China’s ban on low-grade plastic imports leaves big questions over waste
03/01/2018
The country positioned itself as the top recycler of plastic over the past 30 years, importing millions of tonnes of used material for processing per year, but has said it will no longer deal with “foreign garbage” in a bid to reduce pollution.
The ban includes PET, a material found in plastic bottles and one which is widely used by the sportswear industry in its 'recycled' clothing and footwear ranges. The impact this will have on those producing textiles from the material is unclear.
Plastic China, an award-winning documentary released in 2016, highlighted the health and environmental problems associated with the plastic rubbish for towns in Northern China, where toddlers play amongst polluted material and there are reportedly high levels of some diseases.
In the UK, which sends between a third and two thirds of its plastic waste to China (depending on estimates), the waste industry has warned of backlogs and chaos, and said the plastic could be burnt or go to landfill as a near-term solution. British companies have shipped more than 2.7 million tonnes of plastic scrap to mainland China and Hong Kong since 2012, according to Greenpeace.
“We have relied on exporting plastic recycling to China for 20 years and now people do not know what is going to happen,” Simon Ellin, chief executive of the UK Recycling Association, told UK-based newspaper The Guardian.
In the short term, other destinations such as Vietnam and India might be able to take more waste but these will “soon be saturated”.
Commentators in the US have warned that there is hardly any capacity for recycling plastic there and suggested people might recycle less as a result of China’s ban.
Share this story:
