China Engages in Trash Talking Over Garbage

With the U.S.-China relationship already in the dumps, the Chinese government used the occasion of International Environmental Day this week to trash America over hundreds of tons of hazardous garbage it claims has been shipped illegally to its shores from California ports.

Held in the balance is the growing trade in recyclable paper products that has important environmental and economic consequences for both countries.

China, which lacks the forest reserves to produce its own wood pulp, is considered the world’s most promising market for recovered paper products. Although it is seldom mentioned in high-profile trade discussions, shipping recyclable waste overseas has become a huge business, accounting for more than $1 billion a year from California alone.

Struggling to meet stringent new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requirements to reduce landfill, California and other states are competing with European countries to find overseas customers for their reusable waste. Officials fear that the Chinese furor over illegal garbage shipments could threaten this important new market.

In 1994, the total value of wastepaper exports from California ports exceeded $230 million. In the case of China, the waste shipment also helps reduce the mounting trade imbalance heavily in China’s favor. Cargo ships travel to America laden with toys, clothes and shoes. They return loaded with discarded American newspapers and used food wrappers.

“This trade is part of a very important trend, whereby environmental issues are coming together,” California Secretary for Environmental Protection James M. Strock said. “But this issue of trust that these accusations by China raise could undercut an extremely important environmental trend.”

Strock recently led a U.S. delegation of environmentally related business leaders and officials to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, where they were blindsided by vituperative attacks against the United States in the Chinese press. “We looked at the China Daily [the country’s official English-language daily newspaper] one morning,” said Strock, “and were surprised to find the headline: ‘China Is No Dump Site for U.S.’ ”

In a stream of indignant editorials in the People’s Daily and other publications, China has accused the United States of violating international conventions by illegally shipping containers filled with dangerous organic and solid garbage, including “dirty plastic bags, sewage, used disposable syringes, rubber gloves and unidentified white powder.”

“The United States,” fumed an editorial in the May 31 People’s Daily, “is constantly criticizing China about human rights issues while it repeatedly, illegally sends its garbage to China, polluting China’s environment.”

Senior Western diplomats in Beijing have called it an “embarrassing incident” that only adds to the panoply of contentious issues between the two countries that range from pirated compact discs to smuggled weapons.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing issued a statement attempting to calm the outrage over the unwanted garbage. America, the statement said, “desires to assist China in protecting its environment and opposes the transfer of mislabeled and unwanted waste to developing countries.”

Although the United States has pledged to investigate, officials contend that the Chinese government has not provided the details they need, including the names of the exporters who shipped the garbage from Long Beach in May.

But beyond the trash talk, the issue has important environmental consequences for both sides. California is under EPA mandate to reduce its landfill volume by half before 2000. China is a “biomass limited system” that does not have enough arable land to produce both food and trees for wood pulp. As a result, it produces most of its paper products using rice straw.

This process, however, requires the use of lye to treat the straw, which produces a poisonous paper-mill “black liquor” that is deadly to streams and lakes. Because of this problem, Chinese paper mills are good customers for discarded paper trash from America. Moreover, China has a massive cheap-labor work force that makes hand-sorting of the paper more economical than it is in the developed world.

“What Americans don’t generally understand,” said a Western diplomat in Beijing, “is that recycling does not exist in a vacuum. Recycling alone is not enough. You have to have a customer at the end stream of that recycling process. China is the ideal customer.”