It has been a year since China put on the brakes for accepting recyclable materials, causing chaos and consternation among many communities which have scrambled to find other markets.

Although China is about 6,900 miles from Lehighton, the decision of the Chinese government to restrict what it will accept as recyclables has proximity impact on haulers and municipalities throughout the five-county Times News region as well as across the nation.

Late last month, the Kidder Township supervisors voted to suspend their recycling program because of the growing volume and soaring cost. On top of that, some residents refuse to follow the rules at the recycling center, leaving township officials with the unpleasant task of dealing with the mess left behind.

The program in Kidder will come to an end on April 30, meaning that residents will have precious time to find an alternative. Regrettably, this will probably mean that many residents will throw their recyclables in with their trash.

Weatherly borough and Penn Forest Township have also stopped their recycling programs.

What this says to me is that all of the attention that municipal government had given to the importance of recycling and its salutary effects on the environment goes down the drain — or in the dump.

Berger Sanitation in Bath, Northampton County, which serves households and businesses in the Lehigh Valley, initiated a $30-a-quarter recycling fee because of steep costs it was facing to get rid of recyclable materials. A letter to customers last year said the company had no choice except to pass along these dramatically increasing costs.

For more than a generation, the United States has been sending the bulk of its recyclables to China, but now waste-management companies have notified counties and municipalities all over the country that the market for these materials have virtually dried up.

What will happen, if, in fact, you haven’t seen it already is that the price of removing recyclables will increase, companies will become much stricter on what they will accept or they will exit the recycling business.

Recycling has always been one of the least lucrative parts of a hauler’s business. Several local companies confided that they historically have viewed recycling as a “loss leader,” providing the service as a way to win a municipality’s garbage business. That’s where the big bucks are.

Here’s the bottom line, ladies and gentlemen: We Americans will have to come to grips with a new normal. All those plastic water bottles, shopping bags and other materials that didn’t exist years ago have to go somewhere, and creating this much waste without a viable market means we will be confronted with a cost we have not faced before.

So why did China turn off the spigot? Was it part of the tariff tit-for-tat going on with the United States? Was it a strategic political move in a sinister international game of chess moves between two of the world’s Superpowers?

China’s official reason was to terminate the endless amount of contaminated and soiled plastics and other recyclables that were overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with a major environmental problem not of its own creation.

Despite all of the hoopla over recycling spurred by the first Earth Day in 1970, the best we have been able to achieve in the United States is removal of about 35 percent of waste volume. To attack the problem in a coordinated way will require a national, even global, effort.

Studies have indicated that big financial incentives are needed to entice manufacturers to use recycled content in their products.

Don’t get me wrong. Some companies have initiated green efforts, but they have been merely drops in an ocean of issues. For example, some hotels now have signs in rooms in which the guest can opt for a $10 food credit if he or she waives the daily changing of beds and towel replacements.

Some communities have begun to ban straws and plastic bags and charge for paper bags. Pennsylvania tried but failed numerous times to enact a “bottle bill” as neighboring New York did 36 years ago.

In the year since the Chinese pronouncement, its plastic imports have fallen by 99 percent, its imports of mixed paper have dropped by one-third, and while recycled aluminum and glass are affected, too, they are not nearly impacted as much as the other materials.

More plastics are winding up in landfills, incinerators and littering the environment. Across the country, municipalities, counties and private haulers are scrambling to find new markets and countries willing to take the glut that is building up.

Just as Kidder Township has done, communities from coast-to-coast have curtailed or completely halted their recycling programs. Others, such as Philadelphia, are burning the majority of their recyclables at a waste-to-energy facility, but this raises concerns about air pollution.

The only ray of hope in all of this is that it will force our leaders to come up with strategies to deal with this looming crisis, but, fair warning: It is going to cost us — big time.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com