A sword is dangling over the businesses, nonprofits and municipalities involved in Western North Carolina’s recycling sector — a metaphorical blade, but one that still presents a real challenge. China, for years one of the largest markets for U.S. recyclables, enacted a policy known as “National Sword” in early 2018, which halted imports of numerous scrap materials and placed tight cleanliness standards on many others.
Eric Bradford, director of operations at local environmental nonprofit Asheville GreenWorks, calls China’s move a wake-up call for domestic recyclers. He says that the country’s previously lax import standards had created an artificially generous market for low-quality and contaminated material — garbage in the guise of recycling. “They were picking through it, taking some of the items to be recycled, and the majority of it was being landfilled,” Bradford explains. “We were basically paying China to be our landfill for these ‘recyclables,’ and we felt good about it.”
As the changes wrought by National Sword slash through the U.S. recycling sector, WNC organizations are examining how to respond. Asheville City Council member Brian Haynes, speaking at a February meeting in support of the city’s application for a $30,000 N.C. Department of Environmental Quality grant to reduce recycling contamination, referred to the current situation as “a crisis stage.”
In crisis, however, some see opportunity. “We learned a valuable lesson from the Chinese sword, that we’ve got to recycle right. It’s got to be clean; it’s got to be better material,” says Mike Greene, recycling business development specialist with the N.C. DEQ’s Recycling Business Assistance Center. “Right now, we’re just rebuilding everything to what it really should’ve been to begin with.”
WNC is better poised than many other parts of the country to make these adjustments, Greene says. While the region did send some of its recyclables to China before National Sword, its distance from the West Coast made overseas shipping less cost-effective compared to domestic sales in the Southeast. As a result, the area’s materials recovery facilities — MRFs — already had relatively close destinations for their products.
Ron Moore, owner of American Recycling of WNC in Candler, estimates that 80% to 90% of his MRF’s sales go to regional buyers. Cardboard, for example, is shipped to mills in Sylva and Cowpens, S.C., both less than 75 miles away. The No. 1 plastic used for most beverage bottles goes to Reidsville and Troy, Ala., while the No. 2 plastic found in milk jugs and detergent containers is split between two North Carolina processing plants.
The biggest impact of National Sword for WNC recyclers, Moore explains, is the flooding of the domestic market with material that previously went abroad. Demand hasn’t yet caught up to this vastly increased supply, causing prices to plummet for commodities such as cardboard, newsprint and mixed paper. “Those margins are squeezed, and right now, they’re to the point where we’re selling them for below what it costs us to sort,” Moore says. “It’s not a winning model for the long term.”