A cruise ship loaded with thousands of tons of solid waste sets sail from a certain country's port, sails to the high seas to meet with people for transactions, and is already at a Chinese port when it docks. It evades customs supervision by false reporting, concealment, concealment, etc., or directly "bypasses customs", that is, bypasses customs and enters the country privately. In the past few decades, under the temptation of huge profits, such scenes have been repeatedly played out between foreign garbage smugglers and Chinese customs.

Recently, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Implementation Plan for Prohibiting the Entry of Foreign Garbage and Promoting the Reform of the Solid Waste Import Management System" (hereinafter referred to as the "Implementation Plan"), requiring a comprehensive ban on the entry of foreign garbage and the improvement of the management system for imported solid waste. Why can foreign garbage "float across the ocean"? How to really block the entry of foreign garbage? The reporter interviewed relevant experts.

Foreign garbage has far-reaching harm

"Foreign garbage" is a common name, not a professional term, specifically referring to solid waste that is prohibited from import by the country through smuggling, smuggling, etc., or solid waste that is restricted from import without permission.

According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection's Announcement No. 36 of 2009, there are 12 major items and more than 80 minor items of prohibited solid waste, which are the real foreign garbage, including waste animal and plant products, slag, ash and residues, discarded electromechanical products and equipment, etc. In addition, there are also 10 major items and more than 50 minor items of restricted solid waste, such as waste textile raw materials, waste plastics, etc.

Documentary director Wang Jiuliang has conducted investigations in many coastal provinces of China and found that the plastic waste that illegally enters China every year comes from the United States, Germany, France, Australia, South Korea and other countries. "These wastes eventually enter the large and small waste plastic recycling plants along the coast of China, and are recycled and processed in an extensive way, which then causes environmental pollution problems."

Experts said that many imported solid waste materials, including foreign garbage, are of low quality and low price. Many renewable resource processing and utilization enterprises that use them as raw materials are "scattered, chaotic and dirty" enterprises with low pollution control capabilities. Most of them do not even have pollution control facilities. Pollution emissions during processing and utilization seriously damage the local ecological environment. The toxic and harmful substances such as viruses and bacteria carried by foreign garbage may directly infect the workers.

The foreign garbage currently entering China mainly includes industrial waste such as waste slag, waste catalysts, waste tires, waste batteries, electronic waste, as well as old clothes, construction waste, domestic waste, medical waste and hazardous waste. After layers of packaging, many of these foreign garbage enter ordinary people's homes.

Exorbitant profits give rise to a deformed industrial chain

According to the British Daily Telegraph, in 2012 alone, the UK shipped 17 containers of domestic waste weighing a total of 420 tons to Asia, of which 70% were confirmed to be shipped to Asian countries including China. According to data from the US International Trade Commission, in 2011, China's imports of waste and scrap from the United States reached US$11.54 billion, accounting for 11.1% of China's total imports from the United States.

The huge profits from the sale of foreign garbage have spawned a deformed industrial chain: developed countries eliminate waste - developing countries import at low prices - sort, refurbish or repair - resell to Chinese people at a higher price. Among them, each link is profitable: first of all, foreign suppliers sell garbage to foreign buyers at extremely low prices and receive garbage disposal subsidies from government departments; for middlemen, reselling garbage can make a lot of profit; as for Chinese importers, the profit mainly comes from the profit after sorting and selling imported garbage.

Someone roughly calculated the following: the landed price of each ton of foreign garbage is 140 US dollars per ton, of which 10 US dollars is paid to the middleman, plus import taxes and other fees, the cost per ton is between 1,000 and 1,100 yuan, and the market price of the waste paper sorted out is about 2,000 yuan per ton, the market price of plastic products such as milk bottles and mineral water bottles sorted out is between 7,000 and 10,000 yuan per ton, and the market price of aluminum cans sorted out is about 4,000 yuan per ton.

Liu Jianguo, a professor at the School of Environment at Tsinghua University, said that according to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, all transboundary movements of hazardous wastes must be agreed to by the importing and exporting countries before they can be carried out, "but the facts show that this convention has become a "dead letter"."

China's resource demand promotes imports

While the public is accustomed to the term "foreign garbage", they have neglected to pay attention to solid waste. In fact, solid waste is not the same as foreign garbage, and a large part of them still has recycling value.

"In the past specific development stage, some imported solid waste that can be used as raw materials played a certain role in making up for China's resource shortages." Guo Jing, director of the International Cooperation Department of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, said.

For example, papermaking, the consumption of paper and cardboard has soared in China's economic development, resulting in a rapid increase in pulp production and consumption, but China's forest resources are relatively scarce. Wang Qi, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Environmental Sciences, said: "Imported waste paper is of good quality, mostly wood pulp, and can be made into better paper after recycling." In addition, importing waste plastics, etc., can also reduce China's dependence on oil imports to a certain extent.

Take the data of 2012 as an example, China imported more than 28 million tons of waste paper. Compared with pulping with logs, pulping with waste paper reduced chemical oxygen demand (COD) emissions by about 240,000 tons; imported more than 14 million tons of scrap steel, scrap copper, scrap aluminum and other metals, saving more than 13 million tons of standard coal, reducing sulfur dioxide emissions by 84,000 tons and nitrogen oxide emissions by 11,000 tons.

During the interview, the reporter learned that many chemical product companies have the practice of "giving up the near and seeking the far": one ton of imported waste plastic costs about 1,400 yuan, while one ton of Chinese waste plastic costs 5,000 yuan. Experts explained that "it is mainly because China's solid waste is not well classified and the quality cannot be guaranteed".

At present, China has not yet established a complete garbage recycling system. Waste recycling is mainly completed by small vendors and hawkers. Residents' awareness of garbage classification has not yet been popularized, resulting in China's solid waste often mixed with domestic garbage, waste paper and plastic, stone and sand, and even medical waste. Recycling is both time-consuming and laborious.

The reality is embarrassing: on the one hand, there is foreign garbage that is repeatedly banned, and on the other hand, China continues to produce "local garbage". According to the data of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the amount of domestic garbage generated in China's large and medium-sized cities in 2015 was about 185.6 million tons, and most of the solid waste was not reused.

"We must be based in China, do our own thing, and solve our own problems." Qu Ruijing, deputy director of the Circular Economy Science and Technology Transformation Promotion Center of the China Circular Economy Association, said that the release of the "Implementation Plan" coincided with the node period when the central government required the universal implementation of garbage classification. Eliminating foreign garbage and reducing imported solid waste is also making way for China to implement a garbage classification system. "If we implement garbage classification in place, implement the extended producer responsibility system, and do a good job in comprehensive resource utilization, it is completely feasible to replace imported solid waste, and it can even be expanded to the export of solid waste."

(Reporter Ye Lefeng and Zhang Lei of this newspaper)

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