China ban on waste imports leads to piles of paper

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Shipping lines have begun to advise waste paper and plastic shippers that China is set to ban imports of those cargoes, which the government has termed “foreign garbage”, as part of the much wider effort to clean up its environment. “Each day in Hong Kong, 2,500 tons of fresh paper waste is piling up with no place to go,” The New York Times reports. But the effect is to create a new crisis for China’s paper mills and cardboard, with raw materials costs soaring. A wider problem is that is leaving many e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon with dwindling stocks of packaging.