For all the campaigns encouraging people to recycle more, few lay out exactly what happens to our recyclables once they go into the blue bin. Rather than our milk jugs magically reincarnating into toys on their own, for nearly three decades American recyclables were shipped cheaply to China, where they could be sold and given new shape.

That worked well enough, until China started cracking down. With dirty waste continuing to appear in imported recyclables, the rising cost of labor, and an abundance of the country’s own potentially recyclable waste, China no longer had the same financial and environmental incentives to accept the world’s waste.

Within the recycling community, there had been rumblings that China might change its policies, but the force of Operation National Sword, announced in July 2017, still came as a surprise. Going into full effect last March, it banned 24 types of scrap and implemented much stricter and more rigorous contamination standards which have been described as “impossible to reach.” As a result, local governments and the recycling industry are now facing an unprecedented recycling crisis, especially in plastics.

To put the impact of this current crisis into the context of past waste crises — like the Love Canal Disaster, where a residential neighborhood was built on a toxic waste dump with disastrous consequences, leading to the formation of the EPA’s Superfund program — and to understand how the effects of this policy are being felt across the United States, The Goods spoke to Kate O’Neill, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. Specializing in global environmental politics and the global politics of waste, her upcoming book Waste explores the extent to which waste can be a resource, and she has written and spoken extensively about the recycling trade with China.

What’s the history of the US sending recyclables to China?

China imported most of the world’s scrap, the good stuff as well as the more problematic, especially as its industry started to boom in the late ’90s and early 2000s. It was also connected with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. That was a period where China’s growth started booming. It was shipping goods to Europe and the States and that enabled a cheap process of shipping the scrap back to China in the holds of the ships that had brought all the stuff over. So that made it cheaper to ship to China than, say, to ship recycling across the country. And China was the market — that’s where it went to be used. We were shipping it to China because there was demand from its manufacturing sector because it wasn’t producing enough virgin plastic. So there was an economic rationale.

Is it that China doesn’t need our recyclables now that they have enough of their own?

It produces plastics for its domestic market and has a lot of plastic scrap of its own to recycle. This is very similar to the dynamics with electronic waste, because China imported a lot of that for a while, and illegally for quite a while too, and then started really cleaning up its recycling villages and creating more industrial parks for domestic recycling. It’s trying to do the same with plastics.

I also think Beijing is very concerned about their environmental quality and image overseas. As China is taking on this role as the world’s economic superpower, there are aspects that are not just pure economics or military power, but a sort of leadership by example. We see it with efforts in China to combat climate change. I also think that they were very concerned about being seen as the world’s dump site.

How do past rumblings and claims of crisis compare to now? Is the shit hitting the fan?

Oh, the shit’s hitting the fan. Operation Green Fence was the 2013 effort to just start getting exporting countries to clean their recycling, their plastics in particular. That sent ripples, but that was more enforcing existing legislation, it wasn’t a severe cut in contamination limits. The recycling industry saw it as more of a, “Well, let’s kind of clean up our act at the collection stage and not bother the consumers with this.” What happened was that suddenly a whole cleaning services industry sprang up in Southeast Asia, so you knew you could ship it to Malaysia where it would be cleaned if it didn’t meet China’s specifications.

Absolutely no one thinks they’re going to lift this restriction at any point, and it’s really been exacerbated by the trade war with the US. [China has] had periodic disruptions, just temporary ones, on the import of other kinds of scrap like iron, copper, and aluminum. But there’s demand in their own recycling industries for that so it’d be tricky for Beijing to say no to importing that kind of scrap. But plastics now, no one sees any lifting on those restrictions anytime soon.

It seems like this is a type of crisis we’ve never had to face before, but based on impact does it compare to anything else?

Only nuclear waste. Obviously it’s not the same as a widespread nuclear waste accident, but I think it’s the most widespread, and I would definitely call this the most high-profile and prolonged period I’ve seen waste in the global press in many, many years.

Thinking back over early waste crises, again, it’s not quite the same danger to human health, but it’s on par with Love Canal and those big events in the ’60s and ’70s. We’ve really been displacing those risks — out of sight, out of mind — either to poor minority communities in the case of hazardous waste, or now to displacing our plastic and paper waste to communities where — although it’s used in China — it was being disassembled and reprocessed by people who are very much being exposed to the worst risks.

How is this going to start impacting our lives here in the US?

It already has in so many ways. There’s the ripple effect for our lives and also globally. Initially the plan was just to divert the plastics to different places like Southeast Asia. That has not been working because countries like Malaysia and Thailand have become overwhelmed with plastic and stopped importing. India just announced it would not take plastics, so the quest for markets is still ongoing.

There’s a lot of campaigns for consumer education, getting rid of what the industry calls “wish cycling” [the well-intentioned attempt to recycle nonrecyclables, which causes contamination and more waste] and encouraging people to properly wash recyclables. You’ve got a shift away from single-stream recycling, when you put everything into the one big container, to multiple stream, where you’re separating recyclables into different containers.

We’re seeing an increase in landfilling, and because most states have fees for landfills, that’s creating an additional expense [for municipalities]. Plastics went from [selling for] like $300 a ton at their peak to now where you almost have to pay to get rid of them. Municipalities are cutting back on their recycling and what they will pick up, some places have stopped recycling altogether. This includes not just plastic but also glass, not because it was ever exported to China but because it’s difficult and expensive to recycle in the first place, so when you’re losing money because of plastics you’re not going to keep propping up a real economic loss generator like glass.

After years of hearing that we should recycle more, it’s pretty shocking to realize that we don’t have an infrastructure that can deal with all of it.

Recycling started in the ’70s and ’80s but it took a while to really spread and certainly to become kind of mandatory. [Over the past 20 years] there was no matching or building of recycling capacity along with the increase in recycling programs. I was living in New York in the mid ’90s and I remember when the recycling came in, that maps directly onto the years when we started exporting to China.

There’s an interesting debate warming up about if we should focus on improving our recycling or if that is going to enable our continued consumption of plastics. In other words, let’s not focus on recycling, let’s just focus on not using plastics. I personally think that we need to do both, and I’m concerned about this argument that we shouldn’t even be improving recycling, that we just need to focus on not using plastic, because that seems like a lot harder of a goal to reach.

Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here. 

An ear-shaped eraser. A $495 Versace t-shirt. An overwhelming number of printed silk scarves. And of course, the classics: postcards, mugs, and magnets. There are few places where such a mishmash of items makes sense besides in an art museum gift shop.

Contributing up to as much as a quarter of museum revenue, gift shops can be crucial to a museum’s bottom line, but their contributions aren’t only economic. These unique retail spaces help educate visitors, build the museum’s brand, and work to highlight — and sometimes even influence — the aspects of art the institution views as important.

Because basically, stores are like the ultimate cheat sheet — the more you see a piece of art referenced, the more important it probably is. Some visitors even “begin with the shop in order to find out what is important to see in the museum!” says Sharon Macdonald, director of the Center for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage and professor of social anthropology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Curating your experience

That’s because the same people responsible for putting together exhibitions have a say in what makes it onto store shelves. On a practical branding level, the museum’s curatorial team helps store buyers make sure colors are correct in reproductions and checks out copyrights, which can sometimes be impossible or overly expensive to secure.

But their role extends beyond that says Susan Tudor, vice president of the Museum Store Associations board of directors and the manager of visitor services and store buyer for the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida. Tudor says that before developing products, store buyers will meet with curatorial departments to learn “the takeaway and main points of an upcoming show.”

This collaboration is important because museums often consider their stores a space for continued learning and a second chance to stress the main point of an exhibition. Macdonald compares these retail settings to the final exhibit of a show.

The perfect example of that is a Rodin store developed by Michael Guajardo, the director of retail operations at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and his team. The recipient of an MSA Recognition Award, the store was transformed into the artist’s studio and painted in the same colors as the exhibition, with several design touches extending the gallery directly into the retail space.

These curatorial collaborations ensure that whether the store is commissioning its own products, working with brands, or buying them from the trade, their pieces connect directly or thematically to the collection — and many museums underscore that relationship by including information in product displays or packing about the artworks that inspired them.

Macdonald says that stores “have the potential to really enhance the [museum] experience by providing the opportunity for visitors to take something tangible away with them.” Through the magic of retail, stores give museums a way to build their brand and develop long term relationships with their visitors.

Things like books can help with further learning, but even items that aren’t obviously educational “can provide a hook for future remembering.” A visit to an art museum can last a few hours, but the memories that come with a pair of novelty slippers can last a lifetime. Museums are hoping that these memories will make you want to come back.

Today “art museums are a great source for original products, as 92 percent sell product that is custom-made to their location,” says Tudor. Beyond the close link these custom products have to their museum’s collection, they also offer better profit margins.

The tricky relationship between art and commerce

With its title, the 2010 Banksy film Exit Through The Gift Shop gave a nod to the complicated relationship between art and commerce. What began in the late 1800s as a small box of reproductions or counter with a limited selection of items has bloomed into a much larger retail phenomenon filled with glossy art books, printed scarves, and ethically sourced jewelry.

Because for all of their curatorial efforts and goals to extend learning experiences, stores are a commercial enterprise. The amount that a store contributes to the bottom line “depends on the institution, but it is sizeable,” says Tudor. Guajardo estimates that big exhibits featuring popular artists and topics can add “anywhere from 25 to 70 percent” to his store’s total year-end sales compared to a “typical year” where sales typically reach just “over $2 million.”

After operation costs, any profit a museum store makes goes back to its institution, and based on MSA numbers, store contributions typically account for as little as 5 percent all the way up to a full quarter of the museum’s annual revenue. Large donations, grants, and government money often comes with rules about how cash can be spent, points out Guajardo, making shops an important source of unrestricted funds. Though shoppers might not realize it, their purchases are crucial in helping to fund underserved museum initiatives.

Why seeing a painting on keychain lets you know it’s important art

Shoppers might also not be aware just how influential stores can be in shaping what artworks we understand as important. That’s thanks to subconscious magic of the mere-exposure effect, a psychological phenomenon where repeated exposure to something enhances people’s attitudes towards it. Though there are skeptics of the effect’s strength, even they admit that repeatedly seeing an artwork (if it isn’t truly terrible) is one factor that can influence our perception of what counts as Great Art.

Who and what gets to be “important,” and thus featured heavily in museums, has always been contentious. Back in 1989 the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous activist group of feminist artists, created a poster that asked: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Pointing out that less than five percent of the artists in the museum’s modern art galleries were women, while 85 percent of the collection’s nudes were female, the image is a famous example of museums getting called out for the homogeneity of their collections. If a collection lacks diversity, so will its shop.  

In October, the Met opened its first exhibition of Native American art in its American wing, accompanied by a shop selling work made by Native American artisans. The shop was conceptualized by the exhibition curator and Marissa Harvey, the general merchandise and sourcing manager for the Met Museum Store. The exhibition is noteworthy because it shows an expanding institutional understanding of whose art counts as American, and the products sold can be seen as part of that effort to boost visibility and perceived value.

Beyond tracking visitor numbers, an exhibit’s popularity can also be gauged using the commercial success of the accompanying store, and Harvey envisions that because of how customers are reacting to the products, additional pieces will soon be developed for the larger shop, creating more opportunities for visitors to be exposed to and engage with Native American artwork.

Because again, for all of its educational aspirations, a museum store is still a store, which means customer purchasing power reigns supreme. Though there are artworks “curatorial might not think [are] important… our public is telling us that they are,” says Tudor, who like Guajardo and Harvey has a background in the for-profit retail world.

Straying too far from the lessons of traditional retail to focus solely on curatorial vision can mean missing out on sales and opportunities to engage with visitors, which is why museum retailers pay very close attention to the requests that are made, both in terms of specific artworks and types of products.

Giving the customers what they want

In recent years, wearables like scarves and jewelry have become especially popular, giving museums the chance to work their artworks and products into people’s everyday lives. Larger trends, like a growing demand for ethically or locally made goods, also guide the decisions made by museum buyers.

As an example, Harvey points out that until recently, frequent requests from Met Store customers for precious metal jewelry had largely gone unserved. This year the store launched a line that uses fair trade gemstones and ethically sourced metals, and jewelry sales are now trending 25 percent ahead of last year.

Harvey, who was hired near the end of 2017, says that by applying a methodological retail mindset to product selection, after “quite a few years” of not returning a profit back to the museum, this year the Met Store is expected to do so.

With a growing diversity of products like household goods, toys, books, and wearables, museums are now testing new ways to attract customers and expand their influence. Though MSA numbers indicate that art museums still average less than two percent of their sales online, some places like the Met Store are looking to expand into e-commerce in the hopes of engaging with different kinds of shoppers.

In 2017, the MSA even jumped into Black Friday shopping season, debuting Museum Store Sunday which boosted that day’s net sales by 60 percent and museum visitors by 37 percent compared to the previous year. In 2018, over 700 museum stores are expected to participate.

Because beyond all the responsibility that art museum stores have to financially contribute to their institution and help curators further communicate their vision, Tudor says stores are just a great way to keep visitors hanging around a little longer and interacting with the art. That’s because, no matter how intimidating people might find museums or how much (or little) they like the artworks themselves, there’s always one guarantee.

“Everyone loves to shop.”

Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here.