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Hotel Booking Eager to become the world's workshop, but wary of becoming its trash bin along the way, China is laying plans for stricter regulation of the scrap industry.

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Travel Agency Under a regulation issued in mid-December, businesses shipping scrap to China will be required to register with Beijing by July 1 and get government approval. Chinese regulators have not yet said what standards they will set in deciding which companies may register.

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Cheap Hotel Chinese imports of steel scrap have nearly doubled in the last three years and are expected to double again in the next two years, as the steel industry has expanded even more rapidly than the rest of the fast-growing economy.

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Flight Booking In addition to steel scrap, imports of copper and other scrap have also increased, since it is considerably cheaper to remelt existing metal than to process raw ore.

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Travel Agent Meng Jianbin, the director of international cooperation at the Metallurgical Council of China for the Promotion of International Trade, a Chinese trade group, said that the scrap industry posed a continuing environmental problem.

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Hotel Chicago "The environment is better than before, but it still has not reached the best result," he said. "The scrap processors are using very old ways to do the scrapping, which is very harmful to the environment."

Online Booking Most of the processors are still small and medium-size companies with little money to invest in modern, less-polluting equipment, Mr. Meng said.

Travel Health Insurance "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."

Hotel Reservation 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.

London Hotel Booking "We got competitors coming in who were burning cables, throwing fiber scraps into the river," Mr. Tan said.

Discount Travel 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.

Orlando Hotel 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.

Booking Agency "We are very much in favor of controls," he said.

International Travel Medical The rules 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.

New York Hotel An environmental crackdown now in China would not be the first in the region. The scrap industry in greater China was centered in southern Taiwan in the 1980's, but shifted to Guangdong Province, up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, as Taiwan tightened environmental standards through the late 1980's. Guangdong, in turn, imposed tighter rules in the mid-1990's and shut many of the smaller scrapyards.

Online Travel Booking This prompted many scrap businesses, though not all, to move 800 miles north to Shanghai, Nanjing and cities along the lower Yangtze River, a region that is also a big center of steel production.

Travel Medical Insurance Much of the scrap is mixed with pig iron, produced from iron ore, to make the higher grades of steel that China's increasingly advanced economy needs in large quantities, said David P. Garcia, the managing director of Asia Iron Ltd., an iron ore company that has its operations in Nanjing and Australia but is based in Hong Kong.

Miami Hotel Some in China's scrap industry are skeptical that new government rules will have much effect. David Lo, the owner of one of the largest scrap-processing centers for copper and other nonferrous metals in southern China, said that it would not make financial sense to modernize by installing machines instead of relying on hand labor.

Air Deccan Booking The industry provides many jobs, he noted, and is so important to China that he doubted the government would do anything to disrupt it. "There is a lack of raw materials like copper," Mr. Lo said, "so China needs scrap."

Las Vegas Nevada Travel By Keith Bradsher
New York Times - 3/16/2004

Topic: Recycling

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