24 reasons why China’s ban on foreign trash is a wake-up call for global waste exporters

Tom Baxter and Liu Hua say China’s refusal to remain the dumping ground for foreign garbage highlights the need for countries to start facing up to their plastics addiction, and for makers of plastics and disposable goods to take responsibility for the environmental damage inflicted

Reading Time:4 minutes

China’s ban on 24 types of “foreign trash” is a globally disruptive event that will leave governments little alternative but to face up to the reality of their waste problems. Illustration: Timothy McEvenue

Published: 11:32am, 31 Dec 2017Updated: 5:43pm, 31 Dec 2017

On New Year’s Day 2018, a new Chinese regulation banning the import of 24 different types of waste will come into force, sending shock waves through the global, multibillion-dollar waste disposal and recycling industry.

Though the regulation is primarily designed to address major environmental and health issues in China, it will also be a genuine global disrupter. It has the potential to propel many waste-exporting countries – who for far too long have taken an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude to waste disposal – to adopt far more progressive disposal and recycling systems.

Since the 1980s, China has become the world’s largest importer of waste, or “foreign trash”, as it is commonly called in Chinese. By 2012, up to 56 per cent of global exported plastic waste ended up in China.

At the time, this was a valuable source of material for China’s booming manufacturing sector, but it was a double-edged sword. Given the lack of effective oversight and monitoring, it was also the source of enormous environmental and health problems. Guiyu in Guangdong province, a hub for the recycling of imported electronics waste, came into the spotlight in 2003 when an investigation uncovered that up to 80 per cent of children in the town had excess levels of lead in their bloodstream.

Watch: Guiyu, once the world’s e-waste capital

The award-winning documentary, Plastic China, released last year, showed in painful detail that the serious health and environmental consequences of the foreign waste trade have been far from just limited to scandals like Guiyu.