''The government has asked the scrap processors to report to the government about whether the methods they use are harmless or not, but usually the scrap processors don't bother,'' he said. ''In the past, the scrap industry has been a mess. The government is now making rules for them to follow.'' Felipe Tan, who used to own a scrap auction yard in Guangdong Province in southern China and a factory that sliced open secondhand telephone cables to extract the copper, said that he left the business after being undercut by smaller companies with dubious business practices. ''We got competitors coming in who were burning cables, throwing scraps into the river,'' Mr. Tan said. The Bureau of International Recycling, a Brussels-based trade association with 500 members, including many of the world's largest scrap and waste management companies, supports greater regulation in China, said Francis Veys, the group's director general. Tighter supervision should result in a cleaner environment in China, he said, by making it harder for less scrupulous companies to dump almost anything in containers and send it across the ocean. It will also force companies to do more work in places like the United States and Europe, separating trash from scrap before shipment, Mr. Veys added. ''We are very much in favor of controls,'' he said. The may prompt China to shift its imports to rely less on Europe, where regulators have been quick to work with other countries that want to restrict trash imports, Mr. Veys said. He predicted that China might wind up depending on the United States for a greater share of its imports as a result, although trans-Pacific scrap shipments are already causing problems for American smelters that have found it tough to find scrap for their own operations.
''The government has asked the scrap processors to report to the government about whether the methods they use are harmless or not, but usually the scrap processors don't bother,'' he said. ''In the past, the scrap industry has been a mess. The government is now making rules for them to follow.'' Felipe Tan, who used to own a scrap auction yard in Guangdong Province in southern China and a factory that sliced open secondhand telephone cables to extract the copper, said that he left the business after being undercut by smaller companies with dubious business practices. ''We got competitors coming in who were burning cables, throwing scraps into the river,'' Mr. Tan said. The Bureau of International Recycling, a Brussels-based trade association with 500 members, including many of the world's largest scrap and waste management companies, supports greater regulation in China, said Francis Veys, the group's director general. Tighter supervision should result in a cleaner environment in China, he said, by making it harder for less scrupulous companies to dump almost anything in containers and send it across the ocean. It will also force companies to do more work in places like the United States and Europe, separating trash from scrap before shipment, Mr. Veys added. ''We are very much in favor of controls,'' he said. The may prompt China to shift its imports to rely less on Europe, where regulators have been quick to work with other countries that want to restrict trash imports, Mr. Veys said. He predicted that China might wind up depending on the United States for a greater share of its imports as a result, although trans-Pacific scrap shipments are already causing problems for American smelters that have found it tough to find scrap for their own operations.
china_economy_in_1993-1999_2003_2004_2008_2012.docx