What was given is over. With the arrival of the new year in China, the country that for decades was the world’s largest recipient of garbage for processing will slam the final door on any type of waste from abroad. In this way, Beijing culminates a process started in phases three years ago with which it seeks to protect its environment and public health, and to devote its resources to managing the growing volume of waste generated by its own population.
The story comes from afar. Back in the eighties, when Deng Xiaoping encouraged the nation to undertake and open up abroad, China began importing solid waste for recycling to meet part of the demand of its incipient industrial and manufacturing sector. It is estimated that the plants in the Asian country received up to 95% of the used plastic from the European Union or 70% of that generated in the United States, and that the country cleaned, shredded and transformed almost half of the products in its factories recycled from all over the world.
The new Chinese regulations will put more pressure on other Asian countries to be the recyclers
But over the years, this process has taken a heavy toll on the environment and the health of its population. A large part of the materials sent from developed countries were too damaged, dirty or mixed with other waste not suitable for recycling, so they ended up incinerated or thrown uncontrollably in landfills. Nor did it help that a large part of the companies dedicated to these tasks were small businesses in which the process was carried out manually and without paying great attention to environmental regulations, which degenerated into illegal dumping, contamination of soils and aquifers or high carbon emission levels.
The town of Guiyu, in the southern province of Canton, was the epitome of all the ills of the industry. Known in its day as the world capital of the recycling of electronic waste, its streets were sighted mountains of monitors, modems and keyboards with worn letters, decomposing batteries next to ditches or kilometers of cables that gave off a dense black smoke to the be burned to extract copper from them. According to the Chinese authorities themselves, up to 60% of inspected workshops violated government regulations in 2017, and the levels of lead, chromium or heavy metals present in the locality were hundreds of times higher than those in other Chinese cities.
Tired of being the world’s landfill, Beijing began limiting the import of garbage in 2017
Tired of being the world’s landfill, Beijing began to block the importation of garbage in 2017. Since then, the arrival of 24 types of waste for recycling was prohibited, including plastics, a list that has grown to reach to 56 articles. Even so, there was the possibility of requesting an exception
for the entry of prohibited material, something that will finally end at the beginning of 2021: only recycled materials already processed abroad will be allowed to enter the country (for example, paper pulp will enter, but not used paper).
For Mao Da, director of the Shenzhen Zero Waste NGO, the current policies adopted by China should serve as an example so that developing countries do not become the garbage dumps of the first world. “Only when they realize the problems that this generates and adopt national legislation and effective controls will they be able to break the cycle and stop this unfair trade,” he told SCMP. Even so, as it happened in 2017, everything indicates that the entry into force of the ban will put greater pressure on many of its Asian neighbors – Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines – to take care of the waste that China no longer has. wants.
On its way to a greener economy, Beijing will now be able to focus on managing its citizens’ garbage, some 215 million tonnes a year that often end up in incineration or landfills. Little by little, the country has made progress in various programs that aim to increase the recycling of solid products while reducing the rest of waste. Cities such as Shanghai or Beijing have been pioneers in making recycling mandatory in each neighborhood, and with the new year non-biodegradable plastic bags will also be banned in large cities.
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