Industrialised countries not only outsource a majority of their often environmentally hazardous production processes to poorer countries, they also dispose of considerable amounts of waste there. The consequences are disastrous for the affected regions – and for the whole world. That’s waste colonialism.
Part of Europe’s electronic waste lies at the huge Agbogbloshie electronic-waste dump in Ghana. Fires are burning everywhere, sending toxic fumes over mountains of old refrigerators, computers and televisions. “Toxic city” is the name given to the dump that covers 16 square kilometres in Ghana’s capital Accra. An estimated 40,000 people live there.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org
Most of the waste exported from rich countries is largely due to the work of civil-society organisations, which have drawn increasing attention to the issue in recent years. In addition to e-waste, plastic waste is a particular focus.
In target countries, the waste is by no means always recycled, but all too often burned, landfilled or dumped. These practices cause harmful emissions, pollute the water and the soil and leave plastic traces in the entire environment. Various tests of soil and water that Greenpeace has conducted in Turkey have shown how the illegal landfilling and burning of plastic waste from the EU leads to excessive concentrations of substances that are very hazardous to health, such as chlorinated dioxins and heavy metals.
The export of plastic waste is not objectionable in itself. It can certainly be part of regional waste management in border areas. Smaller countries also do not always have access to the entire range of the necessary sorting and recycling facilities and are therefore dependent on exports. If, however, target countries have lower waste-disposal standards and less developed infrastructure, the risk of improper disposal increases. In these cases, country organisations and multilateral institutions must regulate the shipment of plastic waste more strictly and prohibit export to poorer countries.
The EU, among others, has done too little in this regard. For many years, China was the main recipient of its plastic waste. Since the country largely closed its borders to plastic waste in 2018, however, more waste has remained in Europe, and exports have shifted to Southeast Asia and Turkey. In 2022, the EU exported 1.1 million tonnes of plastic waste to non-EU countries. Every day over 3 million kilogrammes of plastic waste leave the EU – 31 % goes to Turkey, 16 % to Malaysia, 13 % to Indonesia and nine percent to Vietnam. Great Britain, Australia, Japan and the USA also ship waste to poorer countries.
The “Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal” regulates the export of waste as an international environmental agreement. It has so far been signed by over 180 countries and, since 2019, also contains stricter requirements for the shipment of plastic waste. The EU has adopted some of these regulations. They have been in effect since 1 January 2021 as part of the EU’s waste shipment regulation, which forbids the export of unsorted plastic waste from the EU to countries that are not members of the EU or the OECD. The export of mixtures of various plastics into countries like Malaysia or Indonesia is therefore restricted.
Stricter regulations would have positive effects in both exporting and importing countries. In the latter, they would reduce the disastrous ecological and social consequences associated with the import of plastic waste. Importing countries’ local recycling capacities would also not be taken up by waste from abroad. In exporting countries, on the other hand, there would be greater pressure to prevent waste and expand recycling structures.
It would be an opportunity to establish a global circular economy in which external costs are no longer outsourced to economically disadvantaged countries. The global community must seize this opportunity if it wants to avoid further exacerbating the climate and biodiversity crisis through its waste.
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