As Americans carefully separate the paper and plastics from their trash, most probably don’t realize that their country doesn’t recycle stuff so much as export it to be recycled elsewhere. Specifically, to China. For more than five years, scrap and trash has consistently been the US’s biggest export (paywall), for which China is the number one customer, and the market has doubled in size since 2006. 
 
 “The public doesn’t realize this, but recycling is made possible by technology and markets—they think it’s just a matter of technology,” an industry insider with expertise in China’s waste management told Quartz. “And we don’t have strong enough markets in the US.” 
 
 But hints are emerging that American cities and the companies that sell trash are in for a rude awakening. A recent sign of this comes from Oregon, where truckloads of plastic are piling up at recycling depots because Chinese buyers cancelled their orders, as Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. 
 
 And it’s not just plastic from Oregon. American waste recycling companies are starting to panic. “What I’m hearing from folks in the industry, it’s that just that nothing is going,” the industry insider says. “[China’s] not taking anything anymore. It’s a greenwall.” 
 
 What’s going on is this: the Chinese government just launched Operation Green Fence, forbidding the import of certain types of solid waste, including unwashed plastics and other illegal waste mixed in with the good stuff. This is a problem for the US because China is the primary source of demand for its to-be-recycled plastic exports (pdf): 
 
 Resource Recycling, Portland OR China’s share of US exports of plastics for recycling. PE—polyethylene; PS—polystyrene; PVC—polyvinyl chloride; PET—polyethylene terephthalate 
 
 Of course, you can’t always tell how serious a Chinese government ban will be, and it’s not even clear why China would come down so aggressively. Despite its “trash mountain” woes, it actually needs the plastic resin for manufacturing. 
 
 Regardless, Green Fence looks like the real deal. Chinese ports have turned away “foreign garbage” by the hundreds upon thousands of tons (links in Chinese). “If China customs found a syringe, even if it’s just one, in a bale of plastic, it’s considered medical waste and the whole shipment would get rejected,” Peter Wang, CEO of recycling exporter America Chung Nam said at a conference recently. 
 
 The US’s reliance on China to buy up its plastic trash has meant that it’s neglected to keep developing its own plastic recycling capacity, as you can see: 
 
 Resource Recycling, Portland OR New PE recycling plants opened by region. 
 
 The drop-off in Chinese demand, and the lack of immediately accessible alternatives, could hit American cities hard, says Quartz’s contact in the industry. “Cities are going to have a huge problem on their hands because they don’t know what to do with this stuff,” she says. “They have made commitments saying it’s recycled—but they didn’t say how or where.” 
 
 Not that the US couldn’t open new plants. But sorting trash to be recycled is labor-intensive, and therefore expensive. (The US’s failure to sort it properly is why China is turning US trash away.) And while optical sorters exist, those are expensive too. And either will raise costs for US cities. ||||| Oregon recyclers have stopped accepting certain kinds of plastic because China has stopped buying them. 
 
 Chinese recyclers are no longer buying plastic items with the numbers 3, 6 or 7 on them, and inspectors are checking for and rejecting shipments of mixed plastics from overseas. The list of plastics China no longer wants includes disposable coffee cup lids, PVC pipes, certain kinds of clamshell containers, and garden planters with flexible walls, to name a few. 
 
 The restrictions have left recycling companies across U.S. without buyers for many of the plastics they have traditionally accepted. They don’t affect curbside recycling items like milk jugs and yogurt tubs, but they are limiting which miscellaneous plastics recycling depots will accept. 
 
 Far West Fibers president Keith Ristau said 50 trucks worth of mixed plastic from his company’s recycling depots has piled up after orders from China were canceled. It will need to be re-sorted into individual types of plastic before it can be sold, as will the plastics are now being collected at recycling depots. 
 
 “We used to have just one big bin at our depots, and you threw all the plastics in there, and we just baled it and shipped it to China,” he said. “Now we have to sort it by the specific resin, so we have four or five bins instead of one.” 
 
 Far West Fibers and other Portland-area recyclers are meeting with officials at Metro next week to find new buyers for the recyclable plastics China won’t take. 
 
 Metro recycling manager Andy Sloop said there are still good markets for the kinds of plastics accepted in curbside recycling programs. 
 
 “What’s mostly at issue is low-grade, mixed, rigid plastics that aren’t supposed to go into curbside bins,” he said. “It’s things like lids and toys and swimming pools. It’s not plastic soda bottles or milk jugs.” 
 
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– If your local recycler starts turning away your cans and bottles in the near future, blame China. Beijing has stopped accepting certain shipments of recycled plastic from the US, reports Quartz. (It reportedly will no longer welcome unwashed plastics and improperly sorted shipments; other reports say items like coffee cup lids and PVC pipes are on the no-no list.) This, it turns out, is a huge deal because trash has for years been one of the top American exports to China, explains the Washington Post. If China won't buy it anymore, US cities and recycling companies will be scrambling for alternatives. In fact, that's already happening, reports Oregon Public Broadcasting, which talks to one company that has 50 trucks' worth of plastic sitting around thanks to canceled China orders. One sliver of hope is that China genuinely needs this stuff for its manufacturing industry, so it's possible that business interests will pressure the government into relaxing the new "Operation Green Fence" initiative. Failing that, the US will either need to start recycling more of its own trash or find new buyers. Might we suggest Oslo?