Is India Becoming America’s Trash Bin for Illegal Plastic Waste?

After handling nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste, mostly from the United States and other developed nations, for over two and a half decades, China banned the import of containers carrying scrap paper, plastics and metals for recycling and reuse early last year. So where is the waste ending up now?

Other Asian countries are being “hit really hard” by the inflow of plastic scrap, Jim Puckett, Executive Director of Basel Action Network (BAN), a U.S.-based organisation focussed on issues of environmental justice and economic inefficiency in toxic trade, told StoriesAsia.

Bearing the brunt of spikes in plastic trash import was Indonesia, which, about four months ago, promised that illegal plastic waste imports - waste contaminated with plastic and other hazardous material - would be sent back to the countries in which they originated.

However, according to a recent investigation conducted by Nexus3, an Indonesian NGO that works towards a just, toxic-free, and sustainable future and BAN, the waste that the Southeast Asian archipelago promised to send back was illegally diverted to countries like India, Thailand, South Korea and Vietnam.

In the present case, the waste was categorised as paper scrap when, in reality, it comprised of plastic and other hazardous materials and was shipped from the U.S. to Indonesia. According to international norms and the Basel Convention, Puckett  explained, “illegal waste exports are the responsibility of the state of export which is required to reimport the waste.”

The Basel Convention is an international treaty that seeks to reduce the movement of hazardous waste among nations, specifically from developed to less-developed nations.

While the U.S. is not a party to the Basel Convention, it is still required to comply with international norms, Puckett clarified.

“We accessed the identification numbers of 70 containers, of which 58 originated in the U.S. and we tracked them,” Puckett said. “We found that the 58 were diverted to other countries. This is against both international norms and what they [Indonesian authorities] had promised.”