It’s all in the melt

In the past decade China has become the world’s largest importer of waste with more than half of all the PET bottles collected in Britain, for example, shipped to China and recycled and the country’s recycling industry now worth an estimated annual US$14 billion.  

Industrial scale recycling has notably increased as the price of raw materials and the demand for them has risen, creating an economic incentive to harvest these materials. The Chinese recycling industry relies to a great part on cottage industries with self-employed men and women, and often entire families, roaming the dumps outside the cities and villages for valuable scrap and receiving the equivalent of around 15 cents for a kilogram of plastic waste.