The Chinese government has already relaxed the proposed rules somewhat, in response to criticism that the increased standards were actually impossible to meet w

The Chinese government has already relaxed the proposed rules somewhat, in response to criticism that the increased standards were actually impossible to meet with current processes and equipment. And this article fails to mention that many of the Chinese companies in this sector were grossly negligent in their handling of the "contamination" - of course no one wants to say "our buyer in China had their license revoked because they were literally pouring toxic waste in a river" but that's the sort of thing that was going on. There are business opportunities here, too. The more positive one is in automated (mostly computer vision based) sorting systems. Automated sorting that's clean enough for China's new standards is possible with existing technology, but there are a lot of opportunities for both new entrants and existing companies in the sector to improve speed and reduce costs. In the long term, this is definitely the path forward. The second opportunity is for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that are less picky about environmental regulations, to buy American recycling exports, clean them up to Chinese standards, then resell to China. In the short term, I expect we'll be seeing a lot of this.