If you're wondering how the Olympics have changed China in a positive way, well, here is an example. Beijing is now running the nation's first near-infrared photo-detecting line to sort trash collected from the Olympic venues. After the games, this line will be used to process residential waste in the municipality.

As the Beijing Youth Daily described, the line sorts plastic bottles, plastic bags, PVC pipes, steel and paper perfectly, and it automatically bales every category of material.

The investor, Beijing Public Sanitation Group, spent 13 million yuan on the fully automatic line with daily processing capacity of 150 metric tons. "That's about how much 80 workers can process," the company said.

But, bottom line, what does this mean? I started doing some math: assuming the line will run 24-7, and each worker costs the company 100 yuan per 8-hour working day, the line will save 8.7 million yuan on labor cost a year. Even taking into account energy and maintenance costs, the investment should be easily paid off in two years.

Yes, China's labor is still much cheaper than the developed world. But wages are going up, and plastic recycling plants of visions are already applying more technologies than ever to improve efficiency. But I'm curious. How much of a cost advantage will an automated Chinese recycling factory have over its American counterpart? In other words, how will the trend of automation in the Chinese recycling industry revise the global flow of plastic scrap and impact global resin pricing?

What do you think?