Plastics pile up as China refuses to take the West's recyclables

London

EVER since China announced last year that it no longer wanted to be the "world's garbage dump", recycling about half the globe's plastics and paper products, Western nations have been puzzling over what to do when the ban went into effect, which it did on Jan 1.

The answer, to date, in Britain at least, is nothing. At least one waste disposal site in London is already seeing a build-up of plastic recyclables and has had to pay to have some of it removed.

Similar backups have been reported in Canada, Ireland, Germany and several other European nations, while tonnes of rubbish is piling up in port cities such as Hong Kong.

Steve Frank, of Pioneer Recycling in Oregon, owns two plants that collect and sort 220,000 tonnes of recyclable materials each year. A majority of it was until re…