Last fall, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change announced the federal government’s next steps towards achieving a plastic waste-free Canada. Since then, several notable changes in plastic regulation have occurred on the federal front. Plastics have now been classified under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999[1] (“CEPA”) as a “toxic substance”. In addition, there are proposed amendments to CEPA currently being considered by the federal government that would prohibit the export of plastics to foreign jurisdictions for final disposal.

The Indonesian authorities have confirmed that imports of secondary materials, including metals and paper, will be allowed into the country with a contamination threshold of 2%. UK recyclers expressed relief at the move and said it would be possible to meet the 2% standard. Indonesia is an important market for the UK, particularly for paper.

The Turkish government is expected to clarify rules and restrictions around the import of plastic wastes later this month with the introduction of measures such as stricter regulatory criteria for the country’s plastics recycling plants. This will come as exports of plastics remain a contentious issue, with some UK recycling exporters reasoning that the export of suitable waste plastic material should continue while other recyclers as well as campaign groups, such as Greenpeace, arguing that it should not be sent abroad.

Plastic scrap trade from the European Union remains sluggish in the absence of free exports to non-OECD countries. The European Commission has not yet amended the waste shipment regulation 1418/2007 which determines how waste is exported to non-OECD countries.

The boy was probably only a teenager. Rummaging through bags of plastic dumped by the side of the road, he was looking for bottles to sell. In amongst the rubbish, were plastic bags from some of the UK's biggest supermarkets, packaging for cheese, ham and beef burgers. Our investigation in March 2020 in the southern Turkish City of Adana found that although plastic that had been carefully sorted and separated by households in the UK was being sent to Turkey for recycling, it was, instead, being fly tipped and burned.

Cape Town - Environmental organisations and groups urged South Africa to support a proposed global treaty/multilateral environmental agreement (MEA) on plastic pollution.

Eggs eaten by some of the world's poorest people are being poisoned by plastic waste from rich countries like Canada and the U.S., new research has found. A suite of harmful chemicals are added to plastic and food packaging to give them desirable traits, like grease resistance or flexibility. When they burn or break down, these chemicals contaminate the surrounding environment and animals living or feeding nearby.

THE BASEL CONVENTION is an international agreement barring countries from shipping various hazardous materials to another country without government permission. In 2019, plastic was added to the list. Of the 187 countries participating, only two have yet to ratify — Haiti and the world’s biggest plastics polluter, the United States.

Several years ago, a new label started to appear on plastic packaging. It said "store drop-off" and it directed shoppers to return their packaging to special in-store collection bins that would ensure it got recycled. Soon more than 10,000 items carried the label and an associated website said there were over 18,000 drop-off bins across the United States. All that waste would be turned into wonderful things like park benches.

Optimism, fueled by high prices and huge demand for recycled materials, is dominating the plastics recycling scene. At the same time there are difficulties in fulfilling supply obligations. ‘We’re in that wonderful situation we’ve only dreamt of: that there is such demand that, once you have value for a plastic, then you’re going to create more innovation, more people wanting to collect, more people seeing it as an untapped resource,’ Sally Houghton of the Plastic Recycling Corporation of California told the latest BIR Convention.

The leader of the Basel Action Network responds to a position taken by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.

Presenters and panelists at several Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) 2021 World Recycling Convention sessions have made it clear to the BIR community that government scrutiny continues to be the order of the day when it comes to plastic scrap. Individual nations, states and provinces continue to propose and pass legislation limiting the way plastic is used, or charging a fee to discourage its use in some applications.

The Turkish Government has revealed that a small number of recycled polymer grades will be permitted for import. It has set out the HS codes that are permitted under new tough regulations and includes PS,PVC, PP and PET.

On May 12, border officials in southern Romania stopped three trucks loaded with 59 tons of waste trying to enter from Bulgaria. The drivers’ paperwork did not entirely match the contents – steel, plastic and scrap metal – so the convoy was turned back. Days later, a similar thing happened, this time in the Black Sea port of Constanta, where Romanian authorities refused entry to 15 shipping containers laden with 300 tons of “metal and paper, textiles, rubber, wood, batteries and pieces of asbestos” from Germany.

On a per-capita basis, Brits rank second in using the most plastic, just behind Americans, according to a study published in Advances Science last year. What does the UK do with all the plastic waste? Much of it is exported, with a seemingly clean conscience by the government, critics say. Anything that can’t be recycled or adequately incinerated, shouldn’t be exported in the first place. British plastic waste that isn’t recycled often lands in foreign landfills and the ocean, affecting humans and animals at sea and land.

Turkey is banning the import of most plastic waste after an investigation revealed British recycling was left to burn or be dumped on beaches and roadsides. Greenpeace visited 10 sites in the southern city of Adana in March. Investigators found waste including British supermarket packaging in waterways, on beaches and in illegal waste mountains.

For months, containers full of plastic waste have been rotting from the yellow sack in ports in Turkey. The authorities have now ordered the containers to be returned. It could be expensive for the recyclers involved.