Business Column: China's mighty migrating mandate

What happens in China, doesn’t always stay in China. In fact, when it comes to tough new garbage and recycling restrictions, they may migrate elsewhere sooner than you might think.

For example, Shanghai is one of the world’s largest cities with 26.9 million people. It is suffocating under mountains of trash its residents generate daily. It lacks an effective recycling and disposal system.

“Instead, it has trash pickers to sift through the waste, plucking out whatever can be reused,” The Economist magazine reported earlier this month. “As people get wealthier, fewer of them want to do such dirt...