Europe has long prided itself on being an environmental leader — a champion of “the circular economy,” in which energy and resources are carefully husbanded, reused and recycled.

The truth is that much of its green success has relied on exporting its trash elsewhere.

Until the beginning of this year, the Continent kept itself clean by sending millions of tons of paper, cardboard, plastics and textiles on cargo ships over the horizon to China.

Of the 56.4 million tons of paper EU citizens threw away in 2016, some 8 million ended up in China, purchased by recycling centers that turn it into cardboard and send it back to Europe as packaging for Chinese exports. That same year, the EU collected 8.4 million tons of plastic waste, and sent 1.6 million tons to China.

China's limits on impurities in paper and cardboard are more stringent than the EU's — a standard almost impossible to meet.

At the end of last year, Beijing put an end to the practice, putting in place strict limits on imports of foreign waste. Only eight weeks later, Europe is struggling to deal with mountains of plastic and paper waste.

"All the sorting centers are clogged, our stocks are exceeding the allowed limits," said Pascal Gennevieve, head of paper at Federec, the federation of French recyclers, and director of recycling at French waste management giant Veolia. "Right after the Christmas peak, we had a lot of paper and no export solution. All European plants are full, saturated."

Garbage ban

The EU is to some extent a victim of its own success. For years, European leaders have touted the benefits of limiting and reusing waste. Just last month, the European Commission presented its vision for the future of plastics, exhorting Europe to turn waste into an economic opportunity.

Europe's pitch for sustainability, it seems, was so convincing that it persuaded Beijing to give it a go.

The Chinese Communist Party is under growing pressure from an increasingly affluent middle class fed up with the side effects of decades of breakneck growth: cities where the air isn't fit to breathe and a landscape clogged with garbage.

Beijing cited environmental and health concerns when it imposed strict limitations on imports of 24 types of "foreign garbage," including plastic scraps and mixed, unsorted paper, that came into force at the beginning of this year.

China's limits on impurities in paper and cardboard are more stringent than the EU's — a standard almost impossible to meet. It has also imposed a flat-out ban on plastics.

The country's recycling capacity will be focused instead on dealing with its own mounting trash problem.

China has "an environmental agenda and an economic agenda to ... become world leaders in recycling," said Arnaud Brunet, director general of the Bureau of International Recycling, the global association of waste traders.

The limitations have already had an effect, as the waste industry on both sides of the ocean has scrambled to adjust. As of November, China had taken in just 6.4 million tons of paper from the EU, compared to 8 million tons in 2016. Plastic waste imports from the EU fell by 36 percent last year to 1 million.

"We are juggling," said Nicole Couder, EU affairs officer at global waste management firm Suez. "We are reaching a point where we have too much stock ... We’re going to have a drastic issue in a short-term perspective. We are reaching this crisis stage now ... I don’t think we can’t stress enough the impact of China."

'A gamechanger'

As garbage problems cascade across the Continent, the European Commission is seizing the crisis to promote its vision of a clean economy.

The Commission's Plastics Strategy, announced in January, aims to make all plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030, something that it says could create 200,000 jobs. For that to happen, Europe's capacity to sort and recycle waste would have to be multiplied fourfold — something that would cost as much as €16.6 billion.

"We mostly export," said Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen while presenting the strategy. "This does not make any sense in economic or sustainability terms. We are throwing away 95 percent of the value of plastic packages and only 5 percent is retained in our economy."

Ireland, the highest per capita producer of plastic waste, depended on China to deal with 95 percent of its plastic waste.

The Commission is also considering a tax on virgin plastics to make recycled plastics more attractive. Low oil prices mean new plastics are much cheaper to produce than recycled ones.

"It would be a gamechanger," Antonino Furfari, director of Plastics Recyclers Europe, said of a plastic tax.

In addition, EU countries agreed last December to raise recycling targets for other packaging materials — paper and cardboard, metals and glass — to 70 percent by 2030.

Two-speed recycling

All these steps are still pretty far into the future, however, and in the meantime, some EU countries are finding it easier to deal with the new Chinese limits than others.

Countries like the Netherlands, which segregates all of its waste into separate streams, have been relatively unaffected. "The quality of collection in the Netherlands is very good and we can sell it very well," said Hans van de Nes, director of Dutch waste management company Sortiva.

Most EU countries collect plastic with metal, which helps reducing collection costs and maintains relatively high quality, but the U.K., Ireland, Greece, Romania and Malta allow a mix of metal, plastics, glass, cardboard and paper in the same bag. That produces low-quality waste that is difficult to sell.

Ireland, the highest per capita producer of plastic waste, depended on China to deal with 95 percent of its plastic waste and is now coping with a waste crisis, according to local reports.

The U.K. is one of the EU's largest waste exporters and lacks recycling capacity at home. "There is more stock than we would normally have. I think that the China import ban is contributing to this. Is it a crisis? I can’t answer that one yet," said Simon Ellin, CEO of the Recycling Association in the U.K.

British recyclers hope that the glut of material resulting from the Chinese ban, combined with the risk of not being able to export waste to the EU after Brexit, will prompt the government to overhaul its approach to waste management in its Resources and Waste Strategy, due later this year. “If it’s a short-term pain for the longer term gain, we’re all for it,” Ellin said.

But for the moment, the U.K. is still sending its waste abroad.

New destinations

Indeed, as Beijing's ban bites, some countries — including many in the EU, as well as the U.S. and Australia — are looking for other outlets in Asia to accept their waste overflow.

Provisional data from the Bureau of International Recycling, shared with POLITICO, show that between the last quarter of 2016 and that of 2017, Malaysia's imports of plastic scrap more than doubled to 180,000 tons. Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India show similar trends. There is no data yet for the first month of this year.

In response, some Asian countries are clamping down on waste imports.

Last month, Vietnam stopped issuing waste import permits. The Malaysian government passed a law last year obliging waste importers to have environmental permits, but so far this is little enforced: "We really don’t know what comes in," said Mageswari Sangaralingam of the Consumers' Association of Penang. "Enforcement is the issue."

Still, Asian countries only account for half a million tons of global plastic scrap imports — less than one-third of what Europe once shipped to China.

Meanwhile on the Continent, the garbage glut has caused waste prices to plummet, causing environmental advocates and some in the industry to complain that much of it will end up in incinerators for energy production.

"We're going to pick only the plastic we can sell, and the rest will go to incinerators," said Gennevieve, the recycling director at Veolia. "It's making energy, but it's not making new materials."

Incinerators are built to handle mixed municipal waste. Too much plastic — which releases more heat when burned — has a corrosive impact on machinery, meaning that waste-burning plants are also struggling with the oversupply.

Some countries are turning to a cheaper option: landfilling.

The revised Landfill Directive, agreed upon by EU institutions last December, capped landfilling at 10 percent of all municipal waste by 2035 but allowed European countries with high landfill rates an extra five years to comply. Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Romania and Slovakia all landfilled more than half of their waste in 2014 according to Eurostat.

The EU's garbage can still be sent east, but to Eastern Europe instead of East Asia.

Bulgaria, which in 2014 landfilled 82 percent of its waste, has very low taxes on burying garbage.

"They could become the landfill of Europe," said Ella Stengler, director of waste-to-energy plants federation CEWEP. "Waste always find the cheapest way."

This article is part of a series on the circular economy, Getting Wasted.