China's foreign waste ban is forcing Australia to rethink recycling

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As China has announced that it will ban foreign waste imports next year, Australian recycling companies say they are already feeling the pressure.

China is the world’s largest importer of waste materials, but it plans to stop the practice because of increasing health and environmental concerns, prompting Australia to find a home for the tons of waste it was used to exporting overseas.

Foreign waste import ban. /CGTN Photo

“To be frank, prices have absolutely collapsed,” said Garth Lamb, the business development manager at Re.Group, which processes recycled materials.

“The biggest buyer of these materials has exited the market. The market is awash with materials so even if you are not exporting directly to China, everyone is impacted by this because there is a lot of material that used to go to China that no longer has a home.”

Garth Lamb/CGTN Photo

A ‘wake-up call’ for Australia

“I think this is a real wake-up call for Australia,” said Mehreen Faruqi, a New South Wales Greens Member of Parliament. “We can’t keep producing waste and export our responsibility to another country to deal with it.”

Despite this perceived setback, industry experts say there are benefits for Australia to process all of the waste materials it generates each year.

“I’ve seen lots of data around that if you recycle and do manufacturing jobs you get 4 times the benefits as opposed to landfilling or trading,” said Waste Management Association of Australia CEO Gayle Sloan.

Sand made from recycled glass/CGTN Photo

Australia currently recycles more glass than it manufactures. Re.Group has come up with a solution to address that imbalance, partly by turning recycled glass into sand for industrial use, instead of mining sand from beaches and riverbeds. Lamb says governments need to do more to encourage the use of recycled materials, which will help to encourage more waste manufacturing in Australia.

Turning recycled glass into roads/CGTN Photo

“We have these road projects that are being developed by state governments and we could get a lot of this glass back into those road projects,” he said.‍