Economy
CityLab Daily: Can Recycling Bounce Back?
Also: How to kill 11,000 parking spaces, and the economic power of arts and culture.
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Waste case: Before 2018, about 40 percent of the United States’ paper, plastics, and other recyclables went to China. But early last year, that changed: China banned many scrap materials and tightened contamination standards, sending shock waves through the global recyclables market. Many municipal recycling programs in the U.S. have struggled to keep up with the waste they can’t ship away, sending more materials to incinerators or refusing curbside pickup altogether.