China's Appetite for Waste

choi

Waste Management  l  Anti-Dumping; The latest crackdown on foreign rubbish will disrupt the global garbage trade. Economist, Aug 5, 2017.
https://www.economist.com/news/c ... foreign-rubbish-out

Quote:

"CHINA dominates international trade in many goods, but few more than waste for recycling. It sucked in more than half the world's exports of scrap copper and waste paper in 2016, and half of its used plastic. All in all, China spent over $18bn on imports of rubbish last year. America, meanwhile, is an eager supplier. In 2016 nearly a quarter of America’s biggest exporters by volume [not by value] were recyclers of paper, plastic or metal. Topping the list was America Chung Nam, a California-based supplier of waste paper which last year exported a whopping 333,900 containers, almost all of them to China.

"It is often cheaper to recycle scrap copper, iron and steel, as well as waste paper and plastic, than to make such materials from scratch, especially when commodity prices are high. So as commodity prices rose during the 2000s, the burgeoning trade in waste benefited both exporters, who made money from previously worthless trash, and importers

"Officials may have been spurred into the latest restrictions by the release of Plastic China, an unflattering documentary about the plastic-recycling industry which was screened at Sundance, a grand American film festival, in January.

Note:
(a) There is no need to read the rest of the text. You may want to view the chart, showing China's import of waste (sorted into paper, metal, plastic and "other") from 1995 to 2016.
(b) America Chung Nam 美国中南 is based in City of Industry, California
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Industry,_California
(in LA County)
(i) Websites based in China says 张茵 ZHANG Yin founded it.
(ii) Company website:

Leadership.
http://www.acni.net/leadership.html
("Yan Cheung and Ming Chung Liu founded America Chung Nam (ACN) in Los Angeles in 1990")

Cheung Yan is Cantonese pronunciation of 张茵 (she was born in Guangdong). 刘名中 is her husband.
(c) Plastic China (subtitle: A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste), is a 2017 documentary (length: 26 minutes). Here is a trailer

published by JourneymanVOD on June 6, 2017 (length: 2'54").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz-suLt88wg

(d) This is another cycle of crackdown. The article says China is barring "yang laji or 'foreign garbage.' "  That caught my attention.
(i) from the Web: "The standard pronunciation for 垃圾 is lājī in the PRC and lèsè in Taiwan."
(ii) But Communist China did t start it. When I was a kid (in Kaohsiung), my neighbors were a veteran family of Chinese northerners. They spoke laji.
(iii) 垃圾
https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh-hans/%E5%9E%83%E5%9C%BE
(广州话拼音 lab⁶ sab³; 闽南语: 白话字 lah-sap / lap-sap)

The former (Cantonese) sound right. Not the latter, which sounds like bunse in real life.