Global Recycling Industry In Crisis As China Bans Waste Imports

The world’s most populous country stopped absorbing rubbish from developed economies this year, disrupting the $200bn global recycling industry. Countries like the US and Germany are scrambling for solutions as scrap piles up.

- Mariam Isa

For more than two decades developed countries have been touting the progress they have made in recycling waste through developing new technologies, building plants to make recycled products, and introducing legislation to make consumers sort and dispose of their rubbish properly.

The Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) based in Belgium boasts that recycled materials now supply 40% of global raw material needs and that the industry has an annual turnover of more than $200bn, similar in value to the economies of countries like Portugal, Columbia and Malaysia.

The assumption most frequently made is that most of the recycling takes place in Europe and North America, where environmentalists are the most vocal, the public most aware and governments the most active in supporting green technology and sustainable solutions.

In fact, industrial giants like the US, Japan, Europe and the UK have been literally dumping their rubbish in China, shipping scrap earmarked for recycling at low cost to the Asian country, which in 2016 processed at least half of the world’s exports of waste plastic, paper and metals.

This amounted to 45m tonnes, or about $18bn worth of imported scrap.