LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
ILLEGAL PLASTIC RECYCLING FACTORIES
HIGHLIGHT NEED FOR REAL SOLUTIONS
New Zealand news portal RadioNZ’s recent
exposé of the illegal plastic recycling industry in Jenjarom and other
plantation hinterlands in Malaysia to deal with plastic waste imported from New
Zealand and the UK highlights the fact that most of the world, including
developed nations with ostensibly clear waste management and recycling
legislation, are ill-equipped to deal with plastic waste.
The irony of this fact (i.e. the import
and processing of plastic waste in Malaysia) is not lost on
environmentally-aware Malaysians who applauded Energy, Science, Technology,
Environment and Climate Change Minister Yeo Bee Yin’s latest announcement on
Sept 14 that Malaysia would be phasing out and eventually banning single-use
plastics.
All our efforts to reduce plastic waste
and microplastic pollution would translate into very low environmental and
health returns if plastic recyclers – mostly unlicensed and unregulated – are
allowed to carry out operations and continue processing plastic waste that had
entered Malaysia prior to the Minister’s Sept 1 announcement of a restriction
on plastic waste imports.
The plastics manufacturing industry
tries to convince the public that littering, ignorance about recycling and lack
of recycling facilities – and not the production of plastics per se – are the
problem.
But the real problem is that we are using
a lot more plastics and generating a lot more waste as the world is becoming
more industrialised. The World Economic Forum reports that we use 20 times as
much plastics as we did 50 years ago. Businesses create more and more
single-use plastics to meet consumers’ expectations for convenience, and most
of these plastics can never be recycled.
Plastic recycling is a labour-intensive
process. Plastic waste has to be broken down, cleaned, separated by grade and
made into pellets. This means that manufacturing plastic from scratch is always
more economically rewarding than recycling plastics, even with subsidies and recycling-related
legislation in place.
Developed nations often believe that
legislating and incentivizing recycling and collecting plastics for recycling
is the same thing as ensuring that plastics are being properly recycled. What
the general public often is not aware of is that developed nations take the
easy option of exporting plastic waste to developing nations --- the very same
developing nations whose rivers are identified as the source of 90% of marine
plastics, the very same developing nations lacking sufficient infrastructure to
manage their own plastic waste.
It could take years for Britain, USA and
European nations to increase their domestic recycling capacities. Even so,
existing recycling technology isn’t good enough, largely because of limitations
in how plastics can be sorted by chemical composition and cleaned of additives.
Most plastics that are recycled are shredded and reprocessed into lower-value
plastics, such as polyester carpet fibre. Only 2% are recycled into products of
the same quality.
In the meantime, more and more plastic
products will continue to be produced, used and discarded, and many countries
will resort to burning plastics for energy recovery or landfilling plastic
waste. However, burning plastic creates harmful dioxins, and if incinerators
are inefficient, these dioxins leak into the environment. Burning plastic for
energy generation is also very carbon-intensive and contribute to increased
carbon emissions. Burying plastic waste in landfills may appear to be safer but
this is a really inefficient use of land, and studies have found that the
degradation of plastic waste in oceans and landfills actually produce methane
and ethylene, both potent greenhouse gases.
The solution to the problem of plastic
waste doesn’t lie in recycling more, or replacing plastics with other types of
disposable packaging. Biodegradable packaging is linked to other environmental
problems, which include increased carbon and methane emissions in landfills,
deforestation, higher water and land use, and higher fuel use due to the fact
that paper and plant fibre products weigh more than plastics.
The solution to the problem of plastic
waste lies not in setting up yet more licensed and legal plastic recycling
plants in Malaysia and other developing nations, as there will always be
unrecyclable and contaminated plastic waste and toxic byproducts to deal with. The
solution does not lie in individual countries banning the import of plastic
waste in order to protect their own population from reduced air quality and
other environmental hazards, as there will be other developing nations and
impoverished societies desperate enough to accept imports of plastic waste.
The solution lies in creating a circular
economy that does not rely on shipping materials across oceans to be reused,
but keeps resources in use for as long as possible in the economic cycle. The
solution to the problems of plastic waste lie in reducing dependency on all
single-use and disposable items, creating more closed loop and low-waste
systems, creating and sustaining a bigger market for reusables, and making zero
waste stores and products available, accessible and affordable to all, not just
to higher income, urban, educated and expatriate communities.
The Malaysian Government is taking a
step in the right direction by raising awareness, phasing out single-use
plastics, enforcing laws against open burning, banning the import of plastic
waste and regulating the plastics recycling industry. What we need now is for
the Malaysian public to stop treating environmental issues as political or
economic issues, and to instead understand that environmental and human health are
interconnected. What we need now is to stop seeing the problem of plastic waste
management as the fault of high-consuming, affluent developed nations, or the
fault of developing nations with high corruption levels and flawed waste
management systems – and to start seeing it as a shared responsibility.
WONG EE LYNN
COORDINATOR,
GREEN LIVING SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP,
MALAYSIAN NATURE SOCIETY
