One Country's Trash is Another One's Treasure? How China and the Majority of Asia No Longer Needs Our Trash To Thrive

For many years China and many other East Asian countries, such as Indonesia, have served as the world's resident recycling facility. The relationship between East Asia and the industrialized world had been quite harmonious. Recyclables would arrive in processing facilities throughout China where thrown out plastics, paper, and the like would be synthesized into usable material that would then be sold back over to the rest of the world. To emphasize the sheer scale of this relationship, China received about 70% of the world's plastic waste, totaling to seven million tons per year. The U.S alone contributed to over 700,000 tons per year. 


The origins of such an operation can be traced back over twenty years ago. In 1995 Zhang Yin established a paper recycling company, named Nine Dragons, and eventually became the first female Chinese billionaire due to the untapped potential of this apparently lucrative industry. Eventually, when word that China is actually looking for more recyclables to process, many recycling plants could not resist the opportunity. Using empty Chinese shipping containers that would normally head back empty served as the perfect vehicle to begin this mutually beneficial relationship. 

What changed Chinese perception of the relationship began to crop up five years ago. Over time, it became less profitable to process other country's trash due to the increasing difficulty in processing contaminated recyclables that require much more labor than is worth the effort. In 2017, China began cutting back on imports. By January of last year, China had nearly shut down all trash imports. They now only receive less than 1% of the world's trash. 


The impact of China's proclamation against trash has had profound affects throughout the U.S. Warehouses and landfills are filling up with unrecoverable plastic waste. The solution: find other places to dump our trash, right? Shipments to Thailand skyrocketed to 7,000% and several hundred percent in Malaysia. Vietnam and Indonesia were also facing increasing volumes of American and global garbage. However, within the last year and a half, nearly all these countries have had to cut back significantly on trash imports.

The overwhelming effect of this development is a question many have been asking for decades at this point: How do we deal with the world's garbage? The irony of this situation is that recycling, something that is often encouraged from the moment we enter elementary school, is not the solution anymore. What the coming decades will bring in regards to dealing with trash is hard to predict, but if practices and habits fail to change and adapt the results could be even more catastrophic than they are now.

The information gathered here come from this NPR Article