Sailing along the Pearl River from Hong Kong to the industrial city of Dongguan, you will find the world\'s largest paper mill with more than 300 football fields.
It is owned by Kowloon, a recycling company founded by Zhang Yin, also known as Zhang Yan, who was named by Forbes as the richest self in the world. made woman.
Dragon paper is-
Or, maybe-
China is the largest importer by volume of US goods. Those goods? Waste paper -
Usually, some undesirable garbage will be mixed.
A ton of cargo was tied up, stacked on board, and then sailed to China, where workers sorted by hand.
This is a crucial task: waste paper cannot be recycled if it is too polluted.
It\'s also a hard job to automate successfully.
It needs humans.
As a result, rich countries are starting to ship waste to countries where workers are poor enough to earn a low enough salary.
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The system runs smoothly from 1980 to recently. China\'s fast-
The growing economy has exported a large number of manufactured goods. instead of empty ships, they are filled with waste for recycling in China.
Entrepreneurs like Ms. Yin have made a fortune.
But as China became richer, the government decided not to want to be a dumping ground for the world\'s garbage.
It announced the National Sword policy 2017, under which China will only accept
Contains not more than half of the classified garbage of things that should not exist in 1%.
This is a big change.
The pollution rate in the past has reached 40 times.
The amount of waste shipped to China has dropped sharply.
The government and recycling companies are scrambling to adjust.
If they find that other countries are poor enough to accept their severely classified waste or raise taxes to pay higher fees --
Let the workers sort better, or do something else?
There is a reason why the mantra \"reduce, reuse, recycle\" is so.
Flushing and filling glass bottles makes more sense than crushing and melting glass bottles to make new ones.
Examples of repeated use can be traced back to paper Papyrus: Ancient Greece gave us the word \"palimpsest\", literally \"scraped clean and can be used again \".
The Romans melted the old bronze statue to carve the new bronze statue. 1,000 years ago, Japan pulled the paper more paper.
For centuries, people have made a living by picking up waste products, such as selling rags to paper mills.
But all this is driven by market incentives: Raw materials are too valuable to be thrown away.
We should recycle because this is the right thing to do, and this idea has only recently emerged.
Think about an article in Time magazine in August 1955 titled \"one-time life \".
Adjectives are not derogatory-
This is a celebration.
\"Disposable items reduce household chores,\" it said . \"
A smiling family filled its trash can with paper trays, plastic cutlery and other items, and this article tells us, \"it takes 40 hours to clean up these things --
Except that no housewives need trouble \".
When you can use the foil \"Disposa-
\"Pot\", or a one-time barbecue with a convenient asbestos bracket?
A television advertising campaign called \"crying Indians\" helped change people\'s mood in the United States at least.
In the first film released in 1971, an American native man paddled a canoe into a trash can.
Polluted river, standing on the side of the road when passing driver throws a bag of fast food
Food crumbs under his feet
\"People are starting to pollute,\" said voiceover . \"
\"People can stop it.
\"The Native American man turned to the camera and a tear rolled down his cheeks.
But advertising is not all that looks like, not just because the actor becomes the second --
A generation of Italian immigrants
It is funded by an organization supported by leading beverage and packaging companies.
At the time, deposit plans were common: Buy a carbonated drink and get some cash back when you return the bottle.
This model assumes that the manufacturer\'s job is to provide incentives and logistics for returns.
The crying Indians have different messages.
People are responsible for their own waste.
The deposit plan is out of date.
The local government sees recycling logistics as one thing.
Historian Fennis dunneville believes that it is a bad idea to translate \"big systemic issues into personal responsibility issues\" in this way.
This makes recycling no longer an effective action, but makes us feel good about ourselves.
This seems to coincide with research by behavioral economists at Boston University, who find that people who know they can recycle tend to waste more time.
If there is a cost in recycling, it doesn\'t matter.
Of course, it\'s not free.
Economist Michael Munger also believes it is a bad idea to leave waste disposal to the free market.
If you charge people for the safe disposal of the garbage, you will induce them to dump the garbage illegally, which is even worse.
But once we use taxes to subsidize waste disposal, it is possible for us to motivate the behavior in the Time magazine article --
People can throw things away when society takes the cost.
How do we get them recycled?
One solution is moral persuasion of Indian advertising.
But it also caused a problem, Munger said in an article by the Cato Institute, a US think tank.
\'We should simply compare the cost and benefits of each waste recovery, \'he said.
Glass bottles, tin cans, plastic coffee cups, etc, compared to other options. Well-
The landfill sites that are now designed are very safe and we can use the methane they produce to generate electricity.
Modern waste incinerator can be a clean one
The source of strength.
If we treat recycling as a moral question, when will we stop?
This brings us back to the problems brought about by China\'s National Sword policy.
Reducing recycling plans will make classification easier.
But it seems to be a step back. Taiwan -
Once called \"garbage island\"
Now, the recovery rate is the highest in the world. How?
By ensuring that waste disposal is \"firmly in public awareness-
Lai Ying, head of the waste management department of Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency, told the Smithsonian Institution magazine.
If they can do it, why can\'t everyone else do it?
Maybe we need a systematic answer: maybe regulators can encourage new business models, such as bottle storage plans, to allow manufacturers to think about incentives and logistics for recycled products.
Many of these discussions were conducted under the term \"circular economy\", Ying-Ying Lai.
Or maybe the technology will come to the rescue. One UK start-
Up says it can mix plastic
It\'s hard to recycle
Back in the oil from where they came.
A shopping mall in Australia recently launched AI for the first time --
The enabled trash can perceive what is put in it and classify it accordingly. State-of-the-
The art classification facility uses robots, lasers, magnets and air jets to separate different recyclable air streams.
This can be lower than the amount of work.
Cost workers in China and other regions
But closing this option may only spur the innovation that the industry needs.
The author wrote an Undercover Economist column for The Financial Times.
The BBC World Channel broadcast 50 news about the modern economy.
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