Recycling Statistics Come to a Halt Following China Fallout

Going back to 1960, The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) collected data on recycling rates through their Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: Facts and Figures report. But that data appears to have come to an abrupt halt in 2018 with no updates since.

The EPA data leans on state data for many of their numbers, and numerous states like Washington, Oregon, and Connecticut among others have also stopped publishing their annual solid waste management plans, which include estimates for recycling tonnage by material. For others like California, they published a recent annual disposal report but without any of the usual details about recycling—just solid waste disposal.

The year 2018 also happens to be the same year that China stopped accepting exports of 24 types of recyclable material. The ban was announced in August of 2017 and went into effect the next year. China then added two more restrictions on imported recycling content mid-2018 to effective ban all imports of scrap material.

From what data is there for 2018, it is already visible that China’s ban led to a sizable decline in recycling. Based on Census trade data, U.S. exports of plastic waste would decline 63 percent from 2017 to 2022.

But it wasn’t just China. Plastic scrap exports to many other Asian countries like India, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and Vietnam as well as some non-Asian but far away destinations like Australia and Nigeria also came to an abrupt halt. Exports to Mexico, Canada, and some parts of Europe increased.

It was largely plastic waste that was affected. Exports of paper waste haven’t changed much considering that exports to China—the largest importer of U.S. waste in 2017—fell to zero.

And while China’s exodus from being the world’s plastic garbage importer happened quickly in 2017 to 2018, the process started back in 2012 to 2014. That’s when China began enforcing Operation Green Fence, limiting imports of recyclable material based on quality. The reasons for the plastic waste ban have varied from the recyclables being contaminated with food or other waste products via single-stream recycling, some of it was being illegally imported, and some that had no value was being illegally dumped in random locations like empty farms.

While China was the de facto source for recyclable content for years, there was no guarantee that any of it was actually being recycled. Tons of it was simply being sold internationally and shipped to uninhabited islands like the Heard and McDonald Islands North of Antartica.