Environmental security

Trash wars: US drowning in its own waste, blaming China for rejecting ‘recycled commodities’

Hundreds of tons of waste that Americans believed they were recycling is now piling up in processing plants or being dumped into landfills, as China’s decision to stop buying garbage for environmental reasons begins to bite.

Beijing’s 2017 decision to ban imports of 24 varieties of trash brought to light the real destination of most Western recyclables: They were shipped to Chinese factories, where they would be cleaned up and repurposed into raw materials. China bought half of all US scrap last year, and has recycled 72 percent of all the world’s plastic since 1992, according to a study in the journal Science Advances.

All of that abruptly came to a halt when China decided to stop almost all imports of paper and plastic waste, and have set a .5 percent ceiling on contaminants in cardboard and metal waste, which most US trash processing plants have been unable to meet.