A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of US plastic are being shipped every year to poorly regulated developing countries around the globe for the dirty, labor-intensive process of recycling. The consequences for public health and the environment are grim.
With US plastic landing in countries that have never seen it in such quantities, local residents are crying foul.
In the Philippines, about 120 shipping containers a month are arriving in Manila and an industrial zone in the former US military base at Subic Bay. Records indicate they were filled with plastic scrap shipped from such places as Los Angeles, Georgia and the Port of New York-Newark.
From the Manila port, shipping records and Philippines customs documents show, some of the US plastic was transported to Valenzuela City. The area, on the outskirts of the Philippine capital, is known as “Plastic City” and residents are increasingly concerned about the number of processing factories sprouting in their midst.
“You smell that?” said a shopkeeper, Helen Lota, 47, as she stood in front of her neighborhood convenience store at noon one day last month.
“That’s nothing. It’s worse toward evening. It gets suffocating,” she said.
“There are times it’s really hard to breathe. Many of us here are getting sick,” Lota said. “I had my daughter’s cough checked in the hospital, but the X-ray is clear. The coughing must be caused by the smell.”
Noticing Lota complaining about the plastic problem, passers-by stopped to chime in.
“My mother’s cough won’t go away, probably because of the smell,” said Renante Bito, 38.
Yet recycling is also one of the area’s biggest income sources.
Officials and residents interviewed by the Guardian said that they had assumed the plastic being processed in their town was the Philippines’ own waste. None realized that some of it was being shipped from the US.
Representatives for the factories receiving US waste declined to be interviewed.
In Turkey, US plastic imports might be putting an entire profession at risk. Since China closed its doors, the amount of plastic recycling Turkey takes in from abroad has soared, from 144,200 tonnes to 398,300 tonnes in two years.
SHIPS TO TURKEY
Each month, about 10 ships pull into the ports of Istanbul and Adana, carrying about 1,814 tonnes of cheap US scrap plastic that is no longer wanted by China. Most of it comes from the US ports of Georgia, Charleston, Baltimore and New York. Some of it is described in shipping records as “Walmart film scrap,” the clear cling wrap used to secure huge pallets of products sold by Walmart.
Walmart declined to comment on the issue.
These ships join dozens of others from the UK and other European countries.
Their arrival is closely watched by Turkey’s scrap pickers, who number in the hundreds of thousands and travel the streets collecting scraps from houses and businesses to resell to factories for manufacturing into products such as plastic bags.
Now, the scrap pickers say, the factories are buying cheaper and cleaner plastic from the foreign recycling coming in on ships. Piles of their unsold, locally collected plastic are building up in urban storage yards. They have organized a campaign to stop the flood of foreign plastic, getting friends who work in the port to take videos of materials being offloaded and conducting their own ad hoc investigations.
“There are 500,000 street collectors in Turkey, working almost like ants to collect the waste,” said Baran Bozolu, head of Turkey’s Chamber of Environmental Engineers.
Yet he said the “uncontrolled and unlimited” import of foreign recycling was leaving these local recyclers without markets for the scrap they collect.
“It’s like we have flour and water and, instead of making our own bread, we import bread from abroad. Does that make any sense to you?’” Bozolu said.
Every day, Eser Caglayan, 33, wheels his giant white collecting bag through a booming business district along the shores of the Bosphorus Strait, hunting for treasures that people throw out, along with the usual plastic and paper scraps. In the past, Caglayan, a 20-year veteran of the scrap-picking trade, was able to feed his family of five with the US$800 or so he made every month.
However, this year his income was down by about a third due to the competition from cheap, imported recycling, he said.
“I want to tell people in US this: recycle in your own yard,” he said. “Don’t bring down our income and put us all in danger of hunger.”
The environmental and social ramifications of the US’ plastic exports are shocking even to those in the industry. Bob Wenzlau is considered one of the founding fathers of the US curbside recycling system, having helped to launch the program in Palo Alto, California, in 1976.
‘GOOD INTENTIONS’
Curbside recycling “was started with a really good intention; I used to feel so proud,” Wenzlau said.
Now, after learning of the effects the nation’s exports are having overseas, he said, “my heart aches, because the system is doing harm.”
Wenzlau recently convinced the Palo Alto City Council to pass a measure requiring the city’s recyclers to report on the social and environmental consequences of any recycling that goes to foreign countries.
Even in San Francisco, long hailed for the high percentage of waste it recycles, the head of the city’s waste disposal provider has said that the system is failing.
“The simple fact is, there is just too much plastic — and too many different types of plastics — being produced; and there exist few, if any, viable end markets for the material,” Michael Sangiacomo of Recology wrote in a recent opinion piece.
A study released this spring by environmental group Gaia documented the human toll of US plastics exports on the countries that receive them.
“The impact of the shift in plastic trade to Southeast Asian countries has been staggering — contaminated water supplies, crop death, respiratory illness from exposure to burning plastic, and the rise of organized crime abound in areas most exposed to the flood of new imports,” the report found. “These countries and their people are shouldering the economic, social and environmental costs of that pollution, possibly for generations to come.”
For many experts, the most frightening example of how an out-of-control recycling industry can overwhelm a country is Malaysia. Immediately following the China ban, it became the go-to destination for US plastic and is still paying the price.
In the first 10 months of last year, the US exported 192,000 tonnes of plastic waste to Malaysia for recycling. Some of the factories had licenses to process foreign waste. Some only had licenses to deal with Malaysian plastic waste, but secretly processed foreign waste. Often, such “processing” actually meant illegally burning plastic, with the toxic fumes inhaled by Malaysians living near unlicensed factories and dump sites.
In October last year, the Malaysian government announced plans to immediately stop issuing new permits for importing plastic waste and to end all plastic waste importing within three years. Even so, thousands of tonnes of junk plastic remain heaped on the landscape, left behind by unscrupulous business operations.
On the outskirts of Jenjarom, a town in the district of Kuala Langat, where local authorities shut down 34 illegal factories in July last year, a land manager struggled to get rid of 3m-high piles of plastic left under a corrugated roof by illegal importers of foreign waste.
Nearby, a huge field of foreign plastic had been abandoned by the former renters: Chinese illegal factory owners, who left without warning following the crackdown.
The illegal importation of US waste is continuing.
Malaysian Minister of Environmental Affairs Yeo Bee Yin told the local press that many shippers simply change the codes on the documentation for their cargo containers to make it look like they are sending virgin plastic, which is not regulated, instead of the same old recycling scrap.
The continued arrival of foreign plastics is no surprise to Pang Song Lim, a 44-year-old civil engineer who lives in Sungai Petani, a town of 500,000 in the northwestern state of Kedah.
Officials say there might be 20 illegal plastic-processing factories there.
Every evening at sunset, Lim prepares his house and his nose for the onslaught from the burning of foreign plastic waste nearby. Foul smoke engulfs homes and a local school.
“It’s normally after 8pm,” Lim said. “Burned plastic ... acidic ... it hurts my chest. I try to seal my windows and block under the door with carpet.”
“You wake up at midnight because of the smell,” said Christina Lai, a Sungai Petani activist. “One day this land will be taken over by rubbish and not humans.”
This is part II of a two-part story. Part I appeared in yesterday’s edition.
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