China no longer willing to be a dumping ground for US waste

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China no longer willing to be a dumping ground for US waste
By Chen Weihua | China Daily | Updated: 2017-12-15 07:09


There have been many stories in US news media lately about how China's ban on foreign waste has caused recycling chaos in their country.

A National Public Radio story last week described the impact on Portland, Oregon, quoting a spokesman for local Rogue Waste as saying that the company had no choice but to take all of its recyclable material to the local landfill.

Few Americans know that one of the largest US exports to China is recyclable solid waste, as Yukon Huang, author of the book Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom is Wrong, likes to remind people. He noted that many US Commerce Department officials had no idea that was the case.

Every day, some 3,700 shipping containers full of recyclables are trucked to US ports, loaded onto ships and sent to China. The items in those containers include plastics, metal, paper, cardboard, and textiles, which Chinese manufacturers use as raw materials, as Bloomberg News outlined in a report tracing the process.

The US exported some 37 million metric tons of scrap commodities valued at $16.5 billion to 155 countries last year. China accounted for almost one-third of that total, about $5.2 billion.

The State Council, China's Cabinet, however, announced on July 18 new regulations banning the import of foreign waste. On the same day, China notified the World Trade Organization that it will no longer accept imports of 24 types of solid waste.

The move will help reduce the health and environmental risks posed by the waste, and also free up more of China's large but somewhat chaotic recycling industry to tackle the rapid increase of solid waste produced by 1.3 billion Chinese themselves.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201712/15/WS5a3304c4a3108bc8c6734c3b.html
 
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