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Once collected, recyclables are sold to workshops for reprocessing. While there are many large licensed reprocessing facilities, the industry is dominated by small family-run enterprises. The size of these smaller companies allows them to develop highly specialized, niche services, making them the go-to destination for specific recyclables. Further, their business costs are far lower than licensed facilities because they are often looser with safety and environmental concerns. Licensed companies must responsibly dispose of excess nonrecyclable waste, while unregulated firms burn anything that cannot be recycled or dump them in improvised landfills. These unregulated practices pollute heavily and often destroy local land and waterways while introducing serious health issues to workers and their communities.
China is turning to controversial incineration plants to deal with its enormous buildup of waste. According to the government, there is up to seven billion tons of waste buried around the country’s major cities. Shenzhen is tackling this problem by building the world’s largest waste-to-energy incineration plant. The plant is expected to burn 5,000 tons of waste a day, converting a third of that into useable electricity. Although the plant produces energy and adds a renewable component with its solar panel rooftop, incineration plants release vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere – and China plans to build 300 of them over the next three years.
Despite easing the burden, incinerators do not solve the root problem of inefficient recycling and waste management practices and continue to draw the ire of local populations worried about the environment. For example, plans to build an incinerator in Guangdong were scrapped after mass protests in April 2015. Nonetheless, Beijing seems to recognize the necessity to reduce waste, as it announced the creation of pilot urban mining facilities in dozens of cities to extract usable material from waste.

https://www.chinabusinessreview.com/...ling-industry/