It’s a bustling, crowded and incomprehensibly dirty main street, crossed by the occasional stray dog, partly blocked by a broken-down truck, and frequently scarred by black spots where, I’m later told, unrecyclable plastics were burned in the night. Above me, plastic bags are captured by the wind, floating on the breeze. But what I find most striking about Wen’an is this: there’s nothing green. It’s a dead zone. It wasn’t always this way. Twenty-five years ago, Wen’an was bucolic – an agricultural region renowned for its streams, peach trees and simple, rolling landscape. The people who knew it then sigh when they recall the fragrant soil, the fishing and the soft summer nights. Engage a local in conversation and within minutes you’ll hear about how you should've come in the old days. This was back before the business of Wen’an was the business of recycling automobile bumpers, plastic bags and bleach containers. Back when the frogs and crickets were so loud they drowned out human conversation, back before the development of the plastics recycling trade plasticized the lungs of men in their 20s. According to the most recent statistics, provided by the China Plastics Processing Association, in 2006 the country was home to roughly 60,000 small-scale, family-owned workshops devoted to recycling plastic. Of those, 20,000 are concentrate in Wen’an County. In other words: Wen’an County isn’t just the heart of northern China’s scrap plastics industry; it is the Chinese scrap plastics industry. And because China is the world’s largest scrap plastics importer and processor, it’s fair to say that Wen’an County is at the heart of the global scrap plastics trade. A labourer looks up as she sorts plastic bottles at a garbage recycling centre in Hefei, Anhui province May 20, 2014. Photograph: Jianan Yu/Reuters The precise details of how Wen’an was transformed into a global plastics recycling centre are lost to history. Still, as we chat with the locals, it becomes clear that it was accidental rather than part of a grand plan. “Someone started doing it,” explains one local who has worked in the industry for years. “He made money, so more people did it. The government saw it as a good source of tax revenue and encouraged the industry. It was random.”After lunch Josh and I are driven out of central Wen’an to visit a plastics recycling factory with two representatives of one of the county’s biggest processors. As we bounce down the road, one of them tells us that most of Wen’an’s plastics businesses are located in around 50 villages that spill across the rural, unconnected county.
source:- The Guardian, July 16,2014