The story has been lost in the miasma of Donald Trump’s scandal-ridden presidency, but its implications for the U.S. and much of the West cannot be overstated. In April, after ending imports of 24 kinds of scrap last year, Beijing announced that it would be extending its ban to dozens of other materials. And while environmentalists have hailed the move as a “big win for global green efforts,” a rash of countries are suddenly scrambling to dispose of their recyclables.

Dianna Cohen of the Plastics Pollution Coalition believes that a plastics crisis has arrived.

“We suddenly have to deal with our own waste, basically, now,” she tells Robert Scheer. “And then, also, the costs of recycling are increasing, and you have to think about how many trucks are needed to create it, how widely it’s dispersed, et cetera. And that’s a big expense. And then plastic production—internationally, but [also] internally in the United States—is really ramping up right now, and it’s going to continue to explode. So we have a very big problem on our hands. It reminds me of that movie ‘Wall-E,’ or ‘Idiocracy,’ where people live in a world that’s just full of waste, it’s just a wasteland, like a garbage dump.”