David Dodwell

Outside In | More than a year after China’s ban on waste imports, the world is still learning to clean up after itself

The loss of the world’s No 1 dumping ground has forced some to turn more to recycling and others to find more amenable waste importers. Everywhere, however, minds are being focused on the staggering amounts of rubbish we produce each year

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Garbage sits at the Syctom sorting centre in Paris, France, awaiting sorting before it can be recycled. With global annual waste likely to rise from the current 2.01 billion tonnes a year to around 3.4 billion tonnes a year in 2050, there is an urgent need to reduce waste at source. Photo: AFP

David Dodwell

Published: 7:00am, 8 Jun 2019Updated: 7:50am, 8 Jun 2019

Almost two years after China’s shock announcement at the World Trade Organisation headquarters in Geneva that, as part of its “National Sword” policy, it would from the start of 2018 no longer be the world’s lap sap haven (lap sap means rubbish in Cantonese), the world of waste continues to roil.

I use the word carefully, because roil can mean to make water muddy or turbid, or it can simply mean to annoy or upset everyone. At the time, China did both.

I always used to muse over China’s role, between 1980 and 2010, as the world’s unsung Santa – steadily delivering to the world its deflationary gift of low-cost consumer goods built on the foundations of cheap but efficient labour.

Our rich Western consuming economies even today don’t properly acknowledge the debt we owe to China’s miserably-paid migrant workers for keeping down the price of our “stuff”.

But I now realise that we owe China just as big a debt as the world’s “Lap Sap Chung” (Hong Kong’s fondly remembered anti-rubbish campaign mascot).