Recycling won’t solve our planet-killing plastic-pollution problem

Dec. 20, 2024

Efforts to target the plastic problem with better recycling, rather than a production cap, ignore how such programs turn potentially hazardous plastic waste into a commodity, fuelling a massive illicit trade

If you’re at all concerned about the alarming growth of plastic waste clogging our oceans and leaching toxins into our earth, this has not been a good year.

Back in April, environment ministers, experts and activists from more than 200 countries gathered for the fourth time in Ottawa as part of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee sessions, convened by the United Nations Environment Program. Their goal: to try to find a solution to the world’s plastic pollution problem, which finally got the attention it deserves in 2018, after China stopped accepting the mushrooming pile of plastic trash coming from rich countries, including Canada. That prompted a mad scramble to find an alternative destination, fuelling a boom in plastic waste exports to the Global South. Attempts to regulate the trade were failing. Plastic waste was turning up in oceans and rivers, and piling up in giant smouldering mountains in some of the world’s poorest places.

The series of meetings were supposed to develop a “legally binding instrument on plastic pollution.” Canada had tabled an ambitious plan in Ottawa to reduce the production of primary plastic polymers by 40 per cent by 2040. In the most recent meetings in the South Korean city of Busan, which ended on Dec. 1, Panama made its own proposal to cap production, signed by more than 100 countries, including Canada.

The vast majority of participating countries agreed that solving the plastic waste crisis requires curbing fossil fuel-based plastic production. But a small coterie of the world’s major plastic-producing countries, led by China, formed a coalition of resistance with the big oil producers, led by Saudi Arabia. The solution, they said – an argument echoed by the army of lobbyists that Big Plastic and Big Oil sent to the weeklong negotiations – was not a production cap but better recycling.

What they didn’t talk about, though, was just how big a mess the recycling industry has made in the world. For years, plastic producers have poured millions of dollars into creating the fiction that plastic recycling is a viable way to combat plastic pollution, when in fact it’s not. In the process, the industry has turned plastic waste – a potentially hazardous material – into a commodity that is bought and sold on the international market.

In 2021, plastic waste was added to the Basel Convention, the global treaty governing the transboundary shipment of hazardous materials. Under the Convention, such waste is divided into three broad categories based on toxicity and recyclability. The easiest and safest to recycle – things like water bottles, plastic containers and film wrap – fall under one trading code, B3011, and is only lightly regulated. To qualify, these types of plastic polymers must be “almost free from contamination and other types of wastes.”

Most B3011 plastics, though, are used for packaging such things as food or cleaning products or cosmetics, and as such, they are often contaminated. To prep these types of plastics for recycling, contaminants must first be removed, a costly process for recycling companies. In clean form, these are the easy-money plastics, but if contaminants are not removed, they become the equivalent of the oil sands: profitable, but dirty and more costly to recycle. The waste must then be labelled differently for trading purposes, depending on the levels of contamination present: hazardous waste falls into the B3210 category, while non-hazardous mixed and contaminated waste is coded as Y48.

Recycling companies in wealthy countries, which generate a disproportionate amount of the world’s plastic waste, are happy to recycle B3011 waste; doing so is cheap, easy and profitable. B3210 and Y48 plastics, meanwhile, are not, with current market prices for recycled plastic pellets coming in around $850 a tonne on average. But waste-management companies still need to get rid of this very large pile of dirty plastic trash. The solution: export it to poor countries where weak labour and environmental laws make processing it profitable.

The problem is that under the Basel Convention, exporting contaminated and mixed plastic waste can be an onerous process, requiring documentation from the destination country showing that the recipient has the capacity to process it in an environmentally friendly way. To get around the regulations, waste-management companies regularly fudge the documents, listing Y48 waste, for instance, as B3011. They also try to hide contaminated plastic waste inside other types of more lightly regulated waste, like clean B3011 or even paper products. Recyclers, meanwhile, mislabel unprocessed plastic waste as processed, thus magically transforming it into a raw material, at least on paper.

The scale of illicit activity is breathtaking. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the international anti-money laundering watchdog, reports that the waste trade rakes in at least US$11-billion a year. And the numbers, according to Michael Fowler, the head of the FATF’s Risk and Data Unit, are almost certainly much higher, spawning notorious cottage industries like waste brokers who specialize in finding ways for waste-management companies to get rid of unwanted trash cheaply and quietly.

As a result, plastic waste trafficking has surged onto the radars of multiple international law enforcement agencies. In 2021, the FATF included waste crime as a priority subcategory in its report on environmental crime. The goal of that report, Mr. Fowler told me, was to “get the world’s governments to acknowledge that this is a massive problem” and start to build up a knowledge base of how the illicit trade operates and the financial flows involved.

Three years later, however, there’s been little progress. Every researcher and law enforcement official I speak to – whether it’s Dutch inspectors from the port in Rotterdam, the biggest shipping facility in Europe and ground zero for the illicit export of European waste, to criminologists attempting to understand the mechanics of the trade – tells me the same thing: it’s a black hole, and the people who should know what’s happening are unwilling to talk about it.

That may be in part because governments turn a blind eye to waste crimes. Economists call waste a “negative-value commodity,” meaning that its value is not measured by its presence, but by its absence. Waste-management companies are seen as performing a public good, and because waste-management is mostly the purview of local government, company owners and local politicians often develop close relationships. In one major mislabelling case in the Netherlands, for instance, the offending company was only levied a fine and told to clean up its act because, according to investigators, it “invests a lot in local households, and municipalities are very satisfied with the services this entrepreneur provides to its citizens.”

Multiple investigations – by Britain’s Environmental Investigation Agency NGO, Dutch police and Interpol, among others – show that mislabelling is rampant in the plastic waste trade. The EIA’s 2024 report, Dirty Deals, called it a “core tactic” used by waste-management companies and recyclers to get rid of waste that would be unprofitable for them to process themselves. Instead, it ends up in the Global South, where it is either dumped in oceans and landfill sites, burned or recycled in unlicensed factories under abhorrent working conditions with little regard for human life or the environment.

Unless there’s a miracle solution to make the recycling of petroleum-based plastics economically and environmentally viable (and there is none), producing more virgin plastic will only make the problem worse. By 2050, yearly plastic production is expected to quadruple to nearly 1.5 billion tonnes, a pile that would be the equivalent of nearly 13,000 CN Towers; recycling capacity, meanwhile, is stagnating. Even if we ramp up recycling rates, it won’t solve the problem of toxic chemicals and contaminants that render the vast majority of plastic difficult or impossible to recycle.

The solution needs to be multipronged, including placing caps on production. Experts say another important step, something Canadian officials pushed for in Ottawa, would be banning dangerous chemicals used in plastic production, and making biodegradable alternatives more economically viable.

Those changes would require shifts in how we live. Plastics have insinuated themselves into almost every aspect of our daily routines, and it’s not by accident. We’ve been duped by Big Oil and Big Plastic into believing their products are a miracle material that we simply can’t do without. That’s a lie. And it’s time we called them on it.

Adnan R. Khan is an independent writer and editor based in Amsterdam and Istanbul.

[Top photo: Bales of crushed, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles in California (Wikimedia Commons)]