China and Indonesia stops importing plastic waste
In January 2018, China had instated a ‘National Sword’ policy which had the specific purpose to ban the import of most plastics and other unwanted materials. The motive behind this decision was to reduce the amount of soiled and contaminated materials which overwhelmed China’s processing facilities and introduced another environmental problem.
This decision started during July 2017 when Beijing had announced that they were going to reduce the amount of mixed plastic imports and paper waste in order to protect their citizen’s health from the side effects of plastic pollution. China had been taking 56% of the worlds mixed plastic waste with the United States contributing 60% of plastic waste and 70% from Europe.
Following China’s National Sword policy, their plastic imports was reduced by 99% which had then led to a global shift in how these materials will be processed. This also meant that more plastics are ending up in landfills and incinerators globally. Other countries such as Thailand and Malaysia had followed this ban and decided to place new restrictions on waste imports.
The Indonesian government had banned the importation of mixed plastic waste in order to “minimise the possibility of environmental and ecosystem degradation caused by waste.” Western countries were the ones that had been impacted the most due to this recent change.
However, it was Australia’s recycling industry that has been facing a lot of difficulty after this policy and is struggling to handle 1.3 million worth of stock which was originally shipped to China. Australia’s state and territory government had proposed a funding plan which allows them to place more emphasis on recycling. This new policy had an estimated price of $150 million needed from both the State and Federal governments with the specific purpose to process and re-use more recycling materials domestically instead of shipping them overseas (as they previously did).
References:
https://www.dw.com/en/after-chinas-import-ban-where-to-with-the-worlds-waste/a-48213871
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20741-9
https://resource.co/article/china-ban-all-imports-solid-waste-2021
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