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Another trade war is brewing as Asia fights back over the world’s plastic waste

  • The planet is only just waking up to the problems that plastics cause, a reader writes – but what is to be done?
Collecting plastic material from dirty water in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in April. Photo: Reuters
Collecting plastic material from dirty water in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in April. Photo: Reuters
Tired of being the world’s dumping ground for recycled waste materials from other countries, Asian nations are 
striking back

with punitive environmental trade regulations that should leave the waste exporting nations in delirium. Last week, the Malaysian Environment Minister, Yeo Bee Yin,

stated clearly

that countries should manage their own waste, and that Malaysia will take care of its own.

Modern economic theory maintains that the trade of global “goods” and services should be optimised by countries embracing their competitive advantages – letting others excel where their own advantages exist.
What it did not account for is the trade in “bads” between nations, whereby a country’s externalities (in this case waste) are sent to another’s shores to take advantage of the other country’s “competitive advantages” – low labour costs and lax environmental enforcement.
As a result of the planet’s awakening to the vast challenges of what do to with plastic in its second life, we now have two large-scale trade wars to contend with. One is between the two largest economies, the 
US and China

. The other is much broader in scope, undercutting the previously perceived values of globalisation, using environmental trade barriers as a proxy for national benefit.

This trend should be expected to continue, as 
plastic pollution

is not the only ill which countries share with one another, but it is one that has generated the most sharing of ideas and momentum across virtually every country on the planet.

To put the scale into context, one can conservatively estimate that at least 10 per cent of the plastic waste sent to Asia for recycling was of quality too poor to make value from.

If all of this “poor quality” material from the European Union alone was returned to its rightful exporting countries for the past 10 years of their exports, they would receive over 95,000 40-feet containers, each containing 35 metric tons of material. This would create a line of containers over 1,150km (715 miles) long.

A global reckoning on waste is under way, thanks to China
It may not be likely that all 95,000 containers will be returned to their ports of origin, but it is clear that the ability to keep moving this volume of material offshore will quickly evaporate, creating all types of disruptions and needing innovative interventions to solve the complex plastic waste challenge.
Join us, and industry leaders and influencers, at our action-based plastic circular economy forum –

Plasticity Amsterdam

– on June 20 for a big discussion on how some of the solutions needed to address these new plastic defences can be for everyone involved.

Source: SCMP

Posted on 27/06/2019 at 10:07 in Asia, Bangladesh, brewing, China alert, Dhaka, fights back, Malaysia, Malaysian Environment Minister, plastic waste, Plasticity Amsterdam, trade war, Uncategorized, world’s   |  RSS feed |   Reply   |   Trackback URL

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