Scrap metal at a dock in Liverpool, England, waiting to be exported.Christopher Furlong/Getty

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.

It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting downwhat had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.

In the year since, China’s plastic imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics is […]