It may soon get harder and more expensive to recycle your solid waste. As the Associated Press reported, stockpiled recyclables are going nowhere these days:

It all stems from a policy shift by China, long the world’s leading recyclables buyer. At the beginning of the year it enacted an anti-pollution program that closed its doors to loads of waste paper, metals or plastic unless they’re 99.5 percent pure. That’s an unattainable standard at U.S. single-stream recycling processing plants designed to churn out bales of paper or plastic that are, at best, 97 percent free of contaminants such as foam cups and food waste.

The resulting glut of recyclables has caused prices to plummet from levels already depressed by other economic forces, including lower prices for oil, a key ingredient in plastics.

As one recycler commented, a bale of mixed paper was worth about $100 per ton a year ago, but now requires payment of $15 to dispose of it.

There may not be much we can do to get China to change its policy, particularly with Trump’s trade war raging. And it may not be a bad thing, from an environmental perspective, as anecdotal reports indicated that American companies had very little insight into what happened to recyclables once they were shipped off to China on empty freight vessels.

So Americans are likely to see higher prices for waste disposal rates soon, as companies renegotiate contracts with municipal governments. And we’re also likely going to have to be more methodical about how we recycle, such as by cleaning out bottles and cans better and separating recyclables into distinct bins by product type.