Waste Tourism: Is Thailand Becoming the New e-Waste Dumping Ground?
/Chinese e-Waste Traders Move to Thailand Now that Beijing Says "No" to Imported Pollution
May 24, 2018. Seattle, WA. For the last two decades, China was the world's primary e-waste dumping ground. Now, however, as China has closed down its polluting and dangerous “backyard” recycling facilities and cracked down on waste imports of all kinds, that distinction appears to have migrated to Thailand and perhaps other Southeast Asia and South Asian nations.
A highly polluting e-waste recycling operation, owned and operated by Chinese businessmen, using Burmese and Laotian labor, has been raided this week by the Thai Government. This dramatic event has prompted the toxic trade watchdog organization, Basel Action Network (BAN) to release additional findings to authorities of at least three other sites revealed to them either by whistleblowers or by following GPS tracking devices as part of BAN's e-Trash Transparency Project.