Plastic pollution is a pervasive environmental problem that manifests itself in multiple ways. Very little plastic is recycled; most of it ends up in landfills or is burned, both solutions having serious shortcomings. High-income countries – such as many in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Australia – facing increasingly strict regulations in disposing of waste, have long grappled with the problem.
One approach they have often pursued for dealing with plastic waste is to export the waste elsewhere, preferably to countries with weaker waste regulations. For over 20 years, China was the place to send plastic waste. In the 1980s-90s, China accepted trash from richer countries to salvage raw materials from it. This led to serious pollution, health risks, and illegal dumping. In 2018, China banned the import of plastic waste.
Since then, Western countries have sent their waste to other parts of Asia and Africa. These waste exports are often advertised as contributions to recycling, but mostly, it is just a charade that simply makes the waste someone else’s problem – namely less developed countries, often with inadequate waste management infrastructure.
This practice of developed nations consuming excessively and exporting their waste to less developed countries is known as waste colonialism. It is a modern incarnation of historical colonialism, where natural resources and labor were stripped from colonized regions.
Its inherent injustice aside, the practice does not solve any of the problems created by waste. It just moves them somewhere else.
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Web Links
Waste Colonialism: A Brief History of Dumping Rich Countries’ Trash in the Global South
Photo, posted February 13, 2011, courtesy of Dan DeLuca via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio
