In Bangdong Village, Yunnan, Matthew Chitwood wanted to do his part to keep the stunning mountainous area clean during his two-year residency as a China fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs. One day he took his empty beer bottles to a local convenience shop for recycling, but the owners would not accept them. He was told to dump them over the embankment. Looking down the slope at the accumulated piles of broken furniture, soggy socks, food waste, and crushed soda cans entangled with plastic bags, Matt refused. Later, Matt’s friends flung his bottles into the gully. He related his frustrating recycling attempt to Mao Da, the founder of China Zero Waste Alliance, who told Matt that “rural trash management itself is a misnomer… It’s really just trash relocation.”

Usually after dinner, Mr. Ma would take off his shirt, shut the door, and begin work making plastic pellets from scrap. But tonight, he sits in his darkened yard staring at two SUV-sized plastic processing machines and a bundle of colorful scrap plastic. No lights are on, no machines grind, and no familiar theme song of CCTV-1 plays in the background. Walking through other villages in Wen’an County, more men meander around their yards filled with the same idle processing machines and mini-mountains of scrap plastic. Most have never studied English, but they are fluent in the language of plastics, sprinkling words like ABS, PP, and PVC into their conversations. They are the owners of small plastic scrap recycling workshops that were once booming—but are now silent.