Southeast Asian nations are facing increased dumping of waste from industrialised nations, with Malaysia and the Philippines threatening to send back trash to countries of origin.
Manila has recalled its ambassador and other senior diplomats from Canada after Filipino officials said Ottawa had failed to meet a deadline last week for removing tonnes of waste that it sent to the Philippines six years ago.
The region has seen a spike in imports of mainly plastic waste after China last year stopped importing refuse for recycling to cut down on pollution.
Waste imports into countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam in 2018 were mainly from the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, Belgium and Canada.
“We do not want to be called the world’s dumping ground,” Malaysian Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin told a news conference on Friday. “We will send the waste back to the country of origin.”
The industrialised nations that shipped their waste to booming local recycling businesses would have to bear the cost in removing and taking back the trash, she said.
Yeo’s comments came a week after 187 countries adopted amendments to the Basel Convention, a 1989 treaty that aims to reduce the movement of plastic and hazardous waste across national borders.
Those amendments, approved during a conference in Geneva this month, would enter into force on Jan. 1, 2021 and require nations that export plastic waste to first obtain permission from countries receiving the trash.
Before it restricted waste imports, China took in about 45 per cent of the world’s scrap plastic, according to a 2018 report from Science Advances, a journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
But when Beijing enacted a national policy that phased in restrictions on imports of recyclable paper and plastic in January 2018, it caused scrap prices to plummet and turned Southeast Asian nations into primary importers of plastic waste.
“Plastic waste from industrialised countries is literally engulfing communities in Southeast Asia, transforming what were once clean and thriving places into toxic dumpsites,” Von Hernandez, global coordinator of the Break Free from Plastic movement, an alliance of NGOs, said in a statement last month.
“It is the height of injustice that countries and communities with less capacity and resources to deal with plastic pollution are being targeted as escape valves for the throwaway plastic generated by industrialised countries,” he said.
After the Chinese ban went into effect, Malaysia received more imported waste than any other nation, taking in 750,000 metric tonnes of plastic in 2018, valued at more than 483 million ringgit (U.S. $116 million), according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), a trade association based in Washington, D.C.
China’s imports dropped from more than 600,000 tonnes per month in 2016 to 30,000 tonnes monthly since January 2018, ISRI said.
“Because of the plastic waste ban imposed by China, other countries made Malaysia as their main location to export the illegal plastic waste,” said Yeo, the Malaysian minister.
While squabbling with industrialised nations to reclaim their waste, many Southeast Asian nations have also taken action after they began imposing import restrictions around mid-2018.
Malaysia issues permanent ban
In July 2018, the Malaysian government revoked import permits for plastic waste. Three months later, authorities issued a permanent ban.
Malaysian authorities also launched a crackdown on unlicensed plastic recyclers. Officials arrested dozens of workers during police raids at illicit factories that were trying to cash-in on the global trade in plastic waste – valued at more than U.S. $5 billion per year.
Kuala Lumpur began moving to combat plastic waste after officials earlier said that 24 containers of plastic waste from Spain had been smuggled into Malaysia at Port Klang, Selangor, using a falsified customs declaration.
Since 2017, Malaysia has been buying discarded plastic from Britain, Australia and the United States, overrunning dozens of illegal factories with un-recyclable scrap that is often burned surreptitiously and releases chemicals such as dioxins, which could harm the nervous system.
In February, the Malaysian government said it had shut down 139 unlicensed plastic recycling factories since last July.
Indonesia: household waste mingled in
Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest country, imported 35,000 tonnes of plastic waste per month from Germany, Australia and the United State in late-2018 – a sharp increase from 10,000 tonnes monthly in late-2017, according to trade ministry figures.
Those three countries were the leading exporters of plastic waste in Southeast Asia, which accepted more than 705 million pounds of plastic trash last year, according to Rosa Vivien Ratnawati, director general of waste management at the environment ministry in Jakarta.
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This article was published on http://www.eco-business.com