China no longer willing to be a dumping ground for US waste

There have been many stories in US news media lately about how China's ban on foreign waste has caused recycling chaos in their country.

A National Public Radio story last week described the impact on Portland, Oregon, quoting a spokesman for local Rogue Waste as saying that the company had no choice but to take all of its recyclable material to the local landfill.

Few Americans know that one of the largest US exports to China is recyclable solid waste, as Yukon Huang, author of the book Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom is Wrong, likes to remind people. He noted that many US Commerce Department officials had no idea that was the case.