Why Southeast Asia Is Flooded With Trash From America And Other Wealthy Nations. By Dominique Mosbergen

Capitalism, greed and inequality have created a crisis in the global recycling system.

IPOH, Malaysia - Bales of plastic garbage, stacked 15 feet high, shimmered in the 100-degree heat. They gave off a faint chemical smell as they warped and softened under the equatorial sun.  A canary-yellow Walmart clearance tag poked out from one of the dirty heaps. Wrappers and packages from American products were visible nearby. These items had likely travelled 10,000 miles to this unmarked and apparently unauthorized dumpsite in a quiet industrial neighborhood in northwestern Malaysia. 

Ad hoc dumps like this one, teeming with foreign waste, have popped up across Southeast Asia in recent months - each an ugly symbol of a global recycling system that regional activists and politicians have described as unjust, inequitable and broken. In January and February, HuffPost visited several of these sites in Malaysia to see what really happens to much of the plastic trash that originates in the U.S. and other wealthy nations.

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Last year Malaysia became - virtually overnight - the world’s largest importer of plastic scrap, receiving hundreds of millions of tons from the United States, Europe, Japan and elsewhere. Malaysia’s neighbors, including Thailand and Vietnam, endured a similar deluge. The results have been shocking.  In Malaysia, shipments of imported plastic are piling up at ports, and a robust underground industry of illegal recyclers has spread across the nation, affecting the health and safety of local communities.   “What’s happening in Southeast Asia, what’s happening in Malaysia, shows just how bankrupt the recycling system really is,” said Von Hernandez, the global coordinator for the Break Free From Plastic initiative, speaking from the Philippines in February. “Consumers, especially those in the West, are conditioned to believe that when they separate their recyclables and throw them out, that it’ll be properly taken care of. But that’s been exposed as a myth.”

U.S. companies, despite making broad promises about reducing waste and promoting recycling, are often unaware of where their used products and packaging end up. Walmart, which has vowed to reduce waste and to invest in recycling infrastructure, did not respond to questions about the bale found in Malaysia, but Jerry Powell, the executive editor of the industry publication Resource Recycling, said the company was likely clueless as to how plastic waste apparently generated at one of its U.S. stores traveled thousands of miles across the ocean only to pollute a Malaysian neighborhood. A Walmart store might send its plastic rubbish to a local recycler, he said last week from Oregon, “but what their local recycler does with it, they have no idea. They don’t track where it goes from there.”

Only about half the trash at the Ipoh dumpsite appeared to be from Malaysia. The other half was a hodgepodge of waste from countries like the U.S., China and New Zealand. The bale with the Walmart tag was tightly packed with an array of other plastic waste, including a bag that once contained cheese from Wisconsin cheesemaker Sargento with a U.S. 800 number printed on its back and a bright blue Oreo Mini container, empty and crushed flat. The bale was wrapped in a plastic sheet stamped with “Sigma Supply of North America,” a packaging company based in Arkansas — the state where Walmart has its headquarters. (Sigma Supply did not respond to a request for comment.).. read more:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/malaysia-plastic-recycling_n_5c7f64a9e4b020b54d7ffdee