> Just to be clear, it wasn't being recycled when we were shipping it to China either. It was just going into their landfills instead of our landfills.

Source? My impression was that china was buying the recycling from us[1]. Sure, some of that was not recycleable and ended up getting burned/landfilled/dumped in a river, but they weren't intending on just landfilling it.

[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/741283641