Is China the Cause of South Korea's Waste Problem?

In July 2017, China threw the global recycling industry into disarray by announcing the “National Sword Policy.” In effect since January 2018, the policy banned import of 24 types of waste (now expanded to 32 [https://phys.org/news/2018-11-china-imports.html]) and strengthened quality control, rejecting plastic scrap that wasn’t at least 99.5 percent pure. China had been importing around half of the world’s recyclable plastic, including hundreds of thousands of tons annually from its neighbor