Southeast Asian Countries are Vowing to Send Trash Back to the West

For years, countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia have been dumping their waste in southeast Asia rather than dealing with it themselves. It is, technically, a legal transaction: both parties sign a contract, the trash is shipped over in containers, and the recipient is expected to deal with it according to local safety laws. But the process often gets a little out of hand and now a number of southeast Asian countries are starting to push back, The Guardian reports.

Currently, Filipino, Indonesian, and Vietnamese ports are overcrowded with containers of rubbish from the west. In the Philippines specifically, the 1,500 tonnes of waste that arrived from Canada in 2013 and 2014 is still the cause of a diplomatic dispute. Duterte wants Canada to take it back—and has even threatened to dispose of the trash in Canadian waters if they don’t come and collect it themselves.

Similarly, in Malaysia, piles of plastic from Europe and the United States are growing at a rapid rate. Earlier this year, a town in Malaysia reportedly transformed into a dumping ground after receiving imports of waste every night, the BBC reports. In response, Malaysia declared on Tuesday 28 May that it was going to send back about 3,300 tonnes of non-recyclable plastic to its origin countries, including Australia, the US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Bangladesh, and China.

Yeo Bee Yin, a Malaysian politician, had a message for the countries that were shipping the waste: “We will send it back and we will fight back. Even though we are a small country, we cannot be bullied by developed countries.”

It wasn’t always like this for the southeast Asian region. Until just a few years ago, China was one of the biggest dumping grounds for the world’s plastic. But as pollution became a growing concern for Chinese citizens, the government declared in 2017 that it was refusing to receive any more.

Arnaud Brunet, director of The Bureau of International Recycling, told the South China Morning Post that that decision “created a major shock in the global market.” Shortly thereafter, southeast Asia became the new victim of the west’s recycling problem.

International efforts to address the issue are being made. Earlier this month, 180 countries agreed to a United Nations deal to make the export of plastic waste more transparent. The deal added plastic waste to the 1989 Basel Convention on the control of hazardous waste, a legally-binding framework.

However, the US is the world’s biggest exporter of plastic waste, and as Channel News Asia reports, it has yet to ratify the agreement.