What happens to plastic after it is dropped in a recycling bin?
According to promotional materials from the US’ plastics industry, it is whisked off to a factory where it is seamlessly transformed into something new.
This is not the experience of Nguyen Thi Hong Tham, a 60-year-old Vietnamese mother of seven, living amid piles of grimy US plastic on the outskirts of Hanoi.
Illustration: Tania Chou
Outside her home, the sun beats down on a Cheetos bag, aisle markers from a Walmart store and a plastic bag from ShopRite, a chain of supermarkets in New Jersey, bearing a message urging people to recycle it.
Tham is paid the equivalent of US$6.50 a day to strip off the nonrecyclable elements and sort what remains: translucent plastic in one pile, opaque in another.
A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of US plastic are being shipped every year to poorly regulated developing nations for the dirty, labor-intensive process of recycling. The consequences for public health and the environment are grim.
A team of Guardian reporters in 11 nations has found that:
‧Last year, the equivalent of 68,000 shipping containers of US plastic recycling were exported to developing countries that mismanage more than 70 percent of their own plastic waste.
‧The newest hot spots for handling US plastic recycling are some of the world’s poorest countries, including Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia and Senegal, offering cheap labor and limited environmental regulation.
‧In some places, such as Turkey, a surge in foreign waste shipments is disrupting efforts to handle locally generated plastics.
‧ With these nations overwhelmed, thousands of tonnes of waste plastic are stranded at home in the US.
These failures in the recycling system are adding to a growing sense of crisis around plastic, a wonder material that has enabled everything from toothbrushes to space helmets, but is now found in enormous quantities in the oceans and has even been detected in the human digestive system.
Reflecting grave concerns around plastic waste, 187 countries last month signed a treaty giving nations the power to block the import of contaminated or hard-to-recycle plastic trash.
A few countries did not sign. One was the US.
A new Guardian series, United States of Plastic, is to scrutinize the plastic crisis engulfing the US and the world, publishing several more stories this week and continuing for the rest of this year.
“People don’t know what’s happening to their trash,” said Andrew Spicer, who teaches corporate social responsibility at the University of South Carolina and sits on his state’s recycling advisory board.
“They think they’re saving the world, but the international recycling business sees it as a way of making money. There have been no global regulations — just a long, dirty market that allows some companies to take advantage of a world without rules,” he said.
WHERE US RECYCLING LANDS
Plastic only came into mass consumer use in the 1950s, but in the Pacific Garbage Patch it is already thought to be more common than plankton.
Officials around the globe have banned particularly egregious plastic pollutants, such as straws and flimsy bags, yet the US alone generates 31.3 million tonnes of plastic waste each year, enough to fill Houston’s Astrodome stadium 1,000 times.
Of the 9 percent of US plastic that the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated was recycled in 2015, China and Hong Kong handled more than half: about 1.5 million tonnes of US plastic recycling every year.
They developed a vast industry of harvesting and reusing the most valuable plastics to make products that could be sold back to the Western world.
However, much of what the US sent was contaminated with food or dirt, or it was nonrecyclable and simply had to be landfilled in China.
Amid growing environmental and health fears, China in late 2017 shut its doors to all but the cleanest plastics.
Since the China ban, US plastic waste has become a global hot potato, ping-ponging from country to country.
An analysis of shipping records and US Census Bureau export data has found that the US is still shipping about 1 million tonnes per year of its plastic waste overseas, much of it to places that are already virtually drowning in it.
A red flag to researchers is that many of these nations ranked very poorly on metrics of how well they handle their own plastic waste.
A study led by University of Georgia researcher Jenna Jambeck found that Malaysia, the biggest recipient of US plastic recycling since the China ban, mismanaged 55 percent of its own plastic waste, meaning that it was dumped or inadequately disposed of at sites such as open landfills.
Indonesia and Vietnam improperly managed 81 percent and 86 percent respectively.
“We are trying so desperately to get rid of this stuff that we are looking for new frontiers,” said independent engineer Jan Dell, whose organization the Last Beach Cleanup works with investors and environmental groups to reduce plastic pollution.
“The path of least resistance is to put it on a ship and send it somewhere else — and the ships are going further and further to find some place to put it,” she said.
Take Vietnam. Minh Khai, a village on a river delta near Hanoi, is the center of a waste management cottage industry. Trash from across the world, inscribed in languages from Arabic to French, lines almost every street in this community of about 1,000 households.
Workers in makeshift workshops churn out recycled pellets amid toxic fumes and foul stench from the truckloads of scrap that are transported there every day.
Even Minh Khai’s welcome arch, adorned with bright red flags, is flanked by plastic waste on both sides.
Last year, the US sent 75,300 tonnes of plastic recycling to Vietnam. On the ground, the US’ footprint is clear: a bag of York Peppermint Patties from Hershey, with US labeling, and an empty bag from a chemical coatings manufacturer in Ohio.
“We’re really scared of the plastic fumes and we don’t dare to drink the water from underground here,” Nguyen Thi Hong Tham said, wearing thick gloves, a face mask and a traditional Vietnamese conical hat to protect herself from the sun. “We don’t have money, so we don’t have any choice but to work here.”
While the exact health effects of workers’ exposure to plastic recycling operations have not been well studied, the toxic fumes resulting from the burning of plastics or plastic processing can cause respiratory illness.
Regular exposure can subject workers and nearby residents to hundreds of toxic substances, including hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins and heavy metals, the effects of which can include developmental disorders, endocrine disruption and cancer.
Once the plastic is sorted by workers, others feed the scrap into grinders before putting it through densifiers that melt and condense the scrap so it can be molded into pellets.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phu in July last year ordered a tightening on scrap standards, and legal monthly imports were cut to one-10th of what they had been.
As of April, more than 23,400 shipping containers of scrap remained held up in customs.
However, business continues to boom in Minh Khai. Tham said that scrap is still arriving from Haiphong, northern Vietnam’s largest port, and other parts of the country every day, and records show a significant rebound in imports.
As nations such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand banned imports, records show the plastic waste fanning out to a host of new countries.
Shipments began making their way to Cambodia, Laos, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya and Senegal, which had previously handled virtually no US plastic.
Each month throughout the second half of last year, container ships ferried about 236 tonnes of US plastic scrap into one of the most dystopian, plastic-covered places of all: the Cambodian seaside town of Sihanoukville, where, in some areas, almost every centimeter of the ocean is covered with floating plastic and the beach is nothing but a glinting carpet of polymers.
“I cannot accept plastic being imported into our country,” resident Heng Ngy, 58, said.
Ngy and his wife live in a wooden house on stilts that seems to hover on a sea of plastic. A pungent stench wafts up to the open-aired rooms.
Cambodia’s waste problem is believed to stem from its own use of plastic and a lack of any system for dealing with it.
No one interviewed in Sihanoukville had any idea that plastic recycling was being exported from the US, and what happened to the plastic after it arrived is unclear.
Experts estimate that 20 to 70 percent of plastic entering recycling facilities around the globe is discarded because it is unusable — so any plastic being recycled at Sihanoukville would inevitably result in more waste there.
Alex Gonzalez-Davidson, cofounder of the Cambodian environmental organization Mother Nature, said that his organization had not been aware of the issue.
However, “if it works, they will bring more and more,” he said.
For now, shipments of plastic appear to have trailed off.
HOW WASTE FUELS A GLOBAL BUSINESS
How does plastic get from a curbside in the US to a village in Southeast Asia? Through a trading network that crosses oceans and traverses continents.
It is a network that is complex, at times nefarious, and in which few consumers understand their role. Now, that network is at a breaking point.
Plastic’s first stop on its months-long journey is a recycling facility where it is sorted into bales based on its type — soda bottles, milk jugs and clamshell-style containers, for instance, are all made of subtly different kinds — and readied for sale.
Waste plastic is a commodity and recycling brokers search across the US and abroad for buyers who will want to melt the plastic down, turn it into pellets and make those pellets into something new.
In the past, it made economic sense to ship the plastic to Asia, because shipping companies that transport China’s manufactured goods to the US end up with thousands of empty shipping containers to carry back.
In the absence of US goods to fill them, the companies have been willing to ship out US recycling at rock-bottom rates.
Steve Wong (黃楚祺), a Hong Kong-based businessman, is one of the mediators who connects US recycling with international buyers.
“At one time, I was one of the biggest exporters in the world,” he said, worth millions.
Now, Wong said that his company, Hong-Kong based Fukutomi Recycling, is deep in debt.
Wong’s problem is hardly a lack of supply. Each month, the equivalent of thousands of shipping containers worth of recyclable plastics, which used to be exported, are piling up all over the US.
Nor is his worry a shortage of demand for plastic: It is desperately needed by factories in China for manufacturing into myriad new products — from toys and picture frames to garden gazebos.
What is nearly killing his business is the fact that many nations have soured on the recycling industry, after unscrupulous operators set up shop, operating as cheaply as possible, with no regard for the environment or residents.
“In our industry, if you do it properly, you save the environment,” Wong said. “If you do it improperly, you destroy the environment.”
As far as profits go, the numbers just barely favor recycling.
Wong said that he might spend US$150 to buy 1 ton (0.91 tonnes) of plastic scrap from a US recycler. Once it is shipped abroad, sold to a processor, turned into pellets and then again shipped to a manufacturer, the seller might ask as much as US$800 per ton.
However, the cost of similar virgin plastic, which is often higher quality, is just US$900 to US$1,000 per ton.
Wong believes that the answer in the future would be to process the material closer to the US.
That is why he has planned trips to meet with government officials in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and why, on a recent Wednesday, Wong crisscrossed back and forth through heavy traffic in the Mexican city of Monterrey, about 240km south of Laredo, Texas.
Wong, a trim 61-year-old dressed head-to-toe in khaki like a safari hunter, was working to set up a new plastics recycling factory for an investor who hopes to one day process US plastic.
At one reseller — a corrugated-metal warehouse piled floor-to-ceiling with plastic that included shimmery sheaths of wrapping from US retail stores — Wong wanted to test the quality of the supply.
He filled a baggie with ground-up flakes of black plastic from picking crates, then took a cigarette lighter and lit one of the flakes on fire. He carefully sniffed the smoke to get a sense of what variety of plastic it was.
At Wong’s next stop, an existing Monterrey recycling processor, you could get a sense of the work the new factory might do.
A rudimentary plastic processing machine stretched 12m across the bare dirt of the warehouse floor. The processor takes rejected vehicle parts and grinds them up into confetti-sized flakes.
Workers feed these flakes into a flume that channels them past a heater to melt them. The melted plastic is pressed into long, white strings, which are stretched across the room and allowed to harden. At that point, they are chopped into pellets a little bigger than rice grains.
Wong said that he would like to build more modern factories with up-to-date systems for eliminating toxic releases to the air and water, but he said he was sure that many of his less scrupulous competitors would keep exporting on the cheap.
He suggested that even in nations that had banned plastic imports, the material continued to be smuggled in.
“Recyclers have set up factories in all these countries, but they don’t have enough supply. So, even though it is smuggling, even though it is not legal, they still have to do what it takes to get the plastic,” he said.
Additional reporting by Febriana Firdaus, Kimberley Brown, Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu and Redwan Ahmed
This is part I of a two-part story. Part II will appear in tomorrow’s edition.
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