The Indian government announced a ban on plastic waste imports on Wednesday. This follows China's import prohibition in 2017, leaving Western countries with dwindling markets interested in their millions of tons of plastic.
Between 1988 and 2016, the United States exported 26.7 million tons of plastic. For over 25 years, the U.S. and many other countries relied on China to take most of that in. When China's ban went into effect last year, it left the U.S. to question what to do with its roughly 68 million tons of recycling now generated annually. According to a 2018 study published in Scientific Advances, China took in 45 percent of the world's scrap plastic between 1988 and 2016, and the ban will have displaced 111 million metric tons of plastic waste globally by 2030.
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