China's waste import ban makes recycling costly for NZ businesses

Thursday, 2 November 2017

China halted 24 types of paper, plastic and textiles from entering its country in July, flooding Asia's recycling plants and depreciating the value of some paper and plastics.

Stuff continues its series on the UN-sanctioned steps businesses are taking to meet their sustainable development goals and to reduce negative impacts on society.

The number of businesses recycling their rubbish has increased significantly in recent years, but they may soon be forced to pay a lot more for the privelege.

Half of New Zealand's milk bottle plastic is sent to multiple Asian countries to be recycled into non-food grade plastic products.

John Gibson, chief executive of recyclable collecting company Reclaim, said the volume of recycling had increased here although there was still not enough rubbish to justify opening specialised recycling mills in New Zealand.

Recycling was an 'economies of scale' business.

Reclaim chief executive John Gibson says cardboard is easily recycled.

'You have to have enough of the material to justify a facility in New Zealand.

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Gibson says glass is easy to separate and recycle because some New Zealand facilities have optical machines that separate bottles into green, brown and clear colour groups.

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'We are doing as well as we can do.'

Reclaim collects paper, cardboard, glass, plastic and food waste from businesses and sends it to recycling plants.

Gibson said his company tried to 'find a home for everything,' although that home was not always in New Zealand.

He said New Zealand's recycling plants were mostly for glass and cardboard because they were easy materials to sort and breakdown.

Paper and plastic were made up of numerous different grades, making them harder to separate so they retained their value, he said.

So most of that rubbish was sent to China and Asia to be broken down at specialised facilities.

Countries competed to buy New Zealand's waste, often paying up to $6000 a tonne, Smart Environmental upper South Island area manager Yuri Schokking said last year.

Schokking said all of the South Island's paper and card recycling was sold overseas because the North Island plants only had enough capacity to process its own.

She said about half of New Zealand's milk bottle plastic was sent to several Asian countries and turned into non-food grade products such as pens, toys and consumer packaging.

But Gibson said a recent crackdown on waste imports into China had changed the business case for the recycling industry.

Companies that wanted to recycle now had to pay for it.

He said the Chinese Government had not renewed its recycling company import licenses, in a move dubbed the 'National Sword'.

The 'big clamp down' happened because the world was sending non-recyclable waste to China, Gibson said.

'China was effectively being used as a dumping ground.'

A document was sent to the World Trade Organisation by the Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People's Republic of China in July this year, outlining a ban on 24 types of waste entering its country, including some types of plastic, paper and textiles.

It said it would make those materials 'forbidden to import into China by the end of 2017'.

The document said the ban was necessary to protect its population's health and safety because dirty and hazardous waste was often mixed in with the now banned materials.

Gibson said China was the major destination for plastic and paper recycling facilities, so its ban diverted all waste to processing plants in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.

He said Asia's recycling facilities became flooded, causing up to a 75 per cent drop in the price of some plastic grades found in shampoo bottles and sushi takeaway trays.

'A whole lot of processing capability is not available anymore.

'If they [companies] are going to want to recycle their products for certain types of materials, it is going to cost.'