The whole point was that we were supposed to be recycling, not using more fossil fuels to ship it all back overseas to be possibly just burned or buried anyways. And at best the recycled material is shipped yet again overseas back to us in the form of new products. The best thing that's come from all this is that we finally know what actually happens to all that 'recycled' material.
My understanding was that our trade deficit with China meant that we had to send more shipping containers back to China and we filled them with relatively light recycling waste instead of simply sending them back empty. It was basically free transportation.
