China is Australia's biggest market for recycling waste but since January it has restricted imports of Australian plastic, textiles and mixed paper because of its high contamination rate.
China's imports of waste – including recyclables – has been in decline over the last year. Imports of scrap plastic have almost totally stopped due to the trade war. China said that most of the plastic was garbage, and too dirty to recycle.
In January 2018, China's ban on the importation of 24 types of recyclable materials sent Australia's waste management industry, which indirectly employs around 50,000 people, into a tailspin.
Australia had exported about 4.5m tonnes of waste to Asia each year, mostly to Vietnam, Indonesia and China. As waste companies struggled to find new buyers, the Victorian operator SKM went into administration and warned up to 180,000 tonnes of recyclable material would go to landfill.
The 24-item list of materials initially prohibited from entering China included eight types of post-consumer plastic scrap, one type of unsorted paper, a dozen types of used textiles, and four metal slags containing vanadium. The import ban came into effect on January 1, 2018.
The ban is part of its efforts to clean its environment and improve quality of life. Now other countries in Asia are increasing their plastic waste imports, raising environmental concerns about their ability to handle such large volumes of recyclables.
The ban is part of a broader Chinese customs program called “Operation Green Fence,” which began in 2013 and aims to reduce waste importation and contamination of recyclable materials. The latest phase of this operation is called “National Sword” which increases enforcement and bans the import of many materials.
The shutdown of recycling facilities, especially in Victoria, has led to a small number of councils having to send some recyclables to landfill until new markets are found. However, the vast majority of recycling collected by Australian councils is still getting recycled.
Just 16 per cent of the country's plastic packaging was recycled or composted in 2019-20, down from 18 per cent in 2018-19. Flatlining recycling rates since 2017 and reports of warehouse stockpiles of plastic reveal serious issues with Australia's recycling system.
This statistic shows the total volume of exported waste for recycling from Australia to China from financial year 2009 to 2018. In financial year 2018, approximately 748 thousand metric tons of waste were exported from Australia to China for recycling.
China was a significant consumer of Australian coal until a non-official ban was imposed due to heightened political tensions between the two countries.
In 2018, China's “National Sword” policy halted the import of plastics and other materials destined for its recycling processors. For decades, these facilities had dealt with almost half of the waste that the rest of the world considered to be “recyclable.”
Despite China's discriminatory tariffs on wine and barley and its informal and WTO-illegal bans on coal, beef, lobster, cotton, wood, nickel and copper concentrates, its total purchases from Australia still rose by 16.6% over the three years from 2019, before the campaign started, and 2022.
Alternatively, items can be offered for re-use. Broken pieces of china and ceramics can be used as crocks to place in the bottom of plant pots. Please note: Ceramics and china cannot be recycled and should be placed in your rubbish bin.
The top reason Americans say they don't recycle regularly is a lack of convenient access. Another problem, which is one that occurs in nearly all of the countries surveyed, is consumers don't fully understand what can actually be recycled.
However, some organizations and communities see it as a new opportunity to build recycling infrastructure and to create less waste. Some Chinese companies are investing in recycling facilities in the U.S. to be able to maintain China's manufacturing output.
Food often contaminates the materials, making reprocessing harder and reducing the materials value. Plus, in Australia, at least, there simply hasn't been enough industrial demand for the waste plastic to keep up with what's being collected. Recycling has had long-standing problems in Australia.
Local governments play an important role in providing household waste collection and recycling services, managing and operating landfill sites, delivering education and awareness programs, and providing and maintaining litter infrastructure. Managing waste is not just the responsibility of governments.
According to the Australian National Waste Report 2022 (The Department of Climate Change, 2022), around 4.5 Mt/yr of recyclable waste has been exported for recycling since 2011. Some types of waste are exported in high proportions.
Launched in 2011, the company was declared insolvent after it failed to pay storage fees on the thousands of tonnes of plastic, despite earning $20 million from the Coles and Woolworths program that had run for the previous decade.
The report also stated that Australians generated nearly 3% more waste than in 2018-19, while the country's recycling rate remained stable at 60%.
The Australian Government's Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020 became law in December 2020 and puts in place Australia's world-leading waste export ban. The new legislation bans the export of unsorted mixed plastics from 1 July 2021 and unprocessed single polymer or resin plastics from 1 July 2022.
The country now has the world's largest plastic recycling capacity. Its huge plastic recycling industry, which employs around 900,000 people, recycled 31 percent of plastic waste generated in the country in 2021, the report said. China's rate of plastic recycling was about 1.7 times the global average last year.
Finally, in 2018, China introduced a 0.5% contamination limit, along with a ban on many recyclables, including plastics. Before these restrictions, the U.S. shipped most of its plastic scrap overseas, particularly to China.
In April 2021, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress adopted the Anti-food Waste Law, which bans excessive leftovers in restaurants. We ask why the Chinese government chose a law with sanctions as its policy response, why the law has been adopted now, and why the law targets the catering industry.