Now China refuses to be dumping ground for the world’s waste, where on Earth will it all go?

In recent decades, China has been the world’s largest importer of waste, accepting some 279 million metric tonnes of America’s scrap alone over a quarter of a century, including paper and plastic for recycling, as well as mountains from Japan, countries in the European Union and from the developing world.

According to Greenpeace, China had become the dumping ground for more than half of the planet’s scrap, at its peak importing almost 9 million tonnes of plastic trash annually. A paper, published last month in the journal Science Advances, says that China imported 106 million tonnes of plastic waste for recycling since 1992.

This year, however, China said, “No more!” So where should or could the planet’s recyclable junk now go? Britain has looked to Southeast Asian nations, offloading more waste on Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam in the first half of 2018 – but such countries have nowhere near the capacity for scrap as China.

Bloomberg Opinion columnists Faye Flam and Adam Minter met online recently to discuss the global recycling crisis – and to ask what, if anything, we can do about it.

Minter, an American, has covered the global recycling industry for more than a decade. As well as having produced a series of groundbreaking investigative pieces on China’s recycling industries, he is author of the book Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade (2013).

Also from the US, science journalist Flam has written for The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Psychology Today, Science and other publications. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology.