China Limits Waste. ‘Cardboard Grannies’ and Texas Recyclers Scramble.<br />“I was angry, but I knew I was just a small businesswoman,” Ms. Leung, 63, said of the wastepaper restrictions as she picked through cardboard, polystyrene<br />and soda cans in a rat-infested alley in the Mong Kok district of Hong Kong on a recent morning.<br />As with so much else in the global economy, China’s decision is rippling through a vast supply chain<br />that stretches from big waste companies in Texas to the “cardboard grannies” in Hong Kong like Ms. Leung that pick through mounds of paper and plastic.<br />Fears of widespread domestic pollution were amplified by “Plastic China,” a recent documentary film about a bleak town in the eastern province of Shandong where people earn their living by picking through scrap plastics<br />and processing them in machines that belch black smoke.<br />“I began skipping dinner so I could work harder,” said Ms. Leung, who was already moonlighting<br />as a dishwasher, sleeping fewer than five hours a night and making as little as $500 a month.<br />HONG KONG — When the street value of scrap cardboard here fell by nearly a third this summer, Leung Siu-Guen, a scrap collector, started to worry.
