Criminal Gangs Are Cashing In On Humanity’s Plastic Crap

By Saqib Rahim of Vice

Imagine for a moment the world of organized crime in Southeast Asia, and you may picture meth labs, human-trafficking rings, or the billion-dollar trade in endangered species.

But lately law enforcement has noticed the oddest of goods circulating in the underworld: plastic junk such as bottles, candy wrappers and yogurt cups.

Interpol said late last year it’s seen a spike in organized criminal efforts to smuggle recyclable plastic from rich countries into Southeast Asia. It said there’s a growing business in making plastic disappear in dumps and furnaces across the region. While it’s hard to estimate the financial size of this trade, if it’s anything like the illicit market for electronic waste, it could be worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

It’s not because gangsters love the environment, of course. In 2018, a plastic ban by China threw the global recycling market into disarray, sending massive shipments of unwanted junk, mostly from wealthy nations, to developing countries. The fallout came to Southeast Asia, and law enforcement operations in the last two years suggest the illegal trade is a key part of it.

“Trafficking in waste becomes very complex now," Patricia Grollet, Interpol’s operational coordinator for pollution crime, told VICE World News. “This is why there’s this organized crime involved behind it. Because there’s a level of sophistication [that] is really one of a criminal enterprise.”