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Whoever creates garbage must dispose of it

Writer: Wu Guangqiang  | Editor: Jane Chen  | From:  | Updated: 2018-05-14

Email of the writer: jw368@163.com

While the U.S. is threatening China with a trade war to punish what it called China’s “theft” of U.S. intellectual property, it is begging China to continue importing a special piece of merchandise from America: garbage. And it is even slashing China for stopping the imports of the waste.

In July 2017, China, the world’s largest importer of waste, officially notified the WTO that it would ban imports of 24 categories of recyclables and solid waste by the end of the year, stressing that China would focus on its own pollution problems.

The ban, which took effect Jan. 1 this year, is warmly welcomed at home as a big step in pursuing greener and more sustainable development. It has also received positive feedback from many countries exporting such waste. Some of the exporters have expressed their desire to use this as an opportunity to improve and reshape domestic waste management and to force manufacturers to produce less waste.

But, as a chief exporter of garbage, America has asked China to reverse the ban.

On March 23, a U.S. representative at WTO requested that China immediately halt implementation and revise these measures, claiming that China’s foreign waste ban could cause a fundamental disruption in global supply chains for scrap materials.

In response to such unreasonable “concerns” and requests, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunyin said, “It’s very hypocritical of the U.S. to say China is breaching its WTO duty,” adding that if the U.S. thought it legitimate to restrict exports of high-tech and high-value-added products, then China’s ban on foreign waste imports was not illegal.

Indeed, the hypocrisy, selfishness and arrogance of Washington have been fully revealed in its recent moves against China. On the one hand, the U.S. announced it will levy heavy tariffs on Chinese goods and restrict Chinese investment in the U.S. On the other hand, it pressures China to cut tariffs on U.S. autos and to continue the import of waste from America.

It’s Washington’s philosophy that the “world order” should be permanently maintained with the U.S. dominating all the strategic fields including high technology, advanced manufacturing, and financial supremacy, while other countries surviving as the consumers of American high-end merchandise and services, producers of low-end products as well as the dumping ground of U.S. garbage.

Any foreign country’s endeavor to upgrade its own economy that Washington sees as a potential challenge to U.S. hegemony will be defined as an act of “undermining the world order” and it will use every means to punish the “disobedient.”

It’s a historical necessity for China to stop the importation of waste regardless of the reactions of foreign governments.

As the world’s largest manufacturer, China has also for four decades been the largest global importer of many types of recyclable materials. Last year, Chinese manufacturers imported 7.3 million metric tons of waste plastics from developed countries including the U.K., the EU, the U.S. and Japan. The U.S. sends 13.2 million tons scrap paper and 1.42 million tons of scrap plastics to China every year.

The lack of resources in the 1980s led China to decide to accept foreign waste and it soon became the world’s largest importer of garbage. According to statistics from China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), the country imported 49.6 million tons of solid waste, with scrap paper, plastics, and metal taking up large shares in 2014, while Green Peace’s annual report in 2017 pointed out that up to 56 percent of global exported plastic waste ended up in China in 2012.

While fueling industrial explosion, China has been suffering from the heavy ecological cost.

Severe environmental damage has been made from the transport, storage and processing of the huge amounts of garbage and public health is under constant threat.

In many areas that specialize in garbage recycling, rivers are polluted, soil poisoned, the sky blackened and air stinky. It’s no exaggeration to say that the problem of foreign garbage is loathed by everyone in China. The ban wins popular support!

As China has tightened control on imported solid waste, many Western countries are now facing severe recycling incapacity, as well as possible environmental pollution.

But China is not to blame. It’s responsibility of the garbage creator to dispose of it.

(The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.)