A green opportunity

China's multi-billion-dollar recycling industry was one of the first casualties of the global recession.

The drop in the price of recycled materials was so sharp that boatloads of scrap shipped from Europe and the US were virtually worthless by the time they reached China. Many Chinese recyclers, who would have preferred to send the scrap back, honored their contracts and lost their shirts.

In towns like Guiyu, made famous by "60 Minutes", and Houbajia, outside Beijing, migrant workers who made small fortunes ripping apart computers and other e-waste were suddenly out of business.

This is not entirely bad news.

The recycling business followed a classic, boom-and-bust trajectory. Each year, China produced 5 million tons of iron and steel, 200,000 tons of non-ferrous metals, 14 million tons of waste paper, and voluminous amounts of glass and plastic available for recycling. Recycled materials helped to augment China's limited resources, but there were not enough materials domestically.

As a result, more than 70 percent of the materials came from abroad, often borne by ships that delivered China's exports and would otherwise have returned empty.

By 2003, China was the world's largest importer of recyclable materials. Last year alone, China imported 11.6 million tons of scrap paper and cardboard from the US, up from 2.1 million tons in 2000.

The human cost was high. Unskilled workers heated circuit boards over coal fires to extract the minerals, or dipped silicon chips in acid baths to remove the protective coating.

Farmers in cities like Dongyang claimed that pollution was causing increased rates of cancer, miscarriages, and deformed births.

And the damage to the environment has been incalculable. Mountains of smoldering e-waste surround the primitive recycling sites, polluting the air and leaching toxic elements into the groundwater.

The sudden drop in the price of recycled materials has altered the economics of waste disposal, critically and perhaps permanently. Waste producers - from factories to stores to individual consumers - may soon have to pay to dispose of materials they once sold to recyclers.

Still, waste must be disposed of, and disposed of responsibly. Painful though it may be, the economic slowdown presents an opportunity for China to reform the way recycling and waste disposal are managed.

On March 4, the government unveiled new rules for the management of e-waste, to go into effect in January 2011. The Management Regulation on the Recycling and Treatment of Disposed Appliances and Electronics Products requires manufacturers, consignees of imported e-waste, and their agents to contribute to a special fund to subsidize the cost of dealing with it. This is a step in the right direction.

In many cases, laws encouraging recycling are already in place, but there is no system for sorting the waste. Sorting is left to individual trash collectors, who pick the waste they think they can recycle directly from trash cans.

Entrepreneurs like Yang Jun of the Fuyang Fulun Paper Mill are already finding ways to recycle waste that previously went to the landfill.

Such enterprise should be encouraged, but rather than rely on a piecemeal approach, a more comprehensive system is needed to manage recycling at every level, from household to factory.

The boom in recycling may be over. But if we seize this opportunity - especially with the glimmer of a recovery - the bust may lead to a recycling industry that is both clean and green.

(China Daily 03/30/2009 page2)