Operation National Sword

The Operation National Sword (ONS) was a policy initiative launched in 2017 by the government of China to monitor and more stringently review recyclable waste imports.^[1] By 1 January 2018, China had banned 24 categories of solid waste and had also stopped importing plastic waste with a contamination level of above 0.05 percent, which was significantly lower than the 10 percent that it had previously allowed.^[2] Before the policy, China was importing the vast majority of recyclables from North America and Europe for two decades. This practice of buying recyclables brought raw materials for the growing industrial capacity of China, but also brought a lot of contaminated recyclables which ended up accruing in China, causing other environmental concerns such as air and water pollution.

China had first brought awareness of its intention to limit its imports of contaminated waste and recyclables back in 2013, through its Operation Green Fence program, that consequently impacted western waste exporters negatively.^[3] The later ONS policy was interpreted as an international relations move by China against Western countries.^[4] The policy caused a ripple effect in the global recyclables market, causing major pile ups in Western countries who had been collecting lower quality recyclables in single-stream recycling, and displacing some of those recyclable to other countries, mostly in South East Asia, like Vietnam and Malaysia.