What is Happening With the Global Waste Trade?

In 2018, China suddenly announced that it would no longer be the scrapyard of the world accepting enormous volumes of unwanted trash from developed nations. This left many countries scrambling to find new buyers for their ever-increasing junk whilst other regions were left with rubbish rising up in huge piles around communities. So two years on, what does the situation look like today and is the global waste trade really sustainable?

For many years, richer countries have sold much of their potentially recyclable waste, such as paper and plastic, to less developed nations which then have the burden of disposing of our unwanted household items. China actually helped kickstart this global flow of waste a few decades ago when recycling schemes really took off in America. For still developing China, waste materials that could be recycled were a cheap source of resources which they could use in their growing manufacturing industry. As countries such as America, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany happily shipped their mountains of waste away from their doorsteps, China fed its booming manufacturing industry with plastic, helping them produce synthetic clothing and many of the colourful products we buy today. Once they shipped these goods back to the West, Chinese shipping companies offered to take plastic waste back with them at record low prices to save their ships sailing back halfway around the world completely empty. Over time, China developed a huge capacity to develop and recycle plastic, leading to high local consumption of plastic products. Whilst our unwanted waste helped this enormous country develop into the powerhouse it is today, it inevitably came with social and environmental pitfalls. As a result of this, China finally decided to clean up its act in 2018 and introduce much stronger regulations on the waste which is shipped to its shores. Despite our best efforts, some of our waste ends up in the wrong place and can contaminate large loads of recycling, for example some tinfoil may accidentally wind up tangled amongst empty plastic pots. For the last few decades China has been tolerant of this, allowing a contamination rate of up to 5%, despite this making recycling a lot more complex. Yet two years ago, they announced that the new maximum contamination level was only 0.5%, something which is strictly enforced by inspection officers in the ports. For many however, this figure is almost impossible to achieve and therefore they are no longer able to export waste to China.

In countries such as America, this has led to a whole host of problems. Suddenly, local councils have an overwhelming amount of rubbish that their facilities simply cannot cope with which has led to a build up of waste in warehouses with the managers hoping that new markets will open up soon. In various regions, some councils are refusing to collect any more recycling whilst others are charging households for collection or several are diverting recycling to landfill or incineration towers. Whatever strategies councils are choosing, almost all of them undermine our work to reduce waste, reuse products and move towards a circular economy. In fact, some recycling centres have even had to shut down as the running costs are now simply too high. One professor from California has explained this by saying that metal is a product which can be recycled over and over again without losing quality, yet plastics on the other hand are quite the opposite and can only be recycled a handful of times. Plastic is also very complex to recycle as it is often contaminated by food and is made up of many different polymers, colours, shapes and shades which all require a different recycling process. For example, clingfilm can be recycled but not if it still has food on it whilst despite yoghurt pots and milk bottles being the same colour, they cannot be recycled together. On top of this, plastic is a low value product and a large labour force is needed to sort the plastics by hand. Overall, this means that plastic has never had a viable business model and can only really work in countries where the labour is extremely cheap, making us question why we even started using it so abundantly in the first place. Therefore, with plastic recycling being largely economically unviable, it is not a surprise that developed countries soon looked to other Asian countries to absorb their waste.

Once the Chinese had announced their new ‘green fence’ to stop contaminated waste entering their borders, countries such as Malaysia became the world’s new dumping ground almost overnight. Malaysia became one of the world’s biggest waste importers whilst Thailand saw a 1000% increase in the amount of rubbish sent its way. Other countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam also opened up to waste but even all these countries combined could not accept as much rubbish as China had once absorbed. Many recycling workers from China followed the waste to South East Asia where they set up new factories. However, these factories were often small and therefore, lacked the correct equipment and health and safety procedures and managed to dodge industry standards, meaning many of your old water bottles may have been recycled by underpaid Asian workers who spent their days in hazardous environments. In the last two years, many Asian countries have also raised the required standards of waste being shipped in from the West with governments banning non-recyclable plastic and aiming to buy only high value plastics, with the rest being sent right back to the exporters. Yet many illegal factories still operate and for many towns, they provide the main source of income. Regions of Asia are now experiencing the same problems which made China renowned for its poor environmental quality as their limited waste facilities and poor transport infrastructure struggles to cope with our rubbish. In many countries, even treating national trash is a large problem for councils but with the West’s waste piling up too, much of it ends up littered in rivers, towns or the ocean. Plastic has already polluted drinking water sources, farmland and massive swathes of the ocean which are home to some of our most beautiful creatures. In addition, much of the waste we send over for recycling is actually burnt to help tame the mountain of trash and the toxic fumes from burning plastic is causing devastating human health impacts across the continent. It seems richer nations export not just plastic but also their pollution.

It seems China’s ban on waste has woken up the world to the unsustainable state of our global waste trade which developed nations have relied upon too heavily over the last few decades, assuming others will be able to make their excess waste vanish. In fact, the UK Environment Agency only made four enquiries in 2017 as to whether the waste they had shipped out had actually been recycled responsibly. With waste expected to increase by 70% in the next 30 years, we need to start turning the table on trash before the next wave of up and coming developing nations, such as those in Africa and Central America, become the next target for our rubbish. Whilst the world could see this as a challenge, it is also an opportunity to make some bold and exciting plans to create a new way of living. For those countries which are now importing waste as a way to access cheap materials and create employment, governments could tax the plastics arriving to help fund a better, safer infrastructure. Many countries have also pushed for plastic to be labelled as hazardous waste which means its journey around the world would have to be regulated a lot more closely, preventing richer nations from sending low quality products to the south. Large multinational companies are also slowly starting to make themselves accountable for the plastic waste they create in developing countries by spending money on cleaning up their act and helping protect our oceans. Finally, we at home can make a difference too, it is our waste which is being shipped around the world after all. Why not invest in a reusable water bottle or start visiting zero-waste shops to cut down on the amount of waste you create, as only by killing our consumption can the business of waste become more sustainable. With the recent change in the global waste trade exposing the issues of rubbish in both developed and developing nations, it seems this outdated plan is no longer working and instead, it’s time to look to new horizons.

By Neve McCracken-Heywood