the girl’s respiratory infections, which she says began soon
after recycling factories opened in their area last year. The
girl has been hospitalized three times since then and last
year stayed home from school for six months. “She kept
getting worse,” Tei says. “Every time she left the house, her
eyes would turn red.” Now the girl spends her days in the
quiet, dark living room, drawing at a small pink table.
After protests from activists in Sungai Petani, factory
owners stopped burning plastic last fall. But the two sides
remain hostile. Last April, arsonists set ablaze two facto-
ries overnight. Their owners blame environmental groups.
When we visited the town dump, a security guard snapped
our photograph with his phone, then texted it to factories
across Malaysia, to alert them to our presence. For days
after, factory owners eyed us with suspicion, asking, “Are
you with the environmentalists?”
On one occasion, we were. One day, near Sungai Petani,
two activists guided us down a dirt road that ran alongside
the Mudah River, a source of water for local farms. There,
a short walk from a kindergarten, a large, unlicensed
dump had sprung up. A chemical reek wafted up from
pools of orange-colored water, filled with plastics instantly
recognizable to Western consumers: Tide laundry soap
bottles, Poland Spring water bottles, Green Giant frozen-pea
packets. Locals explained that recyclers had discarded un-recycle this,” says Muralindran Kovindasamy,
operations director in Ipoh for ResourceCo
Asia, an Australian company. He buys some
of the plastic Malaysian factories can’t use
and sells it to cement companies as material
for road paving. Most other recyclers simply
burn or bury it. “Enforcement is poor,” he says,
“and it’s cheap to dump it in the landfill.”YEO BEE YIN, then Malay-
sia’s environment minister,
looked almost pained when
I asked her how quickly
Malaysia’s plastic-scrap trade
has grown. Sitting in her top-floor office in
the federal administrative center, Putrajaya,
Yeo estimated that the trade contributes only
$1 billion a year to the economy. Yet she saw
herself as waging an all-out war against the
operators. Malaysian recyclers require 19
different environmental permits to operate,
and Yeo closed more than 200 factories last
year alone, for lack of paperwork. If need be,
she said, the government should “cut their
electricity, cut their water, cut everything that
is possible. They are gangsters.”
Yeo’s war awaits a new general: A few
weeks after we spoke, she resigned with the
rest of Malaysia’s cabinet amid a parlia-
mentary crisis. But whoever succeeds her
will have allies among health experts and
ordinary citizens, for reasons evident even to
the casual observer.
On our first morning in Malaysia, Sebas-
tian Meyer and I climb a plastic mountain
50 feet high in the heart of Sungai Petani,
a town of about 200,000 people near the
island of Penang. This waste dump comprises
plastics that nearby factories have deemed
unrecyclable. It is the very end of the plastic
supply chain. Burning it seems about the
only next step, and someone is doing just
that. Tneoh Shen Jen, a physician who directs
the city’s Metro Hospital, says residents have
experienced breathing problems as factories
repeatedly and illegally burn the waste; they
“smell burning plastic most nights,” he says.
In a neighborhood nearby, Tei Jean, 40,
sits in her living room with her 6-year-old
daughter. Their windows are sealed, and
the house is stripped of toys, blankets, and
curtains. It is a desperate effort by Tei to stop“WE HAVE TOSTOP GROWINGTHE PRODUCTIONOF VIRGIN PLASTIC.”
ROLAND GEYER, PROFESSOR OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY,
UC–SANTA BARBARADEALMAKERS Plastics trader Steve Wong (left) shows plastic
samples to recycling-factory owner Saikey Yeong.80 FORTUNE APRIL 2020PLA.W.0420.XMIT.indd 80 FINAL 3/10/2020 4:00:19 PM