,” said Matt McDonald, a former senior adviser on the late Arizona senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. “I mean, it’s literally on his watch.”
Deon Kay was fatally shot by police in Washington, D.C. (photo: WSOCTV)
DC Police Release Bodycam Footage Showing Fatal Shooting of Black Teen Tim Stelloh, NBC News Stelloh writes: "Authorities in Washington D.C. on Thursday released body-camera footage of a police officer fatally shooting an armed Black teenager, hours after protesters surrounded Mayor Muriel Bowser's home and demanded the resignation of the city's police chief."
The release came hours after protesters surrounded the home of Mayor Muriel Bowser.
uthorities in Washington D.C. on Thursday released body-camera footage of a police officer fatally shooting an armed Black teenager, hours after protesters surrounded Mayor Muriel Bowser’s home and demanded the resignation of the city’s police chief.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Bowser said she didn’t have “anything to say” to the protesters, but offered condolences to the mother of the teen, Deon Kay, 18. "Certainly we are very sorry for her loss," Bowser said. "I'm sure she's going to be reliving that moment."
Police Chief Peter Newsham at a news conference called the shooting a tragedy and said that Kay had likely fallen “though multiple safety nets” before an officer, who has not been publicly identified, shot him to death in the city’s Southeast section Wednesday afternoon. Newsham said officers were called to the area because of a report of a man with a gun.
In the footage, which is disturbing, an officer can be seen opening fire seconds after leaving his patrol car. Kay was struck once in the chest and later died at a hospital, Newsham said.
A slowed-down version of the video released by authorities shows Kay appearing to run toward the officer with a gun in his hand. After he’d been shot, Newsham said, the officer saw Kay throw the gun.
In the footage, the officer can be seen searching in a nearby grassy area for the weapon. It was found roughly 98 feet away, Newsham said.
Outraged protesters gathered outside a Southeast police station Wednesday night chanting and calling Kay’s death a “murder.”
“I’m sorry that we are still protesting the murders of Black people,” one said.
Black Americans are 3.2 times more likely than whites to be killed by police, according to researchers at Harvard University. In some metropolitan areas like Chicago, they are six times more likely to die during a fatal police encounter.
After the shootings, as Rittenhouse walked past officers armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle, witnesses shouted at police that he had shot someone. The officers didn’t stop Rittenhouse — a response Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis attributed to a chaotic scene.
The officers involved in Kay’s fatal shooting were placed on administrative leave while federal prosecutors conduct an independent review of the shooting, Newsham said
Since March, private contractors working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been detaining hundreds of children who arrive at the border without their parents or legal guardians in a system of hotels. The children are then quickly sent back to their home countries without being able to access the nation’s immigration system under a coronavirus pandemic order. The government has also been detaining some children with their parents in hotels.
According to court documents, as of July 31, at least 660 children have been detained in hotels by ICE, and 577 of them were unaccompanied immigrant children. Attorneys have called the hotels "black sites" because of how difficult it is to get information about immigrants once they’re put into the system.
US District Judge Dolly Gee ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop placing children in hotels by no later than Sept. 15. Gee made an exception for one to two-night stays while children are in transit or before being put on flights.
Gee also ordered US immigration authorities to transfer all immigrant children, whether they arrived at the border alone or with a parent or guardian, currently detained at hotels to licensed facilities "as expeditiously as possible."
Under a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order, the government has been quickly sending immigrants, adults and children, apprehended at the border back to their countries without the ability to start an immigration claim in the US. The order has effectively blocked immigrants from staying in the country, citing the need to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Friday's order does not stop the Trump administration from continuing to quickly expel immigrant children back to their home country and the practice is expected to continue.
Judge Gee oversees a 1997 court settlement known as the Flores agreement that limits how long the government can't detain children for and sets the conditions under which they can be held. The issue over whether the government can detain immigrant children in hotel falls under her purview, Gee said, the legality of quickly expelling them to their countries does not.
The pandemic may require temporary emergency changes to the immigration system, said Judge Gee, but “That is no excuse for DHS to skirt the fundamental humanitarian protections that the Flores agreement guarantees for minors in their custody, especially when there is no persuasive evidence that hoteling is safer than licensed facilities.”
US border agents have been immediately sending single adults back to Mexico or Canada. Unaccompanied immigrant minors and some families with children have been sent to hotels before being flown to their countries on an ICE deportation flight.
Typically, for someone to be formally deported from the US, they would first have to go through the immigration system. However, the CDC's coronavirus order has cut immigrants off from that process.
Previously, immigrant children who traveled to the border alone and apprehended by border authorities would have been allowed to seek protection in the US.
The use of hotels to detain children has been widely criticized by immigrant advocates and attorneys. And a report filed in federal court revealed that the hotel system is larger than previously thought, with unaccompanied minors having been detained in more than 25 hotels in three states, including Texas and Arizona.
A 2008 human trafficking law gives unaccompanied minors certain benefits, among them the ability to make an asylum claim in the US to an officer instead of a judge. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), which establishes care, release, and due process rights for unaccompanied immigrant children, also grants minors access to legal counsel while in government custody.
Immigrant children who traveled to the US border alone before the COVID order would also be housed while officials vetted sponsors, usually a family member or in some cases friends, who would take them in.
The voters whose registrations were removed were also overwhelmingly concentrated in the counties comprising the Atlanta Metro area, according to initial findings released on Wednesday.
Conducted by the Palast Investigative Fund, which specializes in data journalism, and released by the ACLU of Georgia, the report reviewed more than 300,000 registered voters whom the state had purged from its rolls. Their voter registrations had been canceled because officials concluded the people living at those addresses had moved and did not change the address on their voter registration.
According to the report, most of those people never actually moved from their addresses, and thus should have remained on Georgia’s voter rolls.
For the report, Palast hired expert firms to conduct an Advanced Address List Hygiene, a method of residential address verification, to review 313,243 names that were removed from the state’s voter rolls in late 2019. Their findings claim that 63.3% of voters had not, in fact, moved and were purged in error.
The report states that the percentage is a conservative estimate since the 63.3 percent error rate does not include “the tens of thousands of other citizens who have moved within their neighborhood, some within their buildings” and were still taken off the rolls. Those voters would have still been eligible to vote at the same polling places available to them in previous elections.
Principal investigator Greg Palast said the probe began in 2013 when his group was originally retained by a handful of news publications for a series of reports about voter purges in Georgia and other parts of the country.
“Given our findings of what appears to be large-scale disenfranchisement of legitimate voters, our foundation has chosen, in the public interest, to make our findings available to the ACLU of Georgia for review in preparation for making our findings public,” Palast wrote.
Among the report’s most concerning findings was the fact that Georgia’s records contained “extraordinary deviation” from postal records, writes Palast. According to the National Voter Registration Act, states are supposed to rely on official postal data when striking voters off their lists.
While the Georgia secretary of state’s records say more than 100,000 voters were purged because they showed up on the Postal Service’s National Change of Address (NCOA) registry, investigators who cross-referenced the data found that 75 percent of those voters were not on the official NCOA list. Georgia also appeared to strike voters off the rolls if they did not respond to a mailed confirmation postcard or if the postcard sent was sent back as “undeliverable.” But a closer look at the data found that many of those undeliverable postcards were returned because they didn’t contain an apartment number on the address.
ACLU Georgia Executive Director Andrea Young told CNN that she was “deeply saddened” by the initial report, but was “not entirely surprised.” Young noted that the methods Georgia uses to maintain its voting list are “prone to tremendous error” and do not meet industry standards for residential address verification.
“The real takeaway from this is the state of Georgia is using a methodology for maintaining its voter rolls that is both more expensive and less accurate than what industry would use to maintain a high-quality mailing list,” Young said.
CNN cited previous reporting in which Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger characterized this mass removal of voters as routine maintenance, not a purge, which is all the more cause for concern.
Palast said a final report containing detailed analysis about the demographics of the affected voters was forthcoming, but noted that the state’s methods would disproportionately cull registrations from young people, those living in urban areas, African American voters, and non-English speakers. According to the report, there was an “overwhelming concentration” of wrongfully removed registrations from voters in the Atlanta Metro area.
Georgians concerned about whether they are on the voter purge list can check the Palast Investigative Fund’s website, SaveMyVote2020.org.
Silvia Puntano walks to her home after receiving a ration of stew in a plastic container at a soup kitchen, during the coronavirus outbreak, in Villa Azul, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina. (photo: Agustin Marcarian/Reuters)
UN: Pandemic to Push 47 Million More Women, Girls Into Poverty Worldwide Al Jazeera Excerpt: "The coronavirus pandemic will widen the poverty gap between women and men, pushing 47 million more women and girls into impoverished lives by next year, and undoing progress made in recent decades, the United Nations said on Wednesday." READ MORE
Plastic bottles at a recycling plant. (photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
What Happens to Recycled Plastic? Researchers Lift the Lid Regina Frei and Diego Vazquez-Brust, The Conversation Excerpt: "The secretive way in which plastic recycling is handled in the UK carries the potential for the next big scandal."
While the government's statutory guidance is supposed to clarify who is responsible,our researchsuggests that what happens to plastics we believe to be recycled in the UK is in reality quite obscure.
Each council in the UK contracts different companies for the disposal and recycling of household waste, so the rules for residents in different areas vary. But you probably separate recyclables before filling your recycling bin and expect that waste (except when it's black) to be recycled.
Meanwhile, manufacturers and retailershave pledgedto reduce single-use plastics by redesigning their products and using more recycled materials, as well as making different materials easier to separate. There's no legal obligation for companies in the UK to separate multiple types of recyclable waste when it's discarded, but many do it anyway.
The success of all our efforts to recycle as much plastic as possible relies on the system working. So where does it all go wrong?
Recycling Rates
We sifted through countless reports from businesses and local government bodies, as well as news stories and dozens of interviews with people at waste management companies, including one whistleblower.
What we discovered revealed several inconsistencies about recycling in the UK.
Agovernment briefing paperfrom March 2020 stated that 91% of the five million tonnes of plastics used in the UK each year is "sent towards treatment." This does not mean it is actually recycled, just that it went to a waste management company. Even so, the World Wide Fund for Nature estimated that the recycling rate for single-use plastics was29% in 2018.
A2018 reportby the Local Government Association found only one-third of plastics collected from householdscanbe recycled, due to contamination, low-grade and mixed materials and technical difficulties.
The National Audit Office, an independent body responsible for auditing government departments, claimed in2018that there was a sixfold increase in exports of packaging material for recycling abroad between 2002 and 2017. Exports accounted for half of all packaging reported as recycled in 2017. So what happened to all of it?
Exporting the Problem
According to industry experts, many businesses that call themselves recycling companies actually only sort waste and then sell it on, often via brokers, towards unknown destinations. Few have their own recycling facilities, and many refuse to say where the plastics go, claiming this is commercially sensitive information.
The prices at which plastic waste is traded vary depending on who you ask – councils, waste management and recycling companies, or businesses using recycled materials – without any explanation for the discrepancies. A report by the UK charity WRAPindicatedthat mixed rigid plastics fluctuated between negative prices and £55 (about $73) per tonne between 2016 and 2019, and about £50 ($66) to £120 ($158) for mixed polymers. One company we interviewed claimed to receive £350 ($462) per tonne of mixed plastics.
The UK exports large quantities of plastics to other countries, including Turkey, Egypt and Malaysia, asChina stopped importing wastein January 2018. These countries lack the facilities to recycle their own plastics, let alone plastics from elsewhere. Little wonder that most plastics Turkey promises to recycle are actuallyburned or dumped. Turkey's recycling capacity in 2019 was claimed to be850,000 tonneswhereasalmost 600,000 tonnes were importedfrom EU countries. Compare this to the 650 million tonnes that the UK alone exported and something does not add up.
Even just talking about "plastic waste" obscures how diverse the materials involved are, and how complicated the inevitable recycling process is. TakeTetraPaks– the drink cartons you probably buy milk or orange juice in. Some 68% of councilscollect them from the curbside, but there arefew facilities worldwideequipped to recycle them. The UK hasonly one, built in 2013, that can process 25,000 tonnes a year. But the UK produces about 60,000 tonnes of these cartons annually. Yet, the facility is running under capacity, according to an email they sent us. So most drink cartons must either be exported or have only their cardboard recycled, as they also contain low-density polyethylene (about 21%) and aluminum foil (4%) which aredifficult to separate.
And COVID-19 has made the UK's recycling problemmuch worse. The use of single-use plastics, including disposable masks and other PPE, has prompteda steep increaseduring the pandemic. Online shopping, with all the additional packaging, has risen too, while recycling indeveloping countries and elsewherehas halted. All of these factors have increased the amount of plastic waste the UK exports, and increased the likelihood that it will be dumped.
What to Do
Exporting plastic waste should be forbidden without clear proof it will be recycled. We want to alert the public to this growing problem so that the government is forced to create a legal framework with enforceable regulations, ensuring British plastics are responsibly recycled in Britain.
Plastics recycling comes in many shapes and forms. There are mechanical and chemical processes for recycling the many different types. Most processes require plastics to be clean and separated by type, but there are also processes such aspyrolysisthat can process mixed and contaminated plastics, including printed films.
To deal with all of our plastics, the UK needs to build an integrated plastics recycling facility that can deal with all these in every part of the country.
As a last resort, the unrecyclable leftover waste should be burned in anincineratorto generate energy. These are common in continental Europe, but the UK seems toprefer landfill, with incinerator projectsregularly rejected.
Though not perfect, incineration in Britain would be a vast improvement on the current situation, where plastics are shipped to the other side of the planet only to be dumped and burned illegally.
ver since a member of the right-wing “Patriot Prayer” group was shot and killed during a 
uthorities in Washington D.C. on Thursday released body-camera footage of a police officer fatally shooting an armed Black teenager, 
