In a working-class neighborhood of Myanmar’s Yangon, plastic waste is piled 1m high, the toxic product of what a recent investigation said is rampant dumping of Western trash.
For several years sites across Shwepyithar township have been filling up with trash, which chokes fields, blocks the drainage of monsoon rains and increases the risk of fire.
The trash is the runoff of global plastic production, which has more than doubled since the start of the century to reach 460 million tonnes per year.
Photo: AFP
“In the past, during the rainy season I could pick watercress from this field to eat,” one resident told reporters, asking not to be identified for security reasons. “Because of the plastic waste, now we can’t get any watercress to eat. Instead, we get a smell.”
An investigation released this week by collaborative newsroom Lighthouse Reports and six partners has found some of the waste dumped there is from the West.
The mix includes wrapping and containers for products ranging from Danone yoghurt to Polish company Spomlek’s cheese.
Items from German-owned UK supermarket Lidl and pasta packaging from Canada’s Unico have also been found.
None of these originated in Myanmar, but they have ended up there despite a law prohibiting the import of plastic waste unless it is clean and ready to recycle.
The ban was imposed after China stopped accepting foreign plastic waste in 2018.
Several local recycling factories told Lighthouse Reports that waste they cannot process is often dumped or burned.
Just how the waste enters Myanmar and in what quantities is unclear.
The investigation suggests that Thailand is a key passage for illegally exported plastics.
UN Comtrade data show that most of Myanmar’s plastic waste imports come from Thailand.
Almost 7,500 tonnes entered in 2021, the last year it reported figures.
However, the approximately 2,400km border the countries share is extremely porous, and crossed with ease by traffickers and smugglers.
Officials on both sides of the border do little to inspect arriving waste, Lighthouse Reports said.
“The data collected is often out of date and there’s no check on that data,” said Willie Wilson, former vice chair of Interpol’s Pollution Crime Working Group, referring not just to Comtrade, but all trade data.
“We’re left with this fog of misdeclared, missing data. It’s a licence to hide in plain sight,” Wilson said.
In July Myanmar’s junta said that there was a US$1.639 billion difference between what Thailand said it exported to Myanmar and what Myanmar said it imported from Thailand.
The yawning discrepancy “might be caused by illegal trade,” the Burmese Illegal Trade Eradication Steering Committee said.
Agence France-Presse contacted several of the companies whose products were found in Myanmar to ask how they might have arrived, but received no immediate reply.
Locals in Shwepyithar told reporters that much of the waste dumped in their neighborhood came from recycling factories in a nearby industrial zone.
However, the risks of protesting such a move in Myanmar, which has been run by a military junta since a 2021 coup, are high.
That has left an open area in Shwepyithar once earmarked for a soccer field transformed into a morass of plastic waste, one resident said.
“I know it’s not good for the long term,” she told reporters, requesting anonymity to speak about the sensitive issues.
“I don’t like it at all, but we can’t do anything,” said another, who similarly spoke on condition of not being identified.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS