The Situation of Metal Waste in the Chinese Market in 2021The upward trend in the prices of raw materials to be recycled also finds full compliance in the field of ferrous and non-ferrous waste. China had foreseen strict import restrictions on raw materials to be recycled in 2018-2020, and then became more elastic due to the growing demand for waste to be processed from the domestic market as Brayan Tailor tells us. The People's Republic of China produces more steel, aluminum and copper than any other nation on Earth, so if the percentage of scrap consumption should increase in 2021, ripple effects are likely to occur. An online presentation in late February by Ian Roper and Joyce Li of Shanghai Metals Market (SMM) addressed the evolution of the basic scrap metal market in China , along with other trends affecting the production and use of steel, stainless steel, aluminum and copper in the country. Over the past two years, the Chinese government had imposed import barriers, including on ferrous and non-ferrous scrap, as well as other recycled materials, with the hypothesis of an absolute import ban for all types of scrap on 1 January this year. Li noted that China is far from self-sufficient in copper, with its "self-sufficiency rate" falling from 40% in 2010 to 22% in 2019. Restrictions on imported scrap in 2019 and 2020 therefore led to an increase in copper cathode and aluminum ingot imports in 2020. Although scrap import volumes rebounded in November and December across the board, Roper noted that imports to China dropped by around 300,000 tons in 2020 . It also stated that SMM expects an increase in general scrap imports in 2021, although prices could rise significantly globally. In the ferrous metals market, Chinese steelmakers appear to be moving towards electric arc furnaces (EAFs) and other technologies designed to reduce emissions and consume more scrap. Although Chinese producers will import around 1 million tons of scrap in 2021, Roper said this is a quantity that will impact price levels. raw material, in a region where factories in neighboring countries, such as Vietnam, are bidding on the same product.See more information on the recycling Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.
SEE MOREActing knowing that you are repenting and not finding the way to get closer, puts you in a state of perennial stress. Not everyone takes steps in life without ever thinking about it, or looking back to understand what they have left behind after their passage. Not everyone weaves social, family, work or emotional relationships knowing how to use the right words, the correct behaviors, the considered promises and the laudable actions. Not everyone finds the tranquility of mind to remain immersed in the relationships they have woven, investing constructively in the relationship and finding that tranquility that is anxiously sought in life . Not everyone is able to say yes, when it is necessary and no when the ideal watershed is overcome, not being afraid to discuss clearly and without any hesitation on the relationship . Not everyone is able to face the risk that the other party may not understand, not accept or mediate the topic of the discussion, risking losing or wearing down the relationship. But acting differently from what you would deem appropriate creates feelings of guilt, for what has not been done, for what has not been said, for what you wanted to be or what you wanted others to be or what the situation had been. The fear of putting your relationship into play, work, emotional or friendship, puts you in a position to always see the worst conclusion of the problem, making you decide to don't face it to maintain the status quo. The compromises you make with yourself lead you to undergo a relationship that will never suit you, because you don't experience it as a mediation of the positions between the parties, but of your defeat, creating a sense of inner discomfort, a form of constant imprisonment. Not wanting to face problems equally makes you slip into a sterile silence, which accumulates renunciations on renunciations, feelings of guilt on feelings of guilt and definitively ruin the report. Not feeling good about yourself means that you are unable to manage your relationships in a balanced way, letting yourself be carried away by situations or people, for fear that things can get even worse than they are. Experience a sort of addiction to the negative, hoping that, day after day, a few negative bricks will accumulate in your relationships and dismissing the hypothesis that excessive weight can bring down your whole castle. Saying what the solution is would be simplistic, because everyone builds their own negative way with different bricks, which come from different experiences, environmental situations, characters, culture and education. But looking from the outside, it can be said that the road traveled in this sense is a dead end and that at times, the fear of loneliness and social exclusion , professional and emotional, is often more marked within oneself than it actually is. Addressing all life situations in a constructive and open way cannot be such a great risk compared to leaving problems hidden under the carpet. The evaluation of the risk that one can run to say yes or no real and sincere, is to be done by putting on the scale a greater inner serenity, an improvement of relationship and increased self-esteem. Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.
SEE MOREAre xenophobia, nationalism and violence just collateral damage to economic progress? Rich states are deaf to scientists’ warnings about global warming and its impact on the environment and population. What was considered catastrophic a few years ago seems to be a good place to start today. If global warming attacks the food supply chain,from which some countries are accustomed to replenishing, reducing quantities, little bad, will change geographical areas and suppliers, it will be a matter of paying a little more. If global warming increases the average temperature in the cities where they live, little bad, the use of air conditioners will increase, it will be a matter of paying a little more. If global warming reduces the availability of drinking water and for domestic use, little bad, they will provide themselves from more distant sources and transport it to the house, it will be a matter of paying a little more. If global warming increases ocean levels and threatens some coastal areas or tourist areas, little bad, will change their holiday horizons, it will be a matter of paying a little more. If global warming increases the migrations that press at their borders, little bad, they will turn off the television and pour a good glass of wine, knowing that new walls are being built that will protect them, it will be a matter of paying a little more. If global warming increases cases of pandemic and traditional diseases, which threaten their nations, little harm, high-level health care and individual protections and the services they can access will reduce the risk to almost zero, it is a question of paying a little more. That’s right, it’s about paying a little more. But there is a substantial proportion of the world’s population, to which, if not entirely marginally, the pollution that causes global warming is not attributable, which does not enjoy all the defences that rich countries can give to their citizens. The African, Southeast Asian and South American populations, suffer a direct impact of climate change, such as lack of water, lack of food caused by progressive desertification of land, extreme heat that cannot be mitigated by adequate housing, poor or poor health care, which does not allow them to deal with diseases that are spreading repeatedly around the world. When we talk, even in the most authoritative forums, about human rights, we are led to always think about ourselves and how it is right to guarantee the basic support for people’s lives. But then we forget to act or we do it in a completely timid and inadequate way with respect to our needs. To this shameful resource gap we are getting a little used to,it seems to be a divine division between rich and poor, a status quo that we need to maintain, pampering ourselves in our daily lives. But apart from governments that no longer look beyond their noses, which deny environmental problems, which deny the relations between epidemics and climate change, who believe in the fairness and validity of “First of all”, the richest countries in the world will soon have to face the desperation of ever larger masses of population that have nothing left, because of the crazy climate that we have created. If we have denied millions of men basic rights which are food, housing, health care, work and education, how can we think that this anger, made up of despair, cannot lead to social revolts, wars, terrorism, nationalism, xenophobia that will sooner or later affect everyone? If we now judge the denial of the right to life or a decent life, a large slice of the world’s population, as collateral damage to economic progress,how long do we think it can pass because we too will be involved and squeezed by the environmental disaster of the planet that we are slowly building? Fundamental rights are never one-sided, they apply to everyone, always.
SEE MORECircular Economy and European Green Deal: Ursula Von der Leyen alone after the Cop25 failure in Madrid. The President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen , after the failure of the assembly of the main countries of the world, who met in Madrid to discuss the dramatic environmental situation , in the hope of accelerating the achievement of the Paris objectives, found herself definitely alone. For various reasons, as described in the Portal NEWS pages a few days ago, the major polluters of our planet such as the United States, China, Brazil, India and Russia have not only given no availability to respect the established environmental limits previously but some of them even asked to exit the Paris agreement. The sentiment shared by these countries is that of being free to produce and pollute at their convenience, without the need to submit to strict rules and controls, with the consequence of becoming more commercially competitive on the market than those countries that comply with environmental regulations. It would seem it was a great disappointment, first of all political, on the part of the European Union, which finds itself carrying out this battle on safeguarding the planet by itself. But despite the failures of Madrid, the president of the European commission has decided to continue his fight against climate change and pollution, launching the “European Green Deal” program which expresses the community’s desire to make Europe the first continent to zero impact by 2050. Through new legislative proposals and substantial Community funding that the president wants to put into action, within two years, he wants to get to control emissions, to create a green market, also in the working field and to push innovation, a painful point compared to nations. like China and USA. The new Community policy will affect several sectors: agriculture, industry, energy, technology, transport and chemistry. There are still some EU countries that are opposed or skeptical of the new program, especially those in the east, linked by a double thread to coal for the production of electricity. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary would like to postpone the start of the plan to have more time to convert their plants from coal to a cleaner energy source. Certainly the plan is ambitious and demanding, as it involves not only the technological adaptation of obsolete and polluting energy production systems, such as coal, but also the finding of enormous economic resources, around 100 billion a year , to be invested to help Eastern European countries to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Resources that today are not easy to find among the countries of the European community. But there is also an important aspect to keep in mind, which concerns the commercial disadvantage of products made within the European market , governed by stringent environmental standards, compared to countries that have the right to derogate from these commitments, thus becoming more competitive. from a commercial point of view. To face this problem, a return on public investment in strategic sectors such as technology, industrial and energy is being considered. This could serve to decrease the differential between the cost of European production and that of other countries that produce energy from fossil sources. However, public investment is not the only thought that Brussels has to help European companies to remain competitive in exports, but it is also thinking of a sort of “Carbon Tax”, a tax for polluters, aimed at goods from those countries. that produce and export their goods, using non-green energy, therefore less expensive and more polluting. In chain, ideas could be aggregated about the blockade of the free trade agreement between Europe and Mercosur, affecting the Brazilian meat trade , as the president of Brazil, Bolsonaro , is held responsible for the deforestation of the Amazon , with all the related environmental consequences. The intentions are good, but the process of completing the new green plan involves a lot of politics and a lot of money, two things to be taken with a grain of salt.See more info about topicAutomatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.
SEE MOREU.S. planes sprayed more than 20 million gallons of herbicides. In an effort to bend the tenacious and stubborn resistance of North Vietnamese soldiers, U.S. aircraft and helicopters, they sprayed more than 20 million liters of herbicides, including Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, on the country’s rainforests. The conflict between the United States and the Viet Cong regime,backed by China and Russia, has devastated the Asian nation for nearly twenty years, resulting in millions of deaths, mostly among the civilian population. Despite the fact that decades have passed since the end of the conflict, Vietnam continues to suffer the negative effects of that war. The herbicides used by the US military continue to pollute and poison Vietnamese ecosystems and the people who live there. But why did the Americans use these poisons indiscriminately?The U.S. military suffered heavy human casualties in the armed conflict within the Vietnamese jungle, where Viet Cong soldiers, in addition to learning more about the territory and its nature, created frequent ambushes on American soldiers who could not be massively supported by heavy artillery or air raids. The U.S. military strategies, accustomed to handling field battles over open spaces using air cover and heavy artillery, were to try to lure the North Vietnamese army into the open field to exploit the overwhelming military superiority of their army. But the Viet Cong proved to be as cunning and tenacious soldiers enough to induce the U.S. army to enter the jungle or wooded hills, especially near the Cambodian border, to get them out into the open. In this harsh and solitary environment, Americans paid a very high price in human lives and achieved poor military results. The tactics of the North Vietnamese military was called “take the enemy for the belt” which consisted of frequent ambushes within the jungle or in densely wooded environments, where hand-to-hand combat prevented Americans from using the greatest firepower of their army. Unable to bend the resistance of the enemy, the U.S. Army decided to systematically destroy, in a preventive way, the forests in which their soldiers were to advance, to avoid ambushes and to enjoy, at all times, the armed support from the sky and the earth. For this operation they thought to spray, with defoliating agents, the vegetation in order to destroy it and, in some cases, the napalm to burn everything to the ground. The use of the defoliating agent Orange has not only destroyed forests, but also a part of the country’s food crops, due to the presence in the compound of a dioxin-based contaminant that affected many Vietnamese and U.S. military. An article from the University of Illinois and Iowa State University documents the environmental effects of agent Orange sprayed in Vietnam, also taking into account, not only the effects over time of the poison on the population, but also the persistent action that dioxin still has on the food chain. But what is Agent Orange?Olson and co-author Lois Wright Morton explained that Agent Orange was a combination of two herbicides, 2.4-D and 2,4,5-T,which, used individually in agriculture, had a useful life no longer than a few days or weeks in an environment exposed to sunlight. However, during production, the mixing of the two components to create the new herbicide called Agent Orange, formed a toxic byproduct consisting of dioxin TCDD, the most toxic in the dioxy family of chemicals dioxins. Once the dyoxin TCDD enters the environment it can remain alive for decades or even centuries. This is what happened in the Vietnamese territory bombarded by this substance. What was the contamination mechanism?Researchers examined an 870-page USA ID report, as well as a dozen other research reports on contaminated sites, to explain long-term dioxin behavior in all Vietnam campaigns affected by the event. “The path of contamination it begins with the spraying of Agent Orange, the absorption by the leaves of trees and shrubs, the fall of the leaves on the surface of the soil (along with some direct contact of the poisonous compound with the soil), then the attachment of the dioxin TCDD to the organic substance of the soil with the clay particles of the soil. From there, the TCDD dioxin moved with the surface runoff of the water, clinging to sediment particles and settling into wetlands, swamps, rivers, lakes and ponds. The sediment contaminated with TCDD dioxin was – and still is – ingested by fish and shrimp,accumulating in their fatty tissue and food chain in many other fish that form the basis of the Vietnamese diet. Although fishing is now banned at most contaminated sites, prohibitions by the authorities are difficult to enforce and, as a result, dioxin TCDD is still entering the human food supply more than 50 years after the end of the conflict. President Nixon ordered the U.S. military to stop spraying Agent Orange in 1970 also due to the discovery that U.S. soldiers themselves became ill due to dioxin dispersed in the environment.Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies.
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