Before China’s restrictions, it processed half of the world’s recycling. All that junk was usually mixed together and dirty. It needed to be separated and cleaned before it could be recycled. This took so much labor and time that recycling other countries’ trash became unprofitable. “It got to the point where some of it was so dirty, China had to stop the importation of the material,” says Ernie Simpson, a materials scientist at TerraCycle, a recycling company in New Jersey.
Without China to buy their trash, hundreds of U.S. cities and towns have found that recycling is simply too expensive. They’ve resorted to dumping recyclables into landfills or burning them in incinerators, explains Simpson. But there’s hope that China’s policy change could prompt the U.S. to update its recycling infrastructure. Simpson says people can keep trash out of the environment by reusing items and buying fewer things to create less waste in the first place.