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.
The investigation — backed by on-the-ground reporting and interviews with policymakers and waste experts — comes as EU lawmakers and countries consider an all-out ban on plastic waste exports as part of a broader revamp of the bloc’s waste rules.
As part of the revision, the European Commission has suggested tightening the conditions under which recyclable plastic waste can be exported to non-OECD countries, suggesting they must express consent and prove they’re able to properly treat the waste. But environmental campaigners and members of the European Parliament say a lack of traceability and transparency in the global waste trade mean those tweaks will do little to fix the issue.
“If we don’t get the export ban, we will see in years to come that the situation hasn’t changed for the poorest countries in the world,” said Pernille Weiss, a center-right EU lawmaker leading work on the file in the Parliament.
The case of Myanmar, which has banned the import of plastic scrap unless it’s ready to recycle, highlights the difficulty of ensuring that trash actually ends up in a country that has agreed to receive it — and not in a country that hasn’t and isn’t equipped to deal with it.
Waste traders on the border with Thailand confirmed to POLITICO’s investigation partners that smugglers are moving trash shipped to Thailand into Myanmar, despite the country’s ban. Such goods transiting through the country are not submitted to rigorous checks at the border by either nation. And while Thailand plans to ban the import of plastic waste in 2025, shipments imported for transit will continue to be waved through.
Photo evidence gathered on the ground shows wrapping and containers for products from companies in Poland, Hungary, Ireland and France not sold locally among the waste, but in the absence of an international traceability system there’s no way of telling how those items ended up there.
“It has been three months since [waste trucks] started dumping waste here right in front of my house,” said a woman living in Shwepyithar Township in Yangon, Myanmar, who requested anonymity for security reasons. Many locals in the area say they worry about retribution from the military junta if they speak out about the issue.
“Even though I don’t like seeing the dumpsite in front of my house, I do not want to be the only one to object while others stay silent,” she said.
Pass the polluting parcel
The EU exported over 1.1 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2022 to non-EU countries and special territories, the bulk of which went to Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, according to Eurostat.
But with a growing number of Asian countries introducing restrictions on plastic waste imports from the West — following China’s imposition of such a ban in 2018 — Europe’s options for getting rid of its waste are narrowing.
According to a 2020 survey by Interpol, China’s ban on waste imports has contributed to a significant boost in “illegal waste shipments, primarily rerouted to South-East Asia via multiple transit countries to camouflage the origin of the waste shipment.” The agency also noted “an increase in illegal waste fire and landfills in Europe and Asia.”
Illegal waste shipments within the EU and between the bloc and third countries already represent between 15 and 30 percent of the total EU waste trade, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), generating €9.5 billion in annual revenue from the illicit waste market in the EU alone.
The current regulations are “inadequate,” said Lauren Weir, a senior campaigner with the Environmental Investigation Agency, also pointing to a lack of transparency and public access to waste trade data.
Gaps between data voluntarily reported by exporting countries and importing countries in some instances leave millions of kilograms of waste unaccounted for: Myanmar, for example, reports a fraction of the waste imports declared by exporter Thailand. That could be down to any number of reasons, including the goods being classified differently in the two countries.
“[There’s] uncertainty about what happens with plastic waste once it reaches the destination countries, as there is no traceability system in place,” according to UNODC. “Concerns are that a big portion of unrecyclable, mixed or hard-to-recycle plastics end up in dumpsites and landfills or are burned in the open.”
The European Environment Agency has similarly warned that there is “little knowledge or transparency about how plastic waste imported from the EU is managed in other countries” — and that poor management of the garbage can lead to pollution and health risks to local populations.
Several recycling factories interviewed in Myanmar — which use the imported plastic to make consumer goods — admitted they simply dump or set fire to waste they can’t use.
Even rich OECD countries can’t necessarily treat EU waste properly, according to research conducted by Human Rights Watch detailing the environmental and health risks posed by plastic recycling in Turkey.
The EU exported 586,547 metric tons to OECD member states outside of the bloc in 2022 — versus 526,575 metric tons to non-OECD partners.
Plastic ban bandwagon
The European Parliament has pushed to phase out plastic waste exports to remedy the problem — putting it at odds with the Commission and several EU countries, which worry about their capacity to treat plastic waste without shipping it to third countries and a potential breach of World Trade Organization rules.
The Commission’s proposal to reform EU waste legislation, presented in November 2021, suggested tightening the rules so that companies can only export “green-listed,” non-hazardous waste — including scrap metal, waste paper and certain plastics — to nations outside the OECD club of rich countries if those countries can prove they’re able to treat the waste “in a sound manner.”
But a number of countries are coming around to the idea of a ban, with a next round of talks slated for November 16.
According two Parliament staff close to the negotiations, Belgium and Germany are among the countries on board with a potential ban, while hold-outs include Ireland and Poland.
“Given Ireland’s continued reliance on the exports of plastic waste to the U.K. [and] due to our limited domestic capacity, we continue to have significant concerns on the proposed ban on plastic exports outside the EU,” a spokesperson for the Irish government said.
Ireland’s position is that the revised rules “should continue to allow for the export of plastic waste to OECD countries, including the UK,” they added.
Instituting a ban on plastic waste exports would show “the EU is taking responsibility for the environmental impacts that we have turned a blind eye to for too long,” said Weiss, the Parliament’s lead negotiator.
Under the Parliament’s proposal, plastic waste shipments to OECD countries would be phased out over four years, while those to non-OECD countries would be immediately banned when the rules enter into force.
“This is not ideology,” said Weiss. “It’s about taking good care of the planet and also showing that the EU can take the first important steps.”
Lucia Mackenzie contributed data analysis and graphs.
Additional reporting by: Allegra Mendelson from Frontier Myanmar; Charlotte Alfred, Eva Constantaras and Nalinee Maleeyakul from Lighthouse Reports; Kannikar Petchkaew; and Sicha Rungrojtanakul from Prachatai.
Reporting for this investigation was supported by the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.