The WSJ has published a great piece highlighting the wonders of free markets. In the recent past, U.S manufacturers and consumers sent their waste to China. China took this combination of useful elements and garbage and extracted some reusable materials such as steel. Recently, China has announced that it will no longer accept such U.S exports of toxic materials. Why? Siqi Zheng and I provide an answer in this 2017 JEP paper.
From the basic laws of supply and demand, given that China no longer demands these materials; the equilibrium price of these used materials has fallen. The WSJ discusses how this is creating a boom in the U.S for businesses that can think about to use this "waste". A key idea in ecological economics is how to transform one sector's output into a productive input. So, if a restaurant creates used cooking oil from frying food and this cooking oil can be used by a car to power it , then this is a closed loop ecological cycle.
The article in the WSJ goes on to discuss the capital investments that the new U.S firms will need to make to effectively use the cheap recycled material as inputs in their production process. I view this piece to be highly optimistic about the nimbleness of the U.S economy in the face of changing market conditions.