APD Review | Farewell to foreign garbage

By APD Writer Wang Baocai

As China is steeping up the fight against pollution and environmental degradation, the country has stopped accepting shipments of rubbish such as waste plastic and paper as part of a campaign against “foreign garbage.”

However, the reasonable ban on garbage imports, which is designed to protect the environment and improve public health, attracted censure in parts of the West, especially the United States.

In March, the United States asked China not to implement a ban on imports of scrap materials. The European Union’s representatives at the meeting said China’s policy would force scrap to be rerouted to third countries.

Those western countries, which are used to exhaust resources around the globe to develop their economies but transfergarbage to developing countries.

As they are looking for other foreign “garbage landfills,” the western countries grow increasingly worried becausemany waste disposal sites in their countries are already seeing a buildup of plastic recyclables and havehad to pay to have some of it removed.

In the past, the United States has often criticized China’s environment policy.However, when China focused more and more on the environment and stopped importing foreign garbage, the United States asked China not to implement the ban. What hypocrisy.

China has also paid painful pricefor its processeing at least half of the world’s exports of metals, waste paper and used plastic -- 7.3 million tons in 2016.

With the responsible action to ban the foreign garbage, China told theworldthat every country should be responsible for the dispose of their wastesandinvest on garbage processing facility domesticallyratherthanexportingthem to other countries.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)