50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

Sail up the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong, past Shenzhen, and you come to the industrial

city of Dongguan.

Here you'll find what may be the world's biggest paper mill, larger than 300 football

pitches.

It's owned by nine dragons, a recycling company started by Zhang Yin, who was once ranked

by Forbes as the world's richest self-made woman.

Nine dragons is, or perhaps was, the largest importer by volume of American goods into China.

Was goods? Waste paper, typically with some less useful trash mixed in.

It's among many Chinese companies that built business models around importing what Americans

and others put in their recycling receptacles and picking out stuff that shouldn't be there.

That's a crucial job. If the waste is too contaminated, you can't recycle it.

It's also a job that's hard to automate.

So rich countries started shipping their waste to countries where workers are poor enough

to sort it for wages low enough to turn a profit.

From the 1980s to until very recently, this system worked smoothly. China's fast growing

economy was exporting lots of manufactured goods, and because those ships would otherwise

return empty, it was cheap to load them with waste for China to recycle.

Japanese, such as Madame Zhang, made a fortune. But, as China got richer, the government

decided it no longer wanted to be a dumping ground for the rest of the world's badly-sorted

rubbish. In 2017, it announced a strict new policy called National Sword. China would

now accept only well-sorted rubbish. No more than half of one percent stuff that shouldn't

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