Slow economy affects China’s recycling market.

China’s Big Recycling Market Is Sagging

The collapse of the recycling business has affected people like Mr. Tian, the middlemen who buy the waste products and the factories that refashion the recyclable waste into products bound for stores and construction sites around the world. American and European waste dealers who sell to China are finding that their shipments are being refused by clients when they arrive in Asia.

The ultimate victim may be the environment, already overrun with enough trash in places to threaten people’s health, now further burdened with refuse that until recently would have been recycled.

The effect is being felt acutely in China, the world’s largest garbage importer. The United States, for example, exported 11.6 million tons of recovered paper and cardboard last year to China, up from 2.1 million tons in 2000, according to the American Forest and Paper Association.

Because Chinese consumption is far less developed than the West’s, more than 70 percent of the materials that feed the country’s recycling industry must come from abroad, said Wang Yonggang, a spokesman for the China National Resources Recycling Association.