PLASTIC POSER: Times are hard for Beijing's plastic recyclers as prices drop due to recent manufacturing malaise (XINHUA)

A lesser-known victim of China's recent manufacturing malaise is the European landfill, now in danger of swelling again. Having proudly trained householders to sort waste into color-coded bins for recycling, the EU finds that a recent inability to buy China's manufactured goods means China no longer needs recyclable plastic bottles and tin cans. Manufacturers here have saved up to 30 percent on raw material costs by turning plastic milk bottles and old desktop computer casing back into polyester and polymer.

A whole industry sprung up in Europe, of traders collecting, sorting and shipping waste to eager buyers in the East. A British plastics dealer I met in Beijing recently explained the sorry state that a 70-percent drop in prices has made of his business today, compared to a year ago when Chinese manufacturers were still eager buyers for Europe's waste plastic. In early 2008, Darren Oakes could have sold every container of waste plastics "20 times over" to hungry Chinese factories.

Last year Oakes, whose firm AWS has been shipping waste to China since it was formed in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 2000, had a deal with local councils in England to drill into landfills for plastic, so strong was the demand in China. But that deal has been mothballed: Chinese plastic prices are "microscopic" compared to those on offer when he came out a year ago. Europe's waste going unsold is potentially disastrous for EU green-thinking efforts to recycle. Consumers, having been forced to segregate waste, would stop doing so if they knew the plastic was being landfilled. Getting their goodwill back would be hard.

Collapse in demand from China may ultimately, however, force Europe to get its waste-recycling infrastructure into a more sustainable shape. That would be good for everyone, for Chinese workers are often forced to sort hazardous imported waste by hand, and for the environment, which suffers when the byproducts of waste are carelessly dumped.

Forced with nearly giving away their staple-earning bottles and cardboard boxes, some of Beijing's army of itinerant recyclers have moved upstream. Like the roving couple from Henan who I've met pedaling their tri-cart around apartment complexes in Chaoyang District, looking for unwanted household products. If it's good enough for re-use they'll patch it up and sell it on. Otherwise they'll gut the fridges and TVs for their saleable organs.

My Henan friends are into what's known in recycling business speak as WEEE—waste electrical and electronic equipment. There's valuable metals like copper and zinc in appliances—not to mention glass and phosphorous. The problem is though such materials need to be handled carefully, for the sake of humans and the environment: to gut a fridge you'll remove the foam first and capture ozone-depleting gases for which old fridges are notorious.

The Henan pair won't do this, because they don't know how. There are, however, proper, automated processes for doing all of this though, and it's still a profitable business in Europe, I've been told by Roger Morton, Commercial Director of Axion Recycling that sells on high grade polymers and other separated materials at its plants in Europe.

High prices driven by voracious demand from China meant he couldn't afford to get waste electronic appliances in Europe. Axion payments had to reflect the company's costs in complying with strict EU standards for waste disposal. Buyers in China were paying more—they used low-wage labor to sort the WEEE by hand—but those comparatively high prices "could not possibly have covered the costs of responsible disposal," says Morton.

A "huge drop" in exports of waste from the UK to China has made it more cost-effective to process plastic from fridges and computers at home, for sale to European manufacturers seeking quality and affordable plastic. Profits aren't as dramatic as those scored by selling to China, but it's a more sustainable business model, as prices stay steady and there won't be a mountain of unwanted waste plastic, as has happened since prices collapsed.

Sure he has commercial reasons but Morton makes a good point: Europe has been exporting its own waste problem to another continent, which is irresponsible. EU regulators have blind eyed the export of residues from Europe "which clearly should not be exported because of the lack of evidence of equivalent treatment standards overseas." Let's hope that, for environmental reasons, EU household waste doesn't go back to the landfill. But let's also hope the current crisis makes for a more responsible, and sustainable, way of recycling.

The writer is Irish and lives in Beijing