Trashy Behaviour: How Rich Countries Export their Waste Abroad
Dear Readers,
We hope that the year-end brings you good luck and good energy for the coming year. At GQF, we have been winding down and preparing for the next year. As we come to the end of the holiday season - we are reflecting on some of the biggest challenges that the world is facing in the coming years and how we can talk about it. One of the topics on our minds these days is waste - the enormous amounts of trash that we produce as a species and what happens to it, where it ends up.
Ever wondered what happens to a plastic bottle that you throw in the trash can?
Let's assume, for a moment, that we have resolved the challenge of ensuring the bottle reaches the trash can at all - a victory in itself. What then?
Do you imagine it goes to a nice recycling centre and comes back as some other bottle? Or do you imagine it going to a landfill or being incinerated?
In reality, there is no right answer, because sometimes the fate of the waste we throw is far from being certain. And if you think this is the case only in the developing countries, like India, where waste management is still evolving, we want to introduce you to an unsettling reality: Waste Trade.
Waste Trade is exactly what the name suggests - an exchange of waste materials between countries. And this practice spans various forms of refuse: textiles, e-waste, and hazardous materials; but plastic waste is perhaps its most visible face.
Ghana, for example, is home to West Africa’s largest second-hand clothing market. Over 15 million used garments thrown out by consumers in other countries arrive every week and 40% of them will never be fit for resale. These clothes don’t just disappear; they pollute local environments and fuel landfill fires. Meanwhile, many countries in Southeast Asia have faced similar challenges, especially with the import of large amounts of plastic waste from Japan and other OECD countries.
While the exporter countries paint a glossy picture: waste trade being intended to promote circular economy practices in the global supply chain and thus reduce burden on landfills, it’s a darker story in real life. In fact, the history of waste trade is rooted in exploitation and racism. hence getting the tag of Waste Colonialism. Discarding toxic and plastic waste to developing countries has been one way for the developed world to maintain artificially clean spaces. Waste colonialism creates an illusion of business-as-usual as the waste generated by these nations can be sent off elsewhere and the cycle of production and consumption can continue with no visible consequences to the residents of developed nations.
For this article, we focus on plastic waste—its trade dynamics and the burdens it imposes on importing nations.
Historically, the waste trade reveals that high-income countries dumped their waste in low-income countries. Following the 1980s outcry from environmentalists after discovering toxic waste in African countries, The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was formed. Waste colonialism was coined in 1989 at one of the convention’s meetings as waste was directly getting exported to former colonies and other developing countries despite the fact that these countries did not have the capacity to manage the waste.
The Basel Convention was established to set global standards on regulating toxic and hazardous wastes, which includes the trade and management of these types of wastes, later in 2019, the convention amended its rule also to include plastic waste and clarified that transboundary movement of wastes deemed to be hazardous (non-recyclable, contaminated, polluting) needs to be notified and prior informed consent needs to be taken from the receiving country.
Despite the little progress being made towards controlling plastic waste exports to developing countries, this is still practiced today both legally and illegally. The world produces much more plastic than we can properly manage, and unfortunately, only 9% of global plastic waste is recycled (figure from 2019). Around 5 million tonnes of plastic waste gets traded every year, according to Our World in Data. While plastic waste export is a small proportion of rich countries’ waste production, it can overwhelm the waste management systems of recipient countries. Not all plastic waste can be recycled. If it contains multiple types of plastics in the same packaging material or if it is contaminated by other materials such as food or adhesives, it is too expensive or impossible to separate the recyclable from the non-recyclable material. Therefore, when contaminated plastic waste is exported to developing countries by developed/ OECD countries for recycling, the burden falls on them to then manage waste that isn’t recyclable. What the exporter country sent for recycling might actually end up being dumped in the importing country. This waste can end up in landfills, incinerated or just dumped in water bodies - leading to negative impacts on the natural resources and local communities’ health in importing countries.
The unequal direction of waste trade, coupled with the proven negative impacts that mismanaged plastic waste has on the environment and on people is what contributes to the continuation of a cycle of pollution and colonial exploitation. When the burden of managing waste falls on developing nations where environmental laws are weak and labour is cheap, exploitation is inevitable. Some of these concerns led to the European Union finally banning the exports of plastic waste to non-OECD countries.
While the European Union’s ban on waste trade is to be implemented from 2026, meanwhile, the illegal waste trade is quite elusive as waste trafficking is not an uncommon practice. As long as the production and consumption of plastics and other toxic materials (such as e-waste) increases, the waste trade will continue to persist. The reality of the matter is that it’s difficult to truly trace what happens to our plastic water bottles or any other trash that we throw out - as reporting standards are different in every country, there is under-reporting and developing countries are always at the short end of the stick when it comes to the waste trade. Our world is choking on plastic, and already poor and marginalized communities are the ones affected the most. Considering this, the best way forward would be for there to be more action towards reducing the production and consumption of single-use plastics and the consequences for countries that export their waste and pollute natural resources domestically and abroad.