China finally gets serious about cleaning up

World’s biggest polluter turns would-be environmental protector with green tech investments

BANGKOK/NAIROBI — Business is booming for Max Craipeau. The Hong Kong-based entrepreneur has seen his company transform over the past 18 months: His number of employees has increased sixfold, and he expects his 2019 revenue to “easily double” from last year. His good fortune is largely thanks to China’s decision in January 2018 to ban the import of most types of solid waste for recycling.

China’s disruptive move led Craipeau, founder and CEO of Maxco Industries, to shift from trading rubber and metal scrap to running plastic-waste recycling plants in Indonesia and Poland — with one more on the way, possibly in Japan. China’s ban, according to the France-born Craipeau, created “a new order” in the global plastic-waste business and was a “huge opportunity” for him.

Established players in the industry who simply bought plastic scrap overseas and shipped it straight to China were suddenly “lost.” But Craipeau, familiar with the more complicated logistics of processing rubber and metal, had a network of contacts that allowed him to establish centers to refine plastic waste. His biggest customer for the plastic pellets they produce? China.

Craipeau’s business success is a silver lining in China’s waste ban, and it may not be the only one. At first, the ban caused the filthiest business on earth to migrate elsewhere, resulting in an influx of trash into less-developed Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar — helped by unscrupulous companies, smugglers and corrupt officials. But Craipeau said this inflow has forced most of these countries to develop their own regulations, and that apart from a few “cowboys,” their waste-processing industries are now cleaner than before the ban; in fact, Thailand, like China, plans to end its imports of plastic waste from 2021.

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