Beijing/Shanghai — China aims to cut solid-waste imports to zero by 2020 as it looks to reduce pollution and encourage recyclers to treat soaring volumes of domestic trash, a senior environment ministry official said on Thursday. Since the 1980s, China has taken in hundreds of millions of tons of foreign paper, plastic, electronic waste and scrap metal for recycling by an army of backyard workshops. Beijing began restricting deliveries in 2018, while customs authorities have launched a series of crackdowns on waste smuggling, leading to hundreds of arrests. “China will further tighten restrictions of waste imports and eventually aims to realise zero waste imports by 2020,” Qiu Qiwen, director of the ministry of ecology and environment’s solid-waste division, said on the sidelines of a briefing. China imported 22.6-million tons of solid waste in 2018, down 47% from a year earlier, the ministry said. In December, Beijing also vowed to ban imports of more varieties of scrap steel, copp...
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