Following China’s decision in July 2017 to impose strict restrictions, Thailand and Vietnam are also adopting restrictive measures. Resource waste generated in Japan and Europe and the United States has been exported to Asian countries and reused. However, as environmental awareness increases, opposition to foreign countries The call for imported waste is strengthening, and the global recycling network is welcoming a major turning point.
According to the "Nikkei Business News" website reported on July 16, China proposed in July 2017, to reduce the import of waste that can be replaced by domestic resource waste by the end of 2019, including waste plastics, waste paper and waste. Fiber, etc. China's imported resource waste is rapidly decreasing.
China's waste plastics imported from Japan and Europe and the United States from January to March 2018 were only about 44,000 tons, down from about 1/20.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report shows that the total amount of waste plastics produced worldwide in 2015 was about 300 million tons.
Among them, the world trade in waste plastics is considered to be around 15 million tons in the whole year, forming a mechanism for recycling from developed countries such as Japan, the United States and Europe to developing countries.
Statistics show that China imported about half of the world's waste plastics.
With restrictions imposed by China, the trend of exporting resource waste to Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand is strengthening. In Southeast Asia, imports of waste plastics increased rapidly from January to March 2018. Thailand increased to 18 times year-on-year, Malaysia increased to 4 times, Vietnam has more than doubled.
However, around the surge in resource waste, the opposition voices of various countries are strengthening. Japanese media said that there will be a trend of restricting the import of resource waste such as waste plastics and waste paper.
This has created a huge impact on Japan's domestic waste treatment industry. According to previous reports, many Japanese companies have no place to accommodate new garbage. More than half of the operators in the Kanto region no longer receive new garbage. Enterprises also need to pay for waste plastics. more money.
A plastic waste dumped in a recycling center of the waste disposal industry in the Kanto region is as high as 5 meters, and has reached the dangerous level of the storage standard exceeding the waste disposal law.
