[[link removed]]

THE STORY YOU’VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT RECYCLING IS A LIE  
[[link removed]]


 

Alexander Clapp
February 14, 2025
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ We might at the very least be honest with ourselves. We ship our
waste to the other side of the planet not only because we produce far
too much of it but also because we insist on an environment exorcised
of our own material footprints. _

, DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times

 

In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to
happen.

Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and
instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The
stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again —
dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most
redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of
miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the
export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons
of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the
ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of
Latin America.

In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were
offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The
result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken
from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being
turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an
injustice that Daniel arap Moi
[[link removed]],
then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.”
Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste
export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention
[[link removed]],
entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the
world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic
waste from developed to developing countries.

If only the story had ended there. Despite that legislative success,
the poorer nations of the world have never stopped being receptacles
for the West’s ever-proliferating rubbish. The situation now is, in
many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was
widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most
waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the
language of planetary salvation. For the past two years I’ve been
traveling the globe — from the plains of Romania to the slums of
Tanzania — in an attempt to understand the world trash is making.
What I saw was terrifying.

I started in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where millions of faltering
electronics have been “donated
[[link removed]]”
by Western companies and universities since the 2000s. There I met
communities of “burner boys,” young migrants from the country’s
desert fringes who make cents an hour torching American cellphone
chargers and television remotes once they stop working. They told me
about coughing up blood at night. It’s no surprise: The section of
Accra they inhabit, a squalid estuary known as Agbogbloshie, regularly
ranks among Earth’s most poisoned places. Anyone who eats an egg in
Agbogbloshie, according to the World Health Organization
[[link removed]],
will absorb 220 times the tolerable daily intake of chlorinated
dioxins, a toxic byproduct of electronic waste.

It’s not just your old DVD player getting shipped to West Africa.
Today’s waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, an escape valve of
environmental responsibility that profits off routing detritus of
every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take
it. Your discarded clothes? They may go to a desert in Chile. The last
cruise ship you boarded? Hacked to pieces in Bangladesh. Your depleted
car battery? Stacked in a warehouse in Mexico. Is some of it run
by organized crime
[[link removed]]?
Of course. “For us,” a Naples mafioso boasted in 2008, “rubbish
is gold
[[link removed]].”
But much of it doesn’t have to be. Waste export remains scandalously
underregulated and unmonitored. Practically anyone
[[link removed]] can
give it a go.

Nowhere does today’s waste trade reach more boggling dimensions than
with plastic. The time scales alone are dizzying. Bottles or takeaway
cartons that you own for moments embark on arduous, monthslong,
carbon-spewing journeys from one end of Earth to another. Upon arrival
in villages in Vietnam or the Philippines, for example, some of these
objects get chemically reduced — an energy-intensive task that
unleashes innumerable toxins and microplastics into local ecosystems.
The process’s ability to produce new plastic is at best dubious, but
the environmental and health cost is cataclysmic. Plastic waste in the
developing world — clogging waterways, exacerbating air pollution,
infiltrating human brain tissue — is now linked to the death
of hundreds of thousands
[[link removed]] every
year.

The fate of much other plastic waste that gets sent to the global
south is more rudimentary: It gets incinerated in a cement factory or
dumped in a field. In Turkey, I met marine biologists who fly drones
along the Mediterranean coast to search for stray piles of European
plastic waste, which enters
[[link removed]] the
country at the rate of one dump truck roughly every 15 minutes. In
Kenya, a country that outlawed plastic bags in 2017 only for the
American petrochemical sector to conspire to turn it into Africa’s
next waste frontier
[[link removed]],
more than half the cattle that wander urban areas have been found to
possess plastic [[link removed]] in
their stomach linings, while a shocking 69 percent
[[link removed]] of
discarded plastic is believed to enter a water system of one form or
another.

That still pales in comparison to what I witnessed in Indonesia.
Across the country’s 17,000-odd islands, domestically consumed
plastic is so mishandled that 365 tons
[[link removed]] of
it are believed to enter the sea every hour. And yet, deep in the
highlands of Java, there are hellscapes of imported Western waste —
toothpaste tubes from California, shopping bags from the Netherlands,
deodorant sticks from Australia — stacked knee-high as far as the
eye can see. Too voluminous to even attempt to recycle, it is used as
fuel in scores of bakeries that supply Java’s street markets with
tofu, a culinary staple. The result is some of the most lethal cuisine
imaginable, with poisons from incinerated Western plastic ingested
hourly by great numbers of Indonesians.

Can the waste trade ever be legislated into oblivion? As with drug
trafficking, it may be that there’s too much money going around to
fix the problem. Traveling trash, after all, has many advantages. Rich
countries lose a liability, and garbage producers are let off the
hook. The need to find a place to put all our rubbish has never been
more dire: A recent United Nations study
[[link removed]] found
that one out of every 20 objects moving through global supply chains
is now some form of plastic — amounting to a trillion-dollar annual
industry worth more than the global arms, timber and wheat trades
combined.

Most crucially, it’s hard for Western consumers to recognize the
extent of the crisis — that the story they’ve been told about
recycling often isn’t true — when it is continually rendered
invisible, relocated thousands of miles away. Yeo Bee Yin, the former
environmental minister of Malaysia, may have put it to me best: The
only way to really stop waste from entering her country, she told me,
would be to close Malaysia’s ports entirely.

We might at the very least be honest with ourselves about what we are
doing. We ship our waste to the other side of the planet not only
because we produce far too much of it but also because we insist on an
environment exorcised of our own material footprints. Everything
you’ve ever thrown away in your life: There’s a good chance a lot
of it is still out there, somewhere_, _be it headphones torched for
their copper wiring in Ghana or a sliver of a Solo Cup bobbing across
the Pacific Ocean_._

Here the adage doesn’t ring true. Rare is the trash that becomes
anyone’s treasure.

_Alexander Clapp is a journalist and the author of “Waste Wars: The
Wild Afterlife of Your Trash,” from which this essay is adapted._

* recycling
[[link removed]]
* mythology
[[link removed]]
* Environmental Catastrophe
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]