When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September, Mao Yanmei, a migrant rural worker in Beijing, had no idea her newly started scrap metal business would be affected by what happened on Wall Street.

"We lost three years of savings within a month. I can do nothing but watch copper prices fall day-by-day," said the 28-year-old pointing to copper stockpiled in a corner of her mud-floored home in the city's southern suburbs.

A worker at a waste recycling center. The global downturn affected scrap dealers in China, with weak consumption demand and falling raw material prices.[China Daily]

The copper cost Mao 54,000 yuan when she bought it in early September this year. Now, it is worth less than 22,000 yuan.

The slump in China's waste recycling market is closely connected to the global economic downturn triggered by the US credit crisis, said Guan Aiguo, chairman of the China Resource Recycling Association.

"Falling raw material prices on the international market and fewer bulk commodity transactions, plus weakening export and domestic demand, dragged down waste prices," Guan said.

China's economy, which relies heavily on exports and investment, is experiencing a difficult time as its two-digit GDP growth declined to 9 percent in the third quarter.

The country's industrial output grew 8.2 percent year-on-year in October, the slowest pace of growth in seven years. That was down 3.2 percentage points from September, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Against a backdrop of slowing external demand, a growing number of factory closures have been reported in the country's manufacturing centers such as the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas.