China, environmental policy, international waste trade, recycling 1 | INTRODUCTION The global trade of waste and scrap is becoming increasingly a flow of waste from developed to developing countries, growing 500% over the two decades since 1992 (Kellenberg, 2015). Proponents of the waste trade maintain that importers can benefit by gaining access to cheap, recycled input materials. Opponents claim that waste importers lack the capacity to effectively manage waste imports. By exporting to these countries, the costs of proper disposal are avoided resulting in "waste havens", which are a special case of the pollution haven. China is by far the world's largest importer of non-hazardous waste, accounting for 22% of the global waste imports in 2014 (UN Comtrade, 2016). This type of waste import is slated for recycling and/or recovery and thereby serves as an input to production. Hence, this type of trade should be in principle no different from trade in intermediate inputs. However, poor quality (e.g., contaminated) waste shipments and waste smuggling were a problem. A concern was the cost of sorting imposed on domestic manufacturing, and the associated environmental impact of the unwanted wastes (Flower, 2016). In response to the problem of poor quality wastes and smuggling, China adopted policies that target the flow of unwanted, poor quality wastes that are costly to recover or dispose. As part of the response, China launched Operation Green Fence (OGF) from 1 February to 31 November 2013. The main objective of the 10-month-long policy intervention was to enforce waste trade policies already adopted by China and thereby restrict illegal hazardous waste imports. In practice, this entailed a marked increase in inspection efforts and policing activity at the border. This paper assesses the impact of OGF on the global, non-hazardous waste trade. 1 We study the non-hazardous waste trade because China has a ban on all hazardous waste imports. We focus on two 1 The international trade of hazardous waste is of course also an important and related issue; see Baggs (2009) and Kellenberg (2015) for a description of this type of waste trade.