China to put strict restrictions on imports of scrap steel and aluminium from July 2019

According an update from the environment ministry of China, the country will restrict imports of scrap steel and aluminium from July 1, 2019. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment statement said that the ministry will move scrap steel and aluminium from an unrestricted import list of solid waste products usable as raw materials to a restricted import list.

China is taking a strong environmental stand to free the country from waste dumped by other countries. The statement said that relevant departments were working on formulating standards for recycled copper and aluminium.

The statement also added that copper and aluminium scraps, fit to be raw materials meeting relevant national standards would not be considered as solid waste. Those will be imported as regular goods. As China tightened the ban on solid waste imports and set solid benchmarks on it, the country’s imports of solid waste fell more than half between January and mid-November 2018 compared with the same period of 2017. 

The tight benchmarks on waste imports are part of a “war on pollution” started by China in 2017 in order to clean up the sky as well as the economy from dumping and encourage domestic firms to recycle and compel recyclers to source scraps domestically.