KUALA LUMPUR - When Seah Kian Hoe was just 10 years old, he would jump on the back of his parent's small truck during school holidays and help them collect scrap, going door-to-door around neighborhoods in Malaysia's southern state of Johor. Taking their haul back to the family yard, they would spend hours separating the glass bottles, aluminum cans, discarded newspapers and metal. Seah now employs 350 people to help him run Heng Hiap Industries, one of Malaysia's top five plastic recycling businesses which processes about 40,000 tons of waste per year from both domestic and overseas suppliers. Thirty five years ago, it was just scavenging - a very different era compared to now, Seah said. I wanted to get into the recycling business and do it differently. Heng Hiap Industries is just one of the Southeast Asian plastics recycling companies gearing up to benefit from China's decision to ban imports of plastic waste from the start of 2018. Before the ban, which shocked many in the industry, China was the world's dominant importer of such waste. In 2016, it imported 7.3 million tons of waste plastics, valued at $3.7 billion, accounting for 56 percent of world imports. Over the past two decades, China was keen to suck in as much plastic waste as possible, helping feed its manufacturing expansion. But policy makers took action after a string of scandals involving unscrupulous players in the waste market. Misdemeanors included stuffing containers with mixed or toxic rubbish rather than the specific types labelled for recycling, and illegal smuggling of waste that was simply dumped in landfill. Plastic China, an award-winning documentary released in late 2016, ignited further public outrage by highlighting the human and environmental costs of the under-regulated, Wild West-