'We don't want to be the next cancer village': Canada's plastic recycling dumped and burned overseas

umes spewed from the machinery as workers — wearing only T-shirts, sandals and no masks — at a recycling factory in northern Malaysia manually sorted through mountains of plastic scrap.

The workers, mainly from Bangladesh, earned around $12 a day, sometimes toiling seven days a week.

The labour was "very cheap," said one businessman, as he gave a tour to undercover CBC Marketplace journalists posing as plastics brokers from a fake Canadian company.

The factory was willing to buy the dirty plastic being offered — and said they would break the country's strict importing laws to do it, advising the journalists to lie on the shipping container labels.

"We can start trying with two to four [shipping] containers and see," said the manager.

"If the [Malaysian] government knew, they would shut it down? Illegal?" asked one of the CBC journalists.

"Yeah," replied one of the factory's business partners.