Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Recycling<br />11, 2018<br />LONDON — Ever since China announced last year that it no longer wanted to be the "world’s garbage dump," recycling about half of the globe’s plastics<br />and paper products, Western nations have been puzzling over what to do when the ban went into effect, which it did on Jan. 1.<br />upset of the flow of global recyclables." Now, he said, he is hoping to export waste to countries like Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Malaysia — "anywhere we can" — but "they can’t make up the difference." In Britain, Jacqueline O’Donovan, managing director of the British waste disposal firm, O’Donovan Waste Disposal, said<br />that "the market has completely changed" since China’s decision went into effect. that a major<br />The United States exports more than 13.2 million tons of scrap paper<br />and 1.42 million tons of scrap plastics annually to China, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries has reported.<br />In Halifax, Nova Scotia, which sent 80 percent of its recycling to China, Matthew Keliher, the city’s manager of solid waste, said he had<br />largely found alternatives to accept plastic, except for the low-grade plastic film that is used to make shopping bags and for wrapping.<br />China’s ban covers imports of 24 kinds of solid waste, including unsorted paper<br />and the low-grade polyethylene terephthalate used in plastic bottles, as part of a broad cleanup effort and a campaign against "yang laji," or "foreign garbage." It also sets new limits on the levels of impurities in other recyclables.<br />China had been processing at least half of the world’s exports of waste paper, metals<br />and used plastic — 7.3 million tons in 2016, according to recent industry data.
