Author: Louise Boyle

Packaging from a UK supermarket has been dumped 7,000 miles away in a low-income township in Myanmar - raising troubling questions about how the West’s outsized plastic pollution crisis is being forced upon vulnerable communities with little ability to push back. Labels and plastic wrapping for bottled water and diet lemonade from a Lidl in Lichfield were discovered in the piles of festering garbage which engulf low-income areas of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.

Authors: Leonie Cater and Louise Guillot

The EU has vowed to clean up its act and cut back on dumping its waste elsewhere. For communities in low-income countries bearing the brunt of Europe's trash, that can’t come fast enough. A joint investigation by POLITICO, Lighthouse Reports and other global media partners highlights what an uphill climb that effort will be, as legal loopholes and a lack of transparency facilitate the flow of illegal exports to countries like Myanmar, where local communities are confronted with the pollution caused by ever-growing mounds of trash.

Author: Charles Pekow

Pay someone to clean up a ton of plastic fouling the environment in a developing nation and get certified to create another ton. Then call yourself pollution neutral. This system of “plastic credits” is catching on globally, especially among corporations. Several organizations now sponsor a plastic credit certification process in Asia, the Pacific region, Africa and South America. But as of yet, no common standard or regulations govern the accuracy of the data on what is collected or how the collected material gets recycled and reused. In any event, critics note, the system only deals with the downstream issue of plastic already in the environment, and not the issue of the manufacture and use of plastic in the first place.

Author: Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP)

The extraordinary meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the Waigani Convention made history today as Parties to the Convention adopted its first-ever amendment marking a significant step toward aligning the Convention with international efforts to combat plastic waste. The Waigani Convention, a regional treaty aimed at tackling hazardous waste and other pollutants in the Pacific region, has long been a crucial instrument for environmental protection and sustainability.

Author: Mia Rabson

On the northern fringe of Myanmar’s largest city is a township of nearly 300,000 people with a growing industrial base in textiles, consumer goods and food products. But north of Yangon in Shwepyithar, whose name in English means “golden and pleasant,” nothing is growing faster than garbage. And a lot of it isn’t even theirs.

Author: AFP

For several years sites across Shwepyithar township have been filling up with trash that chokes fields, blocks the drainage of monsoon rains and causes fire risks. The trash is the runoff of global plastic production, which has more than doubled since the start of the century to reach 460 million tonnes per year. "In the past, during the rainy season I could pick watercress from this field to eat," one resident told AFP, asking not to be identified for security reasons.

Author: Douglas Main

On a Saturday last summer, I kayaked up a Connecticut river from the coast, buoyed by the rising tide, to pick up trash with a group of locals. Blue herons and white egrets hunted in the shallows. Ospreys soared overhead hauling freshly caught fish. The wind combed the water into fields of ripples, refracting the afternoon sun into a million diamonds. From our distance, the wetlands looked wild and pristine.

Author: Allegra Mendelson

On any given day, the Thai side of the Moei River is bustling with traders loading hundreds of boxes onto small boats or rafts that cross the narrow stretch of water to Myanmar’s southeastern Kayin State.  At one river crossing, Frontier approached a group of workers sitting around a shaded table, sheltering from the midday heat. One of the men stood up and asked, “What do you want to ship? We can take anything.”

Authors: Allegra Mendelson and Rachel Moon

A stench creeps through the air, carried by a gust of wind from the mountains of garbage piled along the streets of Yangon’s northwestern Shwepyithar Township. Some mounds are over three metres high – as tall as the houses lining the same concrete roads. “The smell from the dump site is strong. At night, when the doors are closed, the air is sealed out, but if the wind comes in from the east, it’s really bad,” said U Zeya Kyaw Moe*, a resident of Shwepyithar’s 11th ward. “Even adults sometimes find it hard to breathe and it’s very dangerous for young children.”

Author: Hajar Umira Md Zaki

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 10 — Residents near Kapar, Meru and Jeram reportedly complained of hazardous gas coming from industrial waste that was illegally dumped nearby, which has been exacerbated by illegal burnings. Utusan Malaysia reported that this affected more than 300,000 residents, with the villagers blaming scavengers for setting off fires to find scrap iron within the waste piles made up of plastics, coppers and other materials.

Author: Claire Asher

Heart-wrenching images of sea turtles entangled in fishing nets, or dead seabirds with stomachs clogged by plastic trash, justifiably attract media and public attention. But zoom down to the microscopic scale and plastics are having far more pervasive, insidious effects on ocean life — even potentially impacting key Earth operating systems that keep the planet habitable. An estimated 12 million metric tons of plastic currently enters the ocean each year. This plastic debris gradually breaks down into smaller and smaller fragments — micro- and nanoplastics — which, while less visually striking, can have serious effects on marine ecosystems and may even pose a threat to the stability of Earth’s climate.

Author: Mathilda Davies

Mountains of Scottish rubbish are shipped every minute to developing countries that have been found to dump or burn recyclable waste illegally. The authorities exported about 350,000 tonnes of refuse, equivalent to almost five years of recycling, from Edinburgh last year to plants in Malaysia, India, Morocco and Pakistan, among others, in a practice condemned as “waste colonialism” and “environmental racism”.

Author: Elizabeth Claire Alberts

The more we learn about plastic, the more we find it everywhere. Research has shown that tiny microplastic particles litter the world’s oceans and rivers, from the Arctic and Antarctic. Microplastics are in the soils where fruits and vegetables grow. They’re found in the internal organs of wildlife. Scientists have even detected plastic in human blood, brains and placentas. A growing body of research has also shown that microplastics — particles less than 5 millimeters, or about 0.2 inches, in size — are being blown up into the atmosphere by wind and sea spray, then falling from the sky in rain. So it would only make sense that plastic is also present in clouds.

Author: Savannah Coombe

The Environment Agency has launched a public consultation on updating current charges for regulating notified international waste shipments.  It intends the new scheme to be more reflective of and proportionate to the activities the Environment Agency carries out. Currently, the cost of the Agency’s regulatory activities is greater than the fees it charges to waste importers and exporters.

Author: SDG Knowledge Hub

Following an all-night negotiating session and years of talks, the fifth International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM5) formally adopted a new global framework for the integrated management of chemicals and waste beyond 2020, the ‘Global Framework on Chemicals – For a planet free of harm from chemicals and waste.’ The Conference also adopted the Bonn Declaration, a political statement drafted over months of informal consultations and agreed to in the final hours.