Giving Compass' Take:

• Catherine Early shares how Europe, Australia, and the United States have struggled to adapt to China's waste import ban. 

• What role can funders play in developing and implementing scalable, sustainable solutions for waste? 

• Learn about an effort to measure plastic waste in order to manage it. 

China’s move to severely limit imports of waste sent shock waves around the globe, with industry bodies calling it “devastating” and “catastrophic”.

Initial attempts by some developing countries to offshore their waste to other markets in Southeast Asia have largely failed, as nations have followed China’s lead and implemented their own bans.

Australia
In 2016, Australia processed just 12 percent of its recycled waste domestically and sent 1.25 million tonnes of waste to China. It has struggled to cope with the import restrictions.

The government drew up a national waste policy, which included a target to recover 80 percent of all waste materials. However, industry body the Waste Management Association of Australia (WMAA) warned that implementing the policy would need AUS$150 million (US$100 million) of investment from state and federal governments.

At the end of last year, federal, state and territory environment ministers agreed to ban the export of plastic, paper, glass and tires from July 2020, with mixed plastic following suit from July 2021. Some new domestic reprocessing infrastructure is on the cards.

Europe
The debate about the need to create demand for recycled material is also live in the European Union. Prior to China’s import restrictions, the bloc was already considering new policies and regulations to reduce single-use plastics and enable a more circular economy – where products are designed to be kept in use as long as possible, then remanufactured into new products.

The single-use plastics directive, agreed in May 2019, for the first time introduced targets, not just for recycling plastic, but also for using recycled material: plastic bottles will have to contain at least 25 percent of recycled content by 2025, and 30 percent by 2030.

United States
In the US, the response to China’s ban has been mixed. A report by the independent public interest organization the US PIRG Education Fund states that the nation’s recycling system is “faltering”, with local governments ending kerbside collections of recyclable materials country-wide, and others reducing the list of materials they accept. Landfilling or incineration of recyclable materials was “increasingly our new normal”, it states.

Read the full article about adapting to China’s waste import ban by Catherine Early at Eco-Business.