KUALA LUMPUR: When Seah Kian Hoe was just 10 years old, he would jump on the back of his parent’s small truck during school holidays and help them collect scrap, going door-to-door around neighbourhoods in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor.
Wednesday, 17 Jan 2018
 |
| Nothing but waste: A recycling centre employee showing compressed blocks of plastics in Hillsboro, Oregon. For decades, shipping containers have been loaded with American waste and dispatched to China for recycling until the recent ban. — AFP |
Taking their haul back to the family yard, they would spend hours separating the glass bottles, aluminium cans, discarded newspapers and metal.
Seah now employs 350 people to help him run Heng Hiap Industries, one of Malaysia’s top five plastic recycling businesses which processes about 40,000 tonnes of waste per year from both domestic and overseas suppliers.
“Thirty five years ago, it was just scavenging – a very different era compared to now,” Seah said.
Before the ban, which shocked many in the industry, China was the world’s dominant importer of such waste. In 2016, it imported 7.3 million tonnes of waste plastics, valued at US$3.7bil (RM14.6bil), accounting for 56% of world imports.
Over the past two decades, China was keen to suck in as much plastic waste as possible, helping feed its manufacturing expansion. But policy makers took action after a string of scandals involving unscrupulous players in the waste market.
As part of efforts to clean up China’s environment, including promoting electric cars and cutting coal use, Beijing launched a campaign against harmful “foreign garbage” last year.
Some of the worst-hit exporters of plastic waste are based in the United States and Britain – leaving those two countries scrambling to find alternative places to take their rubbish.
Unable to send their plastic waste to China, Britain and the United States are now likely to increase their domestic recycling capacities in an effort to reduce exports.
But industry officials say this could take years and may still not be enough.
Faced with growing stockpiles of plastic waste, many British and US companies are either burning some plastics for energy recovery or sending the materials to landfills, several industry researchers said.
Both of these methods will have a catastrophic impact on the environment, they warned.
The labour-intensive job of taking bales of plastic waste to be broken down, cleaned, separated into different plastic resins and finally made into pellets ready to be reshaped into new products is now expected to fall to South-East Asian countries.
Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are among the South-East Asian countries that have attracted Chinese investors in the plastics recycling sector over the past year, keen to fill the void left in China, industry officials said.
Preliminary data from the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) showed imports of plastic waste into South-East Asia are already rising fast.
Due partly to a ramp-up in shipments in the final quarter of last year, the BIR estimates that annual imports of plastic scrap into Malaysia jumped to 450,000-500,000 tonnes in 2017 from 288,000 tonnes in 2016.
Vietnam’s imports rose by 62% to 500,000-550,000 tonnes for 2017, while Thailand and Indonesia showed increases of up to 117% and 65% respectively.
The industry fears, however, that a flood of unregulated plastic waste to these countries could lead to similar problems as those experienced in China, resulting in copy-cat bans.
To avoid this, industry officials urged South-East Asian nations to tighten health and safety regulations, so that they can properly monitor what plastics enter their countries, and stop illegal practices.
Greenpeace East Asia plastics campaigner Liu Hua wants to see companies use less plastic packaging in the longer-term, but for now, South-East Asian governments should strengthen environmental controls to limit the spread of hazardous chemical waste and any negative impact on human health, he said.
To date, the world has produced more than eight billion tonnes of plastic, said Surendra Patawari Borad, a businessman who runs a recycling company in Belgium and the United States and chairs the plastics committee at the BIR.
Only 9% has been recycled, while just under 80% has been treated as waste – sent to landfill sites or dumped in the oceans.
As awareness rises over the dangers of allowing plastic waste to end up in the sea where it poisons fish and can enter the human food chain, recycling capacity will need to grow considerably worldwide. — Reuters
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regional/2018/01/17/cleaning-up-plastic-waste-southeast-asian-recyclers-hope-to-benefit-from-chinas-ban
