Former Times

摘要

By 1989, exporting recovered plastics became an integral part of the burgeoning plastics recycling industry. Post-commercial and post-consumer plastics, as well as industrial scrap, were being shipped abroad with increasing frequency, primarily from West Coast ports to Pacific Rim markets, as, in most cases, it was cheaper to export from the West Coast than to ship inland or to the East Coast. And, for such materials as post-consumer or post-commercial polyethylene film, domestic markets were non-existent, thus the commodity ended up overseas. Being a relatively new venture, the exporting of recovered plastics generated an aura of mystery and uncertainty, as stories surfaced of extremely low wages being dished out for third-world processing efforts (some industry experts claimed that workers in mainland China were only getting paid 16 cents a day), the disappearances of rejected loads in Hong Kong, or that U.S. commercial sorting operations were burning the plastics they couldn't sell.