Africa has long been where a lot of US trash (which is ostensibly "recycled") is being dumped. But as in many other fields, China offered the scale and infrastr

Africa has long been where a lot of US trash (which is ostensibly "recycled") is being dumped. But as in many other fields, China offered the scale and infrastructure to efficiently huge quantities of Western waste that Africa lacks. Lack of proper rail-port infrastructure prevents Africa from replacing China. But your larger point is absolutely correct -- nothing that is supposedly "recycled" should ever leave our shores until it has been transformed into post-recycled content. But again, it's far too expensive to actually recycle, so the problem is the dishonesty -- if something isn't technically feasible, then we should have this information and full disclosure about what can and cannot be recycled and what the various price points are so that communities can make informed decisions. It might be better, for example, to divert a lot of the money we spend on existing recycling subsidies to researching better automation techniques for recycling, but as long as firms are able to claim that they are recycling when they are just exporting waste, then this is unfair competition against those firms that really do want to design a real recycling program.