China Won't Solve the World's Plastics Problem Any More (wired.com) 219
An anonymous reader shares a report: For a long time, China has been a dumping ground for the world's problematic plastics. In the 1990s, Chinese markets saw that discarded plastic could be profitably recreated into exportable bits and bobs -- and it was less expensive for international cities to send their waste to China than to deal with it themselves. China got cheap plastic and the exporting countries go rid of their trash.
But in November 2017, China said enough. The country closed its doors to contaminated plastic, leaving the exports to be absorbed by neighboring countries like Vietnam, South Korea, and Thailand. And without the infrastructure to absorb all the waste that China is rejecting, the plastics are piling up. Between now and 2030, 111 million metric tons of trash -- straws, bags, water bottles -- will have nowhere to go, according to a paper published in Science Advances on Wednesday. That's as if every human on Earth contributed a quarter of their body mass in mostly single-use plastic polymers to a massive, abandoned pile of garbage.
But in November 2017, China said enough. The country closed its doors to contaminated plastic, leaving the exports to be absorbed by neighboring countries like Vietnam, South Korea, and Thailand. And without the infrastructure to absorb all the waste that China is rejecting, the plastics are piling up. Between now and 2030, 111 million metric tons of trash -- straws, bags, water bottles -- will have nowhere to go, according to a paper published in Science Advances on Wednesday. That's as if every human on Earth contributed a quarter of their body mass in mostly single-use plastic polymers to a massive, abandoned pile of garbage.
WALL-E (Score:2)
Sorting and re-processing the heaps might be a job for AI.
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I wish it were easier to repair stuff these days. A lot of things that are in otherwise good shape except for a single fatal bad part results in having the toss the entire thing; it's cheaper to buy a new one than pay for repairs.
And they are often only designed to last 3 years. We have a Japanese-brand microwave oven from the late 90's that still works and is used often. You don't see durability like that now. [Insert git-off-my-lawn joke here.]
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Survivorship bias. How many microwaves from the late 90s ended up in the dump? Things weren't built any better back then, you just got lucky.
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False!
If that were the case, anecdotes of having to replace the new appliance more frequently than they had to replace the old one (if they ever did) wouldn't be common.
It's not just that some old things survived. Among those who own old surviving things, the survival rate of new things does not match.
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Anecdotes are not data. I will tell you this, major appliances in the 1990s were in no way any more reliable than they are now.
People complained about the exact same things in the 1990s, about how their old stuff from the 1970s worked better. Where are all of those 1970s refrigerators anyways?
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It really is true, fridges from the 70's and 80's tended to last 20 years, 90's fridges about 10 years. The ones they sell today seem to only last about 2-5 years. I'm sure they are trying to perfect the system for getting to last only 1 day past the warranty period.
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well with the advent of the cloud and IoT bullshit, they can do just that. Keep a running tally of every time you fridge door opens, or when it first pinged their servers. Then at the appropriate time (typically around the time the warranty expires, or a set number of 'door opens', fry the circuit board that controls the temperature -- voila.
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Why would the industry go to efforts for the sake of repairability?
The invisible hand? Read the rest of the book, Melvin, or at least the part about informed purchase agents.
Even Darwinism implies that the product will trend towards the lifespan of the weakest link, eg phone li-ion battery averages N years, ergo the industry will drift towards...
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It's called Continuation Engineering. I worked for a major appliance controls OEM. There are engineers within the company whose job is to cave cents of cost off of $4 controls and components. If it lasts too long, it's a candidate for cost reduction engineering.
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Anecdotes are not data.
Of course they are. Either way, you're missing the point.
Among those that have/had long-lived old things, you will find very few (or none) that have long-lived replacements.
It's NOT an issue of bias in only looking at examples where old shit happened to last a long time. That's what the person I replied to claimed. It's horse shit. If that were the case, and new shit lasts just as long or longer than old shit, then the typical experience of someone with long-lived old things would be that the new shit i
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I actually wonder about this a little, but not necessarily from th
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Part of it is back then consumers expected things to last longer such that manufacturers payed more attention to durability and repair-ability.
For one, products were relatively more expensive. If you pay a lot for something, you kind of expect it to last a while. The "disposable" mentality had not kicked in yet. You had well known and long living brands like Maytag and Hoover that had a reputation for lasting. Now the brands come and go like stray cats.
A combination of automation and China's low manufacturi
Re: WALL-E (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that parts availability for most old repairable things is fading fast. There is only so much welding and epoxy can do. Eventually you need repair parts and they're largely gone for the old stuff. There are exceptions (you can buy replacements for pretty much anything on a 1960s era Ford Mustang) but in most cases you're going to be SOL at some point because some stupid little $2 part breaks 30 years after the fact. When the modern equivalent can't even last 10 that makes me a saaaad panda. That said, I still have many perfectly functional mechanical things dating back to well before I was alive and electronics dating back to 1977, many of which have required no repairs ever. They just work.
No matter how many baby seals (zero) were clubbed to death to make these things how can you imagine an "environmentally friendly" modern equivalent is actually friendlier than a thing that (given a few replacement parts) will literally last forever?
That's not to say that everything lasted forever in the "before time" but you had a choice. You could buy cheap garbage or things that cost a bit more and would last. Now you can spend infinity dollars and still end up with stuff that won't last.
Re-branding (Score:2)
Sadly much/most of the companies that made quality things that last went out of business because they couldn't compete with the cheap crap. So now everything is crap. Worse is that no matter where you buy now, it all comes from the same place, is all made by the same people, it is just re-branded six ways from Sunday. It is pretty obvious to look around and find the exact same widget or bobbet and apart from some logo or whatnot is the exact same item being sold from china. Buying from a "quality" store you
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Oh they secretly love that guy: he demonstrates a big down-side of democracy daily.
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Maybe some 3D printing can help.
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Agreed. The worst offender are headphones with a built-in cable and connector. Due to wear and tear, the wire in the cables always ends up failing, or maybe it's that very thin piece of wire connecting the cable to the headphone. But once that cable has gone, the whole headphone set has to be thrown out; speakers, rare-earth magnets, plastic and cable. Bluetooth headphones are a bit better, but DJ style headphones have an extra connector to allow the cable to be replaced.
For appliances like washing machines
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Recently I discovered there're in fact in ear headphones with detachable cables (not just DJ style as you mentioned) and I'm gonna try that route and see how it works.
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When I was a kid I repaired several sets of headphones. For me the wire tended to break near the plug, probably from being bent when used with a walkman in a pocket. Amputate just above the break and solder a new one on that you bought from Radio Shack for less than a packet of chewing gum.
Then unsolder it and do it again because you forgot to thread the cable through the screw-on shell first, doh!
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Sorting and re-processing the heaps might be a job for AI.
Well, your title says it all . . . the Chinese could build another Great Wall with the heaps of plastic!
Or another Terracotta Coke Bottle Army.
Actually my personal favorite work of Chinese Architecture was the "Rainbow Bridge". A new one made of colored plastic and illuminated by Rave Lights would be interesting.
And what about some plastic Admiral Zheng He's Giant Ships . . . ? If you don't like 'em, you can sink them to create artificial reefs and islands.
Hey, maybe someone in the US is in the market
Thermal depolymerization (Score:1)
space (Score:1)
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You slay you...somebody ought to.
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Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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About all you can do with mixed plastics. What are they going to do, fractional distillation?
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What are they going to do, fractional distillation?
You mean something like thermal depolymerization?
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Now you've got mixed monomers, still worthless except as fuel, would have been cheaper to just burn it.
The problem is _mixed_ plastics.
Re:Burn it (Score:4, Interesting)
in australia, they mix it with tar, and make new roads that are 60% plastic, and last longer too, if theres one place you want plastic to last for 1000s of years, is a damn road.
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I recently tried to make some raised beds in the garden. I figured I'd make them out of plastic so they don't rot - and sure enough, you can buy wood-substitute plastic planks in various widths, thicknesses and lengths. The trouble is, they work out about four times as expensive as the (treated) wood alternative. Even factoring in lifetime and replacements, they're still somewhere close to twice as expensive.
That said, plastic planks do have their uses - one use I have coming up is in a shed which has a con
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Do they still cost more if you factor in the value of your time in rebuilding them every few years?
Re:Burn it (Score:4, Informative)
in australia, they mix it with tar,
No they don't. There are precisely 300meters worth of roads in Australia made with recycled plastic as a technology trial that one small startup did this year. I'll get to why below:
and make new roads that are 60% plastic, and last longer too, if theres one place you want plastic to last for 1000s of years, is a damn road.
All roads are made up of a large portion of plastic. However none of it is recycled. The quality of the plastic is precisely controlled and adjusted to suit the conditions of the road surface, both in load, preparation and environment. Also roads break down due to wear and external damage. All roads would last a shitload of time if people didn't drive on them, and if they weren't subjected to extreme temperature changes. It is incredibly hard to make roads to suit conditions which is precisely why the formulation doesn't rely on just recycling some garbage, but rather is a tightly controlled mix of polymers to suit the product.
There's something strange about talking about plastic waste that brings out some wild theories.
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You'd need to integrate this with something like CCS to prevent even more pollutants being shit out into the atmosphere though no?
Not that I'm saying that isn't a viable solution, but for whatever reason CCS still seems to be very much in it's infancy despite being hyped for a couple of decades now.
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As much as it makes me cringe, I agree that it is about the only solution at this point. Good news is it is higher energy content than food waste.
As long as there is proper waste gas treatment, I'll have to live with it. I really wish I didn't need as much single-use plastic packaging as I get stuck with though.
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Re:Burn it (Score:5, Interesting)
One company uses 70%+ of all the bags recycled in the US. They claim the average deck uses 140K bags.
https://www.trex.com/why-trex/... [trex.com]
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Um... is that safe? (Score:2)
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Better burn plastic than oil, gas or coal.
Send it to Sweden (Score:5, Informative)
In the end they will burn it controlled for heating.
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
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They are running out of garbage, for real.
Sweden has built a very successful export business with its garbage. What do you think all that IKEA paperboard and plasticboard is made of . . . ? That's why they are running out of it.
If you are brave, daring and unafraid, take your chainsaw to your "Billy" bookcase, and see for yourself what's inside . . .
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Swedish garbage recycling has nothing to do with IKEA furniture made in the US and/or Vietnam (that's the two countries that I see listed most often on IKEA products sold in the US). Particle board is also not made of plastics, that would be impractically heavy and require a totally different kind of glue. And when something they sell is made of recycled material, that fact is proudly displayed in their marketing. This idea that they would hide recycled material inside their products unbeknownst to the cust
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If you are brave, daring and unafraid, take your chainsaw to your "Billy" bookcase, and see for yourself what's inside . . .
You don't need to be anything to take a chainsaw to your Billy bookcase. Though if you want to make something practical out of it like I did I suggest using a jigsaw or something with more finesse than a chainsaw. What's inside it? Depending on when you bought it you're either looking at chipboard or more recently a low density wooden honeycomb which they introduced to reduce wood use while maintaining strength.
Now onto your conspiracy theory: IKEA has several products that are made out of waste, all of the
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Sweden will not just take any of your garbage, it has to be presorted by quality, and that costs money. The UK is not willing to spend that extra money and now they're complaining nobody will take their low quality trash for a few pennies a tonne.
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Somehow that seems worse than dumping it in a big hole.
Did they ever solve it? (Score:3)
On the other hand, we might eventually not want to recycle all of our plastic. Eventually we'll stop burning oil and other fossil fuels (as we move to solar and electric power for more and more things) and plastic is a convenient way to sequester carbon. We could even bury it in old mine shafts or find other places to store it where it won't leach into the ground water or get eaten by marine wildlife. Presumably we'll even start scrubbing it from the atmosphere, but we have to do something with it.
Re:Did they ever solve it? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure to what extend they were really "solving" the problem. I'm guessing that a lot of what gets sent to China for recycling ends up in a landfill where it's out of sight and mind from the Western world.
This is basically the current situation with electronic waste - it is shipped to third-world countries for "reprocessing". Once it arrives there, any recyclable components may or may not be removed before the carcass is dumped in whatever spot is most convenient.
When one of those countries closes its borders to additional trash (as has happened here, with plastics), then the source countries start looking for another third-world country they can pay to receive it rather than spend the money to truly address the problem.
Dirty! (Score:1, Insightful)
But in November 2017, China said enough. The country closed its doors to contaminated plastic,
Which from what I've read is the problem. China is sick of our soiled plastic waste. I mean ffs people, we had one job, clean up the waste so it's not disgusting and China would take it on the cheap. But NOOOOOO, lazy fucking Americans can't even be bothered to rinse stuff off and make their garbage slightly more appealing.
Well, guess what, they're are sick of it and I don't blame them. And you can bet the other countries taking plastic now, they won't put up with it for very long either. Clean it up,
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Not actually the problem; it isn't individual plastics being contaminated but rather the joke of "single stream" recycling. A couple things in a truckload of recyclables can contaminate it sufficiently that it isn't worth sorting. At those kinds of numbers the answer is to get rid of single use plastics (and papers).
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But NOOOOOO, lazy fucking Americans can't even be bothered to rinse stuff off
My city told me to not rinse stuff, because it wastes water. I do put stuff with significant food residue in the dish washer, which is much more water efficient than rinsing. One reference [ecomyths.org], you can find lots more with a quick search.
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Plastic OUT, Plastic IN (Score:3, Insightful)
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Somehow they don't see a problem with exporting all that plastic in the form of cheap toys and electronics in the first place, eh? Man up, show some responsibility and start dealing with the problem you yourself have created.
Think about that a moment. Sure they send toys, electronics... that if I were to melt them the toys I gave my kids down would easily fit into a 5 gallon can. On the other hand the bottled water dumbasses keep consuming because they somehow don't want tap water is staggering. Ever check out the grocery store? I was just at one that they had so many bottles it's in the bulk section and out into the isle nearly blocking it and more in the back. So many people frightened to use tap water.
How many Americans is that? (Score:1)
"That's as if every human on Earth contributed a quarter of their body mass"
A more relevant analogy would be to say something like "as if every American contributed an elephants worth of plastic...cause they probably do". I doubt the 2-3 billion people living in poverty are contributing anywhere near as much as my neighbors who manage to fill 2 96 gallon bins every week.
Re:How many Americans is that? (Score:5, Informative)
When it comes to plastic waste, the opposite is actually true. This is because most of such waste is packaging.
If you were to ever go to a market in poor countries, one of the first things you'll note is that when you buy your daily products, they come in daily doses, packaged as such. Tiny shampoo packages, tiny soap packages, tiny deodorant, etc. Even food is commonly sold packaged as "this is your portion for the next meal".
This is because people in poor countries can't afford to pay for a bottle that will last them a month. That's a month you have to pay up front. Poor overwhelmingly live day to day, and products are portioned to match this need.
So for the same amount of product, you get order(s) of magnitude more plastic waste. Which is why the plastic garbage problem is far worse in Pacific and primarily originates from poor countries on the West end of Pacific.
Because China has enough of it (Score:5, Informative)
Why would China allow importing other countries' garbage? That would amount to treason. That's because it was the WTO concession imposed upon China [mintpressnews.com] in exchange for them getting access to the world market at lower tariff. So while we are complaining "unfair trade" with China and ridiculing their environment problem, we must feel shameful about ourselves -- China (and other poor third world countries) had to sell out their environment in order to survive economically while we have ripped the benefits of a clean environment, something that our politicians and media never want to mention. Get down from your moral high horse!
I hate plastic (Score:5, Insightful)
The main thing that spurred all this was probably a mixing bowl.
I had a set of white plastic mixing bowls, and at some point I had to store some tomato based pasta sauce in one, after which, no matter how much I washed it, it was forever tinted orange. It just looked gross, and sparked the realization that; if the damn plastic bowl was so porous as to be permanently stained by tomato sauce, what the hell else might it have soaked up, and/or leached out of it?
After that, whenever I get a chance, I buy a stainless steel or glass version. Sure, costs more and will take longer to acquire some items, but I figure its worth it.
It all reminds me of the humorous observation:
At what point, did drilling an oil well in the middle east, pumping out that oil, putting the oil on a ship, sail that oil filled ship across the ocean, unloading the oil in America, piping it to a refinery, refining it into some form of plastic, trucking that plastic to a factory, forming that plastic into an object, boxing that object up, putting that box into another truck and trucking it to a warehouse, then from the warehouse to a store, from the store to your house, to be opened, used once, and then thrown away, ALL BECOME EASYER THAN WASHING THE FUCKING FORK.
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Minimum wage was implemented back before plastics were common. America was late to the party, introducing it (nationally) in '38, 40 years after Australia.
Earlier, like in 1349, there were maximum wage laws. Just because the labourers were mostly wiped out by the black death, didn't mean paying them more, no matter how much the peasants thought otherwise.
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When minimum wage was enacted. Not saying we should drop minimum wage. Europe's solution is to make people pay the entire cost of disposing of that plastic fork. That makes it cheaper to pay somebody to wash dishes.
I doubt that. If the costs of washing something are greater than using disposable and just carrying out the trash at minimum wage, they will still be be at pretty much any other pay rate too. The labor of washing is always going to be more than just taking out the trash. When the price of disposable forks undercuts the costs of real forks, washing apparatus, and shop space for both is when disposable comes first. Especially considering that disposable forks must be kept around and stored anyway for take out
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if the damn plastic bowl was so porous as to be permanently stained by tomato sauce, what the hell else might it have soaked up, and/or leached out of it?
All plastic is porous - if not washed right away it eventually absorbs whatever it is in contact with. Interesting fact, you know PEX water pipe that is used in newer house builds? It is made of plastic and works great. However, standard PEX is not used for in-floor heating applications. The reason why is that oxygen can travel though the PEX and cause rust within the closed heating system. To prevent this they use a PEX that contains a internal layer of aluminum foil. Because to stop oxygen (or any
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This is also the reason for sell-by dates on bottled water. The water slowly escapes from the bottle while it sits on the shelf, through the plastic. It's so slow that it doesn't cause puddles or anything, but after some years the amount of water in the bottle is less than the advertised 2L or whatever and can't be sold at full price any more.
It also tastes of plastic by that point but that isn't a legal problem.
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The touch, the feel, of plastic. The fabric of our lives.
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Well depends. There's nothing like feeling a pair of nylons on my wife.
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It's time to dump CCC! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheap Chinese Crap needs to go!
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When we got a big problem... (Score:2)
... we think of China?
Are we just wishing them death nowaday?
Far more concerned about CHina's dumping (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Far more concerned about CHina's dumping (Score:2)
we need to find a way to recycle it (Score:3)
Awesome! (Score:3)
I love reports like this. Some people are going to say that government regulation is the way to go and that people should cut back on consumption, etc. Maybe that's true to some extent, I dunno.
But really, I hope most people see this as a huge opportunity and that it lures creative entrepreneurs. That's how these problems are most effectively solved, and somebody is going to get absurdly rich off it, and I'm excited to see what they come up with. Don't bury it, don't send it to the sun, but find some way to make it useful again.
I guarantee the plastic will have somewhere to go. (Score:4, Insightful)
> Between now and 2030, 111 million metric tons of trash -- straws, bags, water bottles -- will have nowhere to go
Unless the laws of conservation of mass are to be repealed I guarantee that plastic will go somewhere. Therefore, by definition, it will have somewhere to go.
Start injecting deep into the earths crust (Score:1)
Thank god! (Score:4, Insightful)
If solving the world's plastic problems meant dumping it in the Yangtze river [verdict.co.uk] thank god!
The out of sight out of mind policies of 1st world countries, off loading their environmental responsibilities on to countries that are least able to deal with it has to stop, it's an hypocrisy the world's ecosystem can no longer afford
Make it great again (Score:1)
why? (Score:2)
why do they keep shipping garbage (not just plastic, but everything) to the other side of the world?
we know how to recycle ALL THESE THINGS! it's a solved problem, for years.
i get that it is cheaper, but it doesn't solve anything, the garbage is still there, how short-sighted must you be not to realise that?
It's only cheaper now, it will be more expensive to deal with it later.
one quarter (Score:2)
That's as if every human on Earth contributed a quarter of their body mass in mostly single-use plastic polymers to a massive, abandoned pile of garbage.
Yikes, I might produce that much every year. I really gotta cut back.
"international cities"? (Score:1)
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Yes, I asked you to provide a link or proof to Steven Burn saying he recommends your software. You didn't
I followed your link. None of them are Steve Burn.
So we come back to my initial point that you've failed to disprove
Malwarebytes describes APKs software as 'small'. Similar software is 'small' and 'useful', but APK is just small. Not useful.
APKs software isn't useful - just ask Malwarebytes. APK thinks this is a 'RECOMMENDATION'
Shall I add
APK claims Steve Burn recommends him, but can't prove it
I have no