Chinese Association of Idaho State University (CAISU)

China's recycling ban has sent America's plastic to Malaysia. Now they don't want it -- so what next?

Dozens of laborers and factory operators sit hand-cuffed in rows on the pavement at an industrial park in Malaysia.They've been detained in a government raid on unlicensed plastic recyclers as the country seeks to curb a growing illicit industry.To get more News in China, you can visit shine news official website.
"It's illegal," said Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia's Minister of Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change, who attended the raid and had invited journalists to watch."It's against the Environmental Quality Act because they do not have licenses and they are polluting."
Malaysia is cracking down on opportunists who are trying to cash-in on China's decision last year to ban plastic waste imports. Since July 2018, officials have shut down at least 148 unlicensed plastic recycling factories -- but have only pressed charges against a handful of suspects.
Much of the waste comes from countries outside Malaysia, including the US, which angers Yeo who says wealthy nations shouldn't be using her country as a trash dump.
The rise of illegal recyclers in Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, has exposed the rotten side of an industry that experts say is often anything but "green."
"There's no magical land of recycling with rainbows and unicorns. It's much grittier than that," says Martin Bourque, executive director at the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a non-profit group that has been engaged in curbside recycling programs since 1973.
At the center's plant, laborers wearing protective aprons and work gloves sort through a grimy procession of metal and glass refuse that clatters along a conveyor belt.Bourque says the recycling of paper, tin, and aluminum "saves a ton of energy and natural resources."
But approximately 40% of the non-bottle mixed plastic that his organization gathers is not recycled -- either because it's made from plastics that are too costly or hard to process, have been contaminated with food or other materials, or there simply isn't a market for that type of plastic.
Therefore, this plastic goes directly to landfill. Bourque says that's because he cannot find a destination that can recycle the plastic without causing additional harm to the environment.
"We would much rather see them in a landfill then being exported to a foreign country where we don't know what the final destination will be," Bourque explains.
Once unrecycled plastic scrap leaves the facility it becomes an internationally-traded commodity that normally goes through different hands en route from the point of origin to final destination, making it hard to track.To ensure its plastic was being properly recycled, the Berkeley facility carried out an experiment. Using a GPS locator to track plastic waste, they learned that their shipments ended up in China and Malaysia.
There, Bourque says, local environmental investigators found signs of plastic dumped in ravines and waterways. For the plastic that did reach a recycling factory, there were reports of poor working conditions and contaminated water being discharged into local creeks from such facilities.
"We think it's a real problem that mixed plastics from recycling programs could end up being dumped in the environment in (developing) countries," Bourque says.