So Much Plastic

Some new environmental laws in far-off China means that the two companies that bought used plastic - 15,000 tons of it a year - from the Almería invernaderos for recycling in the Orient, will no longer do so. That's a lot of used plastic to dispose of.

The popular measure of the size of the plastic farms which stretch from the Almería border with Granada to the left and as far along to the right at Nijar is 30,000 hectares - 300 square kilometres. This figure however dates back to around the beginning of the 21st Century. A farmer from El Ejido tells me that his union reckons on around 75,000 hectares of farms under plastic across the province. 
That's a lot of plastic - maybe it's time for one of those accidental fires that seem to plague this country (there have been 141 major unexplained fires in different recycling plants across Spain since February 2012).