China Trash Ban Creates Crisis for US Recyclers

[TomSea]

This article reads we send $6 billion dollars of waste over there, they recycle it and then, it's sent back.

China Trash Ban Creates Crisis for US Recyclers

LOS ANGELES —

Just less than $6 billion worth of U.S. waste was sent to China last year to be converted into packaging and products, and then shipped back to the United States and other markets. Scrap recyclers had taken advantage of low shipping costs for empty containers returning to China after the ships had unloaded their goods on the U.S. West Coast.

Today, that flow of trash is just a trickle, the result of a Chinese ban that went into effect Jan. 1 on many types of foreign garbage, from mixed papers to waste textiles.

The result of the ban is seen at a recycling facility in Anaheim, California, owned by Republic Services, a national company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. The parking lot of the materials recovery facility (MRF) is brimming with 2,400 bales of mixed paper that once would have been bound for China.


Read more at: https://www.voanews.com/a/china-trash-ban-creates-crisis-for-recyclers/4429960.html

[Suppressed]

It's not actually a ban on all scrap, just some.  And they've made the standards stricter -- much, much less contamination is allowed  (from 1.5% down to 0.5%).  You know, when someone throws something into the recycle that's not supposed to be there.

It's costing us a lot.  The value of our waste has plummeted.  What we used to get paid for, we now have to pay to dispose of.  Literally billions of dollars lost.

This is basically China throwing tariffs back at us.  We hit them with aluminum tariffs, so they hit back with rubber ones, and this ban, etc.

Everyone loses.

[driftdiver]

Decades of weakness and corruption has a cost.  Fixing it wont be easy

[Suppressed]

Decades of weakness and corruption has a cost.  Fixing it wont be easy

Huh?

You really don't understand how trade works, do you? Both sides benefit, else the deal isn't made.

Where's Trump out crowing how he's lost us billions, billions, we made by selling them our waste?  These are American companies hurt by this.