China may not have the greenest of environmental records, but it has kept millions of tons of waste out of landfills by importing the world’s trash and putting it to good use.
But starting next year, nations will have to find a new place to send their scrap paper, plastic, steel slag and other solid waste, according to a Reuters report.
In a World Trade Organization filing, China said the costs of being the world’s scrapyard were starting to outweigh the benefits, as useful raw materials coming into the country were sullied by pollutants, Reuters reported.
The ban, set to go into effect by the of the year, might be a good thing for Chinese ecology, but the decision could hit Georgia’s overall exports to China.
“Waste and scrap,” a category that mainly consists of waste paper products sent to China for reuse, was Georgia’s No. 5 export to China in 2016 at $145 million, just behind agricultural products (bolstered by a bumper peanut crop to $147.9 million this year). Georgia’s top three earners in China are paper, transportation equipment and chemicals.
Already, China’s overall imports of scrap had more than halved from $416 million in 2011, presumably as China’s domestic recycling sector grew and its overall growth rate slowed.
Still, any significant reduction could hit Georgia’s ports and the related logistics sector, which employ thousands of workers, as they handle fewer trash-laden containers. The scrap trade itself is a source of jobs as well, with export activities supporting 40,000 of them.
Georgia’s overall exports to China have declined in each of the past two years after a decade of meteoric growth.
