‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is a typical approach to waste and is one of the main reasons why the waste trade persists. The world discovered that toxic waste was being dumped in Africa and other developing countries in the 1980s, and since 1988, more than a quarter of a billion tons of plastic waste have been exported around the world, usually from the Global North to common destinations like Southeast Asian countries plus India and Turkey.

Following public outcry and heightened environmental awareness, the Basel Convention, the first global legal instrument to control the transboundary movement of hazardous waste, was developed in 1989. It took 3 decades for the Convention to also include plastic waste through its amendments, but the Basel Convention Plastic Waste Amendments came into force in 2021.

But why does waste trade still happen? The term ‘waste colonialism’ was coined in 1989 at one of the convention meetings, to describe the dumping of waste from higher-income countries in lower-income countries. It is also referred to as ‘waste neocolonialism,’ since it’s the direct export of toxic waste into former colonial states or other areas on the economic periphery. Malaysia and India, which are former British colonies, receive plastic waste from the United Kingdom, while Vietnam receives plastic waste from the European Union and the United States, and Indonesia from Japan, the United States, and the European Union, for instance. On average from 2021 to 2023, Malaysia received 1.4 billion kilograms of plastic waste, Vietnam 1 billion, Turkey almost 1 billion, Indonesia almost 600 million, and India almost 200 million kilograms. This pollution transfer is a historical environmental and social injustice.

In 2019, a Science Direct study stated that moving high volumes of consumed plastic waste outside of a country (typically from high-income to low-income countries) actually encourages the consumption of plastics in “artificially cleaner” countries and should not be encouraged without guarantees that the plastic waste can be efficiently recycled without environmental damage. The previous year, China, through its National Sword policy, prohibited plastic waste imports, resulting in an influx of plastic waste to Southeast Asia, leading to overwhelming waste levels in these developing countries.

What needs to be done?

Studies and visuals often attribute plastic pollution to ocean litter or uncollected waste, and cite data that point to Asian countries as hotspots. This disregards the fact that plastic waste export to the Global South has been continuing and will not be drastically reduced in the future if plastic is still being produced at the current rate. It also disregards the fact that most plastic can’t be recycled in an environmentally sound manner, and that any process that melts, burns or sheds plastic is doing more harm than good to the environment and putting communities’ health at risk. Impacts have been evident in top exporting countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Turkey.

Since 99% of plastic is a byproduct of oil and gas, this is not just a matter of plastic pollution, but climate change too. Among the biggest climate polluters are the US and the EU, and the largest plastic manufacturers are in countries like the US, EU, UK, and Japan. It is no coincidence that these are also the top plastic waste exporters, yet Asian countries bear the blame and the burden of plastic pollution, with these communities most vulnerable to climate change. Not factoring in the impacts of the plastic waste trade in global plastic pollution metrics is forgetting and ignoring the historical injustices of dumping waste in developing countries that are also victims of colonialism.

With the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5) on the Global Plastic Treaty beginning in late November, world leaders have a make or break moment to address the worsening impacts of plastic pollution. The treaty text should harmonize the guiding principles of the Basel Convention, especially on minimizing waste generation. The treaty can further address this by including provisions like reducing plastic production at source, banning single-use plastics, eliminating hazardous chemicals that affect human health and the environment, and institutionalizing reuse to address plastic pollution.

At a time when the world is experiencing the worst impacts of climate change and plastic pollution, and now that we know the main culprits of climate change and plastic production, it is imperative to stop pointing fingers at the Global South and shift scrutiny to the plastic producers while holding corporations to account. The opportunity to end plastic pollution is within reach through the Global Plastic Treaty, if legally binding rules across the full lifecycle of plastics are established.

Coleen Salamat is a policy campaigner for Waste Trade, Southeast Asia with an extensive background in policy campaigns addressing waste management, plastic pollution, and marine conservation.

Banner image: Bottles manufactured by American company Coca-Cola are among the most common kinds of plastic waste. Image by David Slater / NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program Marine Debris Team, 2015.

Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: Our hosts trace England’s – and Europe’s – waste trade across the world, listen here:

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