KUT 90.5 – Austin’s NPR Station –
Sahadat Hossain, a civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, created the school’s Solid Waste Institute for Sustainability. He says China is an importer of recycled material from all over the world, and now the country has changed its rules governing the importation of that material. “They made a regulation that impurity in recycling cannot be more than 0.5 percent,” Hossain says. “Before that, it was around 20 percent. To get to the level of 0.5 percent is almost impossible.”