They had lots of poor people and their children separate it, wash it and slice it up into lots of strips that then get compressed together into bundles of 'raw

They had lots of poor people and their children separate it, wash it and slice it up into lots of strips that then get compressed together into bundles of 'raw feedstock'. In this process lots gets washed away, the local water is no longer drinkable (so they have to buy water to drink from trucks that do the rounds). Any guesses where the river leads to? The ocean. Also many plastics are hard to identify. So you were having kids with lighters burn a bit of that microwave tray (in black) to sniff it and then guess what the rest of the tray was made of. Then it would be put in one of the twenty or so piles of different types of plastic. The Chinese President saw the film about all of this banned the imports and banned the film. That is how we got here. The bit you didn't see (because the film was band) is how water intensive the process is. The leftover food on the microwaved tray does not clean itself. When it has been sliced up into lots of small pieces, washed and compressed into some block of recyclable stuff you get bits of it washed away to end up eventually in the ocean, even if it blights local fields first before the rains come.