A Pyrrhic Victory? The Limits to the Successful Crackdown on Informal-Sector Plastics Recycling in Wenan County, China

Abstract

Wenan county in Hebei province was “North China’s plastic waste recycling capital,” home to around ten thousand informal enterprises that together processed millions of tons of waste plastic annually until they were finally shut down in 2011. Based on fieldwork in North China’s informal recycling sector and data from gazetteers, government documents, news articles, and Chinese blogs, this article sketches how the informal waste sector developed in Wenan since the 1980s and analyzes how local government approaches to the sector changed as the devastating pollution and health effects of the industry became increasingly apparent. While the 2011 crackdown finally eliminated the sector from Wenan county, it predictably resulted in scattering these polluting enterprises throughout the region to work in more covert conditions, contributing to a “race to the bottom” dynamic in the sector. The conclusion proposes an alternative policy approach to the problem and briefly evaluates a national-scale initiative against the sector being planned for 2016.