There are big changes afoot with the recycling industry and we Americans are going to have to get a grip on both the way we handle our recyclables and on making consumption changes
With the first Earth Day in 1970, the recycling ethic was born and the whole program really took off in the ’90’s to the hue and cry of burying less trash in the landfills. For a few decades this really worked out well because our largest recycled materials customer, China, was ramping up industrially and needed our bin scraps to make up for their own shortages. China, by 2015, was importing 60 percent of the plastic, a third of the metal and half off all global paper scrap. It was a very efficient process. shiploads of Chinese made goods, such as for Walmart were offloaded and millions of tons of baled recycled stuffs made the return journey. But, guess what? China decided it no longer desires to be the dumping ground for all our consumer waste. So, this is causing a huge disruption in the whole recycling plan which was highly reliant on China’s appetite. Trying to gin up the enthusiasm in other Asian countries like Viet Nam, Malaysia and India just cannot match the role China played for us. As a result, there is chaos as American municipal trash/recycle pickups, recycling industries and consumers are figuring out where to go from here.
Why did this happen? China found out that the problems of accepting these second hand materials began to outweigh the benefits, so it suspended imports of US. recyclables. A huge reason has to do with a reaction to social media exposing environmental problems in China which drew the attention of decision makers. The public began to loathe the idea of “foreign garbage” coming into China especially as they were responding to the new middle class concerns of moving away from extraction and industrial toward higher end jobs.
Much of the problem began with the US attitude toward recycling. The baled goods were contaminated with non recyclable items, garbage and trash–things like diapers, dead animals, wet unusable paper, rubber hoses, rotting food and other nasty things. Separating the useable from the bad is time consuming and dangerous. This job fell to rural Chinese family run businesses to receive and pick through, but what to do with all the no good stuff? Leftover dreck would be dumped into riverbeds to make their way to the ocean. Plus, China was finding that the whole processing of recyclables was polluting water and air.
So China launched some initiatives: Green Fence and National Sword. The former began to intensively inspect all incoming scrap materials to enforce the new regulations, checking licenses for materials handling and shuttering some of the non compliant mills The later addressed corruption and smuggling of overseas waste brought in by the unscrupulous hoping to make money. Supervision of polluting industries is much stricter than before.
Previously China was accepting a certain percentage of impurities but they have tightened this percentage down to .5% which stricter standards Americans say they cannot accommodate given our recycling systems. There is an expectation that China will stop accepting recycled goods by 2020 in favor of using virgin materials.
The results are that there has been a serious slowdown in getting recycled goods into China due to inspections of all containers, many of which would not be accepted as clean enough. Therefore no profit is going to be made and back home collections of recycled goods are piling up without an adequate market abroad. Therefore, we are going to be seeing fees raised and waivers sought to dump items that used to be recycled in our landfills as there is not enough domestic demand.
