Implications of China's foreign waste ban on the global waste paper trade networks for circular economy and sustainability

Abstract

To achieve the sustainable development goal, China banned the import of unclassified waste paper in 2017, known as China's import Ban (CIB) to influence the global waste paper trade. Here, we construct the global waste paper trade networks (GWPTN) to observe network characteristics from 2006 to 2020 and use Difference-in-Differences (DID) to test effects of CIB. Results show that CIB reduces the scale, transmission efficiency and stability of GWPTN and changes the network characteristics of major trading countries as network nodes. By constructing DID models with degree and Strength Centrality as dependent variables, it can be seen that although waste paper exporters affected by CIB have expanded export channels, the total amount of exports still shows a downward trend due to other waste paper importers being unable to replace China's position in GWPTN; Meanwhile, importers other than China import more waste paper, especially Asian importers close to China.