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BEIJING: China will ban all waste imports from January 1, 2021, state media reported on Friday, marking the culmination of a three-year phase-out of overseas garbage acceptance.
Since the 1980s the country has imported solid waste, which local companies cleaned, shredded and transformed into raw material for industrialists.
For years it has been the world’s largest importer of garbage, often leading to pollution when materials cannot be recycled or disposed of properly.
Hoping to cease to be the world’s dumpster, the government began closing China’s doors to foreign waste in January 2018, prompting a backlog of garbage in exporting countries.
Since then, it has gradually banned imports of different types of plastics, auto parts, paper, textiles, and scrap steel or wood.
And from January 1, the ban will cover all kinds of waste, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Xinhua, citing a notice from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs, said the dumping, stacking and disposal of waste products from abroad would also be prohibited from the first day of next year.
The agency said China’s solid waste imports stood at 13.48 million tonnes last year, up from 22.63 million tonnes in 2018, and that figure for the first 10 months of this year fell by 42.7 percent year-on-year.
