China’s 2018 National Sword Policy ended the country’s role as the recycling bin for the world’s post-consumer plastic scrap and threw global recycling markets into disarray. Reeling on the other side of the globe, American cities were forced to store, incinerate, or throw collected recyclables into landfills. Faced with a rapidly diminishing landfill capacity, China is consolidating and formalizing its domestic recycling industry, an expensive and daunting task.

Stacy Flynn is intimately familiar with the ins and outs of fashion’s supply chain. She knows how clothes travel the world as they move through the stages of design, textile production, and garment formation before landing in your local retail store. For years, she managed these supply chains for Dupont and Target, making regular visits to suppliers in China who showed her pristine manufacturing facilities where she examined textile and clothing samples and discussed prices and delivery. Nothing could have prepared her for when she returned in 2010 with a Seattle-based startup to tour smaller textile and dyeing factories, and saw the staggering pollution these second and third tier suppliers generated. Her guides told her that during periods of increased textile production, wastewater emissions turn the rivers deep unnatural hues and factory exhaust smothered the air outdoors and even indoors for the workers. 

At the initial epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, the daily output of medical waste soared five times its average volume — from about 40 tons to as much as 250 tons at the end of February. This overwhelmed Wuhan’s single specialized medical waste treatment plant, far exceeding its 50 tons-per-day processing capacity. As the pandemic progressed throughout China, it revealed the shortfalls in medical waste management capacity in many cities. At a news conference in Beijing in March, Zhao Qunying, director of the emergency management office of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, reported that 22 cities were operating over-capacity and 28 cities were working at full or near full load.

Some older Wuhan residents still talk about paddling across the city in their boats, traversing the 100-plus lakes that were once connected by a network of canals. This once-leisurely activity takes on different meaning today as citizens navigate some of the worst floods in decades. Hubei Province, where Wuhan is the capital, is among the 27 central and southern Chinese provinces affected by floods that have caused CNY 86 billion (USD $12.3 billion) in nationwide economic losses in June and July of this year.