Usually after dinner, Mr. Ma would take off his shirt, shut the door, and begin work making plastic pellets from scrap. But tonight, he sits in his darkened yard staring at two SUV-sized plastic processing machines and a bundle of colorful scrap plastic. No lights are on, no machines grind, and no familiar theme song of CCTV-1 plays in the background. Walking through other villages in Wen’an County, more men meander around their yards filled with the same idle processing machines and mini-mountains of scrap plastic. Most have never studied English, but they are fluent in the language of plastics, sprinkling words like ABS, PP, and PVC into their conversations. They are the owners of small plastic scrap recycling workshops that were once booming—but are now silent.

Seismic Shift in the Plastic Recycling Capital of the World

China is home to 600,000 family-run small plastics recycling workshops, one-third of which are located in Hebei Province’s Wen’an, a largely rural county two hours south of Beijing. The largest cluster of workshops is a massive one-stop shop for processing with 100,000 plastic recycling workers who sort, clean, melt, shred, pelletize, granulate, and mold plastic waste. For nearly four decades the county has sold pellets to China’s plastic-hungry industries, which, according to a 2014 report, account for a quarter of global polyethylene (PE) demand, the most commonly used plastic in the world.

Wen’an is not unique. Contrary to big recycling factories in the United States and Europe, low-tech workshops are prevalent in China, India, and Southeast Asia. In her 2019 book, “Waste,” UC Berkeley Professor Kate O’Neill details how over 20 million people worldwide work in informal waste and recycling industries, harnessing the profitable global resource frontier.

The Birth of Plastic “Mining” in Wen’an 

Wen’an began recycling in the 1970s when villagers traveled to Beijing to collect plastic covers off old copies of Mao’s Little Red Book to transform them into irrigation pipes.

Recycling has been lucrative for the county. Some locals estimate a family-run recycling workshop earns up to 300,000 yuan (~$40,000) a year, nearly 20 times greater than the average income in Chinese rural households.

Before 2011, thousands of tons of scrap plastics poured into Wen’an daily, 70 percent of which was imported from overseas. Greenpeace estimates that since the 1980s, China has imported half of the world’s plastic waste, peaking at 9 million tons in 2012. Originally, international exporters paid villagers to take waste, but as scrap demand increased, villagers began to pay for scrap, which provided a cheap source of material to produce plastic pellets.

Dirty Legacy of Wen’an’s Plastic Economic Miracle

The “success” of the plastic recycling industry in Wen’an stemmed in large part from lax environmental regulations. 20,000 workshops were supported by only one sewage plant that most did not even use. The wastewater produced from chemically cleansing plastic scrap was poured untreated onto the ground, contaminating aquifers. Workshops burned unrecyclable scrap in open-air pits, blackening the sky with acrid fires. Like many informal recyclers around the world, workshop laborers in Wen’an inhaled dust and chemical-filled air without masks, and washed plastics without protective gloves.

In the 2000s, no local young men were able to pass the physical exam to enter the People’s Liberation Army. Adam Minter, a Bloomberg columnist who visited Wen’an in 2010, investigated the poor physical condition of village men and learned that many suffered from pulmonary fibrosis and paralyzing strokes. When he asked a village doctor about the cause, the village doctor said, “Pollution. It’s 100% pollution.”

The extreme air pollution and health degradation galvanized Hebei officials in 2011 to start a provincial “war on pollution,” a full three years before Beijing declared the national campaign. Around the same time, county and central governments started to crack down on the plastic recycling industry in Wen’an, eight years before the nation banned plastic imports.

Policy Crackdowns Break Down the Plastic Market

Early in 2011, Wen’an County government released a Special Action Plan on Regulating Scrap Plastic Cleansing and Shredding Industries and follow-up policies aimed at shutting down high-polluting workshops and factories. These shutdowns decreased scrap plastic market prices in Beijing, as the army of informal city waste pickers lost their major clients from Wen’an. Policies from the State Council and environmental inspection teams from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) pressured Hebei’s provincial government to continue crackdowns and clean ups in Wen’an.

Central and local pollution control efforts seemed to work at cross purposes. To keep jobs, Wen’an invested more than 10 million yuan to construct a sewage treatment system in an industrial park, attracting workshops from the entire scrap processing chain to better manage industrial waste. But a MEE air pollution control policy in 2017 forced the industrial park to shutter all small workshops. More than 1,563 small workshops and factories⁠—including those owned by Mr. Ma and his neighbors⁠—were shut down.

These closures disappointed many small workshop owners who had invested great amounts of money into environmental protection equipment and endured multiple government inspections only to lose operating permits again. Villagers were forced to move, find new employment at local factories, or continue to run heavily polluting recycling workshops under the radar. Mr. Ma purchased an electricity generator to work at night because the government cut his electricity.

The Path Forward for Plastic Miners 

The gate is now closed for international plastic imports but not for China’s domestic plastics⁠. Shanghai and 46 other cities are piloting waste sorting, which is expected to increase the supply of Chinese domestic scrap plastics. The China Plastics Reuse and Recycling Association predicts that Chinese domestic demand for recycled plastics will rise more than 100 percent in three to five years. However, Haifeng Huang, a professor at Peking University HSBC Business School, anticipates that better sorting practices, especially via automation, will intensify waste worker unemployment and replace small recycling workshops with industrial-scale processing plants.

According to Huang, a human resources gap exists in the economic transition. Workers need to move from polluting to sustainable industries. To ensure a smooth transition, central and local governments should offer fiscal and policy support to facilitate job transition such as preferential taxes for factories and companies who hire local workers. Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum, points out that “China lacks an ‘e-Harmony’ in the waste sector to match up new industries with old industry workers. The speed of the war on pollution makes it even more challenging to transition and train these workers.”

In Waste, O’Neill highlights models that China could follow, such as in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Pune, India, where local governments have worked with informal waste workers to invest in and reinvent their industry instead of simply displacing them. Translating to Wen’an, central and local governments could invest in wastewater collection systems and other pollution control plants as well as help unemployed plastic miners get work in China’s modernizing waste management system.

Heated debate continues on the balance between economic growth and environmental protection. A former employee at Wen’an industrial park said a similar park in Shanxi Province lured him and other owners of soon-to-be-closed workshops to relocate with promises that they could pollute as much as they wanted there. He said, “We banish the pollution in Wen’an, they welcome it here, because they are poor.”