Three months ago, China decided to ban 24 different grades of rubbish as part of its opposition to importing foreign rubbish, which has so far imported millions of tons of world waste and provided materials for its recycling industry.
China's Bureau of International Recycling estimates that China imported 7.3 million tons of plastic waste from Europe, Japan and the United States last year, with 27 million tons of waste paper.
Picture Source: Surging News
China is the world's largest consumer of raw materials, buying billions of tons of crude oil, coal and iron ore every year, but one commodity market will no longer play a leading role: waste.
In July, the Chinese government told the World Trade Organization that it will no longer accept the import of 24 types of solid waste by the end of this year, and officials said restricting such imports would help protect the environment and improve public health. However, the proposed ban will threaten the number of Billions of dollars of trade, and many Chinese recyclers lose their jobs.
Why is China so eager to prohibit foreign litter?
For decades, China has been the world's major processing center for waste recycling, importing 45 million tons of scrap metal, waste paper and plastics nationwide for a total of 18 billion U.S. dollars in 2016. It seems that a large sum of money is being paid to foreign companies for garbage Fair deal but good for both parties.
Exporters are rewarded for the remainder of the waste, most of which may ultimately end up as landfills, while Chinese firms receive a steady supply of recycled materials, often cheaper and cheaper than recycled materials Less, for example, consumes 60% less energy than iron ore produces steel.
However, this economic benefit is accompanied by a corresponding cost: Imports of recyclable waste are often dirty, poorly sorted or contaminated with hazardous substances and are not always recyclable, even if they are imported safely.
The government said the proposed ban would protect the environment, but other analysts pointed out that most of the waste in the Chinese recycling industry comes from domestic sources rather than from imports.
As for the millions of tons of wastes to be clogged on the Chinese border, some high quality wastes will find buyers in other countries like Malaysia, Vietnam or Indonesia and the rest may end up in landfills.
Impact on foreign waste exporters
There is an economic activity that the United States does better than any other country - a world champion in trash disposal. The United States is also good at getting others to buy the trash, at least in newspapers in trash cans, in the Amazon Shopping Web site This is the case for boxes and 2-liter bottles.
The US Waste Recycling Industry Association said the United States has a huge trade surplus in the waste trade, including the recycling of household goods, said Joe Picard, the chief economist for the trade group, "We are like Saudi Arabia in the field of waste."
But now, companies in the United States that provide waste paper and waste plastic separation services have run into a lot of trouble: the biggest buyers of such waste do not want to buy anymore.
The association said that last year's U.S. scrap exports totaled $ 16.5 billion, more than any other country. The total export of waste paper and plastic waste was about $ 3.9 billion. More than two-thirds of U.S. waste paper was exported last year Have reached China, while over 40% of waste plastics have their destination in China, according to data from the United States that the total amount of waste paper and waste plastics exported to mainland China exceeds 2.2 billion U.S. dollars.
Picture Source: Surging News
Robin Wiener, chairman of the association, said: 'The U.S. industrial export activities supported 155,000 direct jobs with an average salary of nearly $ 76,000 and contributed over $ 3 billion to federal, state and local taxes.' He added: 'Prohibiting the import of waste into China will have catastrophic consequences for the recycling industry.'
As China implements the ban by 2018 at the latest, the recycling industry in the United Kingdom has already sent a letter to the environmental, food and rural affairs and asked the authorities to help them deal with the problem of waste accumulation that will occur.
Byrd, chairman of a local government recovery advisory council in the UK, thinks the UK can still export scrap to other parts of Asia such as India, even if China no longer imports waste from the rest of the world, but the price will change a bit, This is always a crisis for local governments.
After China reforms its policy of importing foreign rubbish, the recycling industry needs to allocate more funds to deal with the problem of excess global waste.
According to the British "Times" reported that China's practice is part of an effort to reduce and clean up the environmental pollution, but China's total ban on the import of recyclables from abroad will cause a chain reaction and have a huge far-reaching impact on the world. Is the packaging industry.It is reported that the international export of recyclable waste up to tens of billions of dollars.
Seek new buyers
Scrap is reborn in China, and sometimes it turns itself back into the United States as something else - some factories disassemble it and use it as a raw material for making new boxes, new toys, and other goods.
A waste management company executive said global price performance is very poor after the largest customer has taken concrete steps to exit the market, saying the company is working with buyers in India, Vietnam and South Korea to take over China However, given China's huge demand in the past few years, a halt in imports means that there will be a very big problem in the market's degree of activity. '
This may be a recovery crisis because no project has yet enough to fill the void in China's waste recovery capacity, China's neighbor, Japan, may be the country that seizes this opportunity, and Japan, like many other nations, has relied on decades to export its waste to China.
Now this market is open. Due to the government's long-term support for research and development, the new technologies used by some large Japanese companies both at home and abroad may partly replace the low-cost and polluting recycling system used in China for a long time. Of course, such research and development and investment will not be less, nor short-term.