Over the past two decades, most people have become accustomed to doing the right thing with their rubbish. Who doesn’t feel virtuous as they rinse their supermarket meat packaging or takeaway box, separating the worthless cellophane from the recyclable plastic? Or feel a glint of satisfaction after setting aside bottle caps, scraping food from takeaway containers? Off all our scrubbed-down plastic goes, we tell ourselves, to be made into — what, exactly? New bottles and takeaway cartons, lawn chairs perhaps, shower sandals or any number of the other plastic objects exponentially cluttering our lives.
Yet rancid scenes such as those unfolding in Birmingham today, where the bin strike has resulted in 17,000 tonnes of uncollected rubbish rotting along kerbsides, confront us with a darker reality: our ever-mounting piles of trash don’t magically disappear or seamlessly slip back into production cycles. And a lot may not be undergoing any kind of recycling process at all.
For here’s the dirty little truth about all the stuff you take such methodical care to recycle: approximately 60 per cent of it winds up getting mashed into a cargo container, then shipped far away. What becomes of the 600,000 tonnes of British plastic waste that makes its way to the hills of Turkey or the villages of Vietnam every year? Some of it may get turned into a bath mat or a mobile phone case. But perhaps it gets burnt in a factory or dumped in a field. Possibly it goes into a river. No matter its fate, one thing is incontestable: somewhere, someone is paying a price for its disposal.
Who must take your waste and why? When all is said and done, where will much of Birmingham’s rubbish eventually go? It would be hard to conjure up a greater barometer of global inequalities. And it would be hard to find a more contradictory story of how we got to a world in which your rubbish was turned into someone else’s burden.
The trash trade owes its origins to the western environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In an attempt to reduce waste outputs, legislation in the US and Europe made the price of discarding certain forms of industrial residue — asbestos, for instance, or aircraft fluids — exorbitantly expensive. To municipalities or factories bent on discarding such hazards on the cheap, developing countries’ environments came to be regarded as an economic opportunity.
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We have yet fully to account for the damage done by the masses of toxic waste that exited the US and Europe for the rivers of Africa, islands of the Caribbean and coastlines of Latin America in the closing years of the Cold War. In Guatemala you can meet villagers who tell bewildering tales of an El Dorado of poison: hundreds of barrels of radioactive waste they say were poured into a lake in the middle of Central America’s biggest jungle at the bloody height of their country’s civil war.
Along the coasts of Somalia there are pirates who claim they were once content to merely fish their seas — until foreigners decimated mackerel stocks with toxic waste, encouraging enterprising Somalis to raid western vessels to earn their livelihoods instead. And in Nigeria’s Delta State there’s the port of Koko where, in May 1988, authorities discovered 2,000 drums of polychlorinated biphenyls from Milan leaking into the groundwater, – an incident which Oladele Osibanjo, a chemist in charge of assessing the devastation, told me resulted in local farmers having their hair bleached white by toxic despoliation.
But one need not go back 40 years to search for such gruesome tales. In Ghana, something truly bewildering can be witnessed right in the heart of Accra, the capital: a squalid slum of 60,000 residents who spend all day sledgehammering faltering old electronics that have been “donated” by western companies or universities in lieu of paying costly disposal fees at home.
On a recent trip to the slum I met communities of “burner boys”, young migrants from their country’s desert fringes who make tiny sums an hour doing something even more archaic and excruciating. When all the valuable materials have been shucked and stripped away from those old western electronics, the burner boys gather what remains — plastic wiring encasement, plastic TV boxes, Styrofoam insulation — and torch it. Encircling the slum at any given moment are scores of conflagrations, melting the remains of DVD players and television remotes, sending drags of inky, carcinogenic smoke across the sky.
The burner boys complained to me of coughing up blood by night and of limbs that locked in place with an icy dullness. The section of Accra they inhabit, a squalid estuary known as Agbogbloshie, regularly ranks among Earth’s most poisoned places; on any given day one can observe scrap collectors losing fingertips to Japanese paper shredders or cows destined for the slaughterhouse chewing through last meals of German refrigerator insulation. According to the World Health Organisation, anyone who eats an egg in Agbogbloshie will absorb 220 times the European Food Safety Authority’s daily tolerable intake of chlorinated dioxins, chemical compounds that can prove damaging even in minute quantities.
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In return for accepting such toxins, developing nations were propositioned over the years with all manner of gifts. Peru was offered a school system, Liberia a hospital, while a Philadelphia waste firm would tempt the puny Caribbean island of Saba with “one ounce of fine gold, one ‘yard fowl’ and a basket of fruit and vegetables” per every tonne of waste it agreed to hustle on to its volcanic shores. But most of the time an easier solution existed: dangling wads of cash.
At a time when many states across Africa and Latin America were trapped beneath crushing debt, the prospect of toxic waste import — and the whopping sums of hard currency it could bring in — often seemed too good a deal to turn down. “We need money,” an official in Guinea-Bissau would claim in response to a plan to receive 15 million tonnes of western European pharmaceutical waste in exchange for $600 million.
Such exchanges underscore an important definitional line that was crossed in the late 1980s. Waste had become, by the Cold War’s conclusion, no longer something to be deposited into nature. It had become an object of exchange, something to be rerouted at profit from one corner of the globe to another. The Global South, long a place from which precious raw materials had been extracted, now became a place where swelling mountains of unwanted stuff, including some of the things you may discard this weekend, could be put.
Yet at the close of that decade one could have been forgiven for believing that the billion-dollar industry of waste diversion was finally coming to an end. In 1989, dozens of developing nations banded together to stop “rampant, uncontrolled waste tourism”. The resulting treaty, the Basel Convention, ratified in 1994 by nearly every nation in the world with the exception of the US, made it illegal to ship toxic waste from developed to developing countries. “Waste traders are on the run,” Greenpeace could declare.
Few waste traders were on the run, though. Many were just getting started. For the 1990s proved to be the decade in which waste export reinvented itself and exploded not only in profit — waste diversion is now a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry — but also in the mesmerising range of rubbish it conspired to offshore on to poorer nations.
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Everything imaginable goes south
In the 1980s, it was mostly obscure forms of industrial residue that got shifted south. By the 2000s it was almost everything imaginable, much of it originating from within the confines of your home. Your used clothes started heading to deserts in Latin America. Your worn-out car tyres started winding up in India. Your faltering old electronics started surfacing in slums across west Africa. Many of these things are in fact exorbitantly toxic and, according to the Basel Convention, should not be permitted to travel to poor countries. And while some get reused or stripped of valuables upon arrival to foreign lands, many merely get torched or tossed.
How to explain the fact that, in the very decade that outrage over the trash trade was being formalised into international legislation against it, waste diversion became bigger than ever before? The simple answer is a western obsession with recycling.
Recycling per se is no myth. It is possible to turn an old newspaper into a new newspaper and an old fizzy drink can into a new fizzy drink can. But in the 1990s you were encouraged to place all sorts of objects — Styrofoam, Tetra Pak, plastic everything — into a recycling bin even when the possibility of them being safely or effectively resurrected was dubious at best.
The motive for insisting that all these materials were “recyclable” was not so much financial as psychological. At a time when concerns had begun to circulate about what things like Styrofoam appeared to be doing to our planet, “recycling” proved a miraculous public relations panacea for the petrochemical industry. It shifted the onus of environmental responsibility on to consumers. And it allowed them to believe that, so long as they placed their old Coke bottles and ketchup sachets into a recycling bin, there was nothing wrong with purchasing and discarding as much as one wanted.
Someone had to pay the price for western self-assurance, though. Allowing innumerable forms of toxic refuse to skirt the writ of the Basel Convention on the grounds that they did not constitute rubbish but “reusable materials”, this new iteration of the garbage trade flipped the earlier economics of waste diversion on their head. Developing nations had once been offered colossal sums of cash to take in American and European refuse. Now importers in poorer countries were expected to pay for western rubbish, which many did, in the desperate conviction that there was some opportunity to be had in handing over meagre sums for cargo containers packed with grimy polyethylene bottles, plucking out whatever worthy scraps they could find, then incinerating or dumping what remained.
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Nowhere has this arrangement proved more destructive than with plastic. There is a good reason why only 9 per cent of the plastic discarded by humanity has ever been attempted to be recycled. The process, as the petrochemical industry understood all too well in the 1990s, does not work. On arrival in villages in southeast Asia or Latin America, some western plastic waste does get chemically reduced — an energy-intensive undertaking that unleashes innumerable toxins and microplastics into local ecosystems and, even when it does result in the production of new plastic, is rarely an infinitely repeatable process.
For 20 years half the plastic placed into a recycling bin anywhere on Earth made its way to China. In 2016, citing the stupefying pollution that these imports brought, Beijing declared it would no longer allow it. Thus began a frantic search for the West’s next trash frontier, a new place to ship millions of tons of old plastic and continue to insist it is all getting recycled; a scramble that continues to this day and which has left no corner of the planet untainted.
In the past eight years, Greek garbage has begun surfacing in Bulgaria, Italian rubbish has started wrecking the beaches of Tunisia, Dutch plastic has been found across Cambodia. Poland has been forced to charter a special police unit to patrol for waste getting trucked in from Germany, while French cops who had once busied themselves with checking for heroin in the bumpers of cars arriving from Belgium are now inspecting boots for bags of rubbish. Trash exports from Europe to Africa have quadrupled, Malaysia has become the world’s greatest recipient of US plastic waste, and half the plastic placed into a recycling bin in the UK is now all but certain to end up in Turkey, where its fate is often to be torched in a cement plant or strewn near the Syrian border.
Gargantuan global plastic glut
So gargantuan and mismanaged is our global plastic glut, it is even wreaking havoc on circular economies that ought to work. Indonesia is one of the world’s greatest importers of secondhand paper, which for years now it has pulped to produce new paper. On a recent trip to Java, however, what I saw deep in the island’s mountains terrified me: hellscapes of western plastic — American toothpaste tubes, bags of Belgian cat food, French ham packaging — rolling in raggedy waves through some of the most luxuriant vegetation you’ve ever seen. None of it had arrived in Indonesia as “plastic”; it had entered the country tucked within bales of recyclable paper, which across the world are now contaminated by the unrelenting quantities of plastic we consume and, invariably, toss into paper recycling bins. As much as 30 per cent of the “secondhand paper” entering Indonesia is now worthless plastic.
Or almost worthless. What to do with the millions of kilos of old crisp packets, padded envelopes and plastic delivery bags getting dispatched to Indonesia every year under the guise of being secondhand paper? It’s too voluminous to even attempt to recycle, so villagers across Java’s jungly highlands have turned themselves into farmers of western plastic waste, which they spend their days raking in the sun, a freakish twist on the livelihood of their ancestors, the rice harvest. Eventually they sell the rubbish by the truckload to local tofu bakeries, which burn it for fuel.
The business is lethal. International researchers who conducted tests of the bakeries in 2019 found that the most proximate toxicity levels recorded anywhere in Asia were Agent Orange loading sites during the Vietnam War. Little has changed. Thousands of kilos of western plastic is hustled on to the island every day, its toxins ingested hourly by great numbers of Indonesians.
As a warning of what rubbish is doing to the planet, one would be hard-pressed to find a more alarming transformation. So much plastic, it had replaced centuries of rice farming; so much plastic, the only solution was to torch it away. Forty years after we recognised that shipping our waste abroad was wrong, we’ve still not stopped offloading it on those places that can least afford to take it. We’ve just made ourselves feel better about doing so.
Alexander Clapp is the author of Waste Wars, published by John Murray, £20
