For more than 30 years, imports of recycled goods have fueled China’s manufacturing boom. On Wednesday, the government announced that it’d had enough. By the end of the year, it told the World Trade Organization, it would stop accepting most recycled plastics, paper, textiles and other products from overseas. The decision, it said, was part of a campaign against “foreign garbage” that harms public health and the environment.

It’s a crowd-pleasing stand. But far from solving China’s environmental problems, this crackdown will actually worsen them -- and do so at the expense of jobs and economic growth around the world.

The rhetoric itself is nothing new. China’s government has long played up stories about foreign waste, partly to deflect attention from unmanageable garbage problems at home. But it has also encouraged the import of scrap recyclables since the 1980s. Importing scrap plastics and paper is cheaper, quicker and easier than drilling oil wells and cutting down trees. It’s also cleaner: Recycling 1 metric ton of paper saves enough energy to power the average American home for over six months, while using recycled material to produce plastic reduces the energy required by as much as 87 percent.

That’s why some 160 million metric tons of recyclables worth $87 billion were traded globally in 2015. Hay-bale-sized bundles of plastics recovered from US recycling bins might look like “foreign garbage” to the untrained eye. But for savvy importers, they’re as good as barrels of oil.

Nowhere is that more appreciated than in China, for two decades the world’s biggest importer of recycled material. China’s recycling industry grew in parallel with its manufacturing boom. By the mid-2000s, scrap paper was among the leading US exports to China by volume. Much of that paper went round trip -- it started as packaging for goods made in China, then was shipped to the US, discarded into bins, and exported back to China for recycling. By some estimates, China’s paper recycling rate could be as high as 70 percent if all those returned exports are added in. Foreign garbage is really just China’s recycling coming home.

That’s a good thing for everyone involved. Americans are good recyclers, but they’re even better consumers, and on average roughly one-third of the stuff that’s tossed into US recycling bins can’t be made into new products domestically, because there’s too much of it. Before China’s market opened, that meant that lots of otherwise recyclable waste had nowhere to go. Since China’s opening, public and private recycling operations have flourished across the US, helping keep waste out of landfills and putting lots of people to work. According to one industry study, scrap exports support more than 40,000 American jobs. In China, the number is multiples larger.

The industry isn’t perfect, of course. I’ve seen recycled plastics imported from the US covered in rotten food that poses a health risk to the folks who process it, and bales of paper stuffed with cinder blocks to make them heavier and thus more valuable. Unscrupulous traders sometimes label shipments of hazardous medical waste as recycling to save on disposal costs. China’s many small-scale recyclers are known to flout regulations. But the Chinese government has rightly cracked down on this sort of thing in recent years, and helped clean up the worst abuses. The quality of the recycling China imports today is better than ever.

If the goal is to improve the environment and public health, then, the ban on foreign garbage is counterproductive. For all the problems with imported recyclables, those generated in China are far dirtier -- which is why Chinese recyclers want to continue importing foreign garbage. Cut off the imports and many of them will shut down, while much of the over 3 million kilograms of plastic and more than 13 million kilograms of paper that China imports annually will end up in dumps and incinerators in other countries. And that would really be a waste.

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By Adam Minter
Adam Minter is a Bloomberg View columnist. -- Ed.

(Bloomberg)