The business of exporting garbage to China for recycling has become, in recent years, an enormously profitable one. Zhang Yin started collecting wastepaper in Los Angeles, USA, in 1990 and shipping it to China where her company, Nine Dragons Paper Holdings Ltd., recycled it. Today, her fortune is counted in billions of US dollars (1). 

But this is more than just an extraordinary business success story: the underlying reason for Zhang’s success is part of the larger story of China’s enormous economic growth in recent years. China’s rapid economic development has meant an explosive growth in the demand for paper, a demand which far outstrips China’s paper mills' ability to supply. China’s paper industry has an absolutely ravenous appetite for wood pulp. Wastepaper is a good way to make up the shortfall where wood pulp can't meet demand because it's cheap and already of high quality. In 2004 China spent US$7 billion on importing wood pulp and waste paper. (2) The message is clear: used paper products have value in China.

Ordinary Chinese are highly aware of the value of waste paper, and they're quite willing and able to capitalize on that value. At the end of each day in China’s biggest cities you will see people riding bicycles loaded down with as much cardboard, old newspapers, and other paper products as can possibly be piled onto them without compromising the vehicle’s balance (although, sometimes these inexact calculations go awry and you will sometimes see tipped over bicycles and cardboard strewn for half a city block). These industrious folk take all of this cardboard to a central location and sell it for cash, often as their primary source of income. This is China’s recycling brigade.

China has no national and very limited local government recycling programs. But it would be a mistake to assume from this fact that things do not in fact get recycled. In fact, very little goes to waste in China. Though cardboard collectors form the most visible part of China's informal recycling industry, they do not form its limits. Informal recyclers also gather up old, broken electronics and strip them of whatever working parts might remain. As well, they strip and melt down remaining metals in electronics, some of which are quite valuable, then sell them as scrap, along with any other, larger pieces of scrap metal they might happen to find (3, 4).

The World Bank estimates that some 1% of the urban population of the developing world survives by collecting and selling other people’s valuable trash (5).  In some ways the system works quite efficiently. In Cairo the Zabaleen, the city’s private waste collectors, are such efficient recyclers that they recycle or reuse up to 85% of what they collect, a higher percentage than the formal recycling programs Cairo has attempted to institute have been able to achieve (6).

However, informal recycling is not without its problems. Sorting through garbage by hand, dismantling electronics and collecting heavy metals exposes waste collectors to a number of health hazards, from disease to blood poisoning from heavy metals. Garbage is by its very nature unclean, and stripping heavy or precious metals from broken electronics can release toxic fumes if not done properly (5).

References
1) bloomberg.com
2) sinomedia.net
3) geographyalltheway.com
4) wikipedia.org
5) wiego.org
6) wikipedia.org

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