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/GETTYIMAGESbillion kilograms of plastic packaging materials
produced in 2013, only 14 percent were even col-
lected for recycling, and just two percent were
effectively recycled to compete with virgin plas-
tic. “Recycling delays, rather than avoids, final
disposal,” the Science authors write. And most
plastics persist for centuries.
As the globalized economy boomed, the toxic
reality was hidden overseas. Plastics tossed out
here were picked over at domestic recycling
facilities, which targeted easier-to-sort-and-
reprocess clear plastic bottles, milk jugs, and de-
tergent containers. The leftovers were tied up
in dirty bales and shipped to Asia. “China took
them because there was some high value of ma-
terial in there,” a former Waste Management ex-
ecutive tells ROLLING STONE. Oftentimes, he
says, Chinese recyclers “would dump those bales
into the river to separate the materials and pick
the better stuff out. And then they simply letthe rest just go downstream.”
The target plastics weren’t
recycled in state-of-the-art fa-
cilities, rather shredded and
melted down in rudimenta-
ry factories — often staffed by
whole families, children in-
cluded — eking out a toxic living amid mountains
of imported trash.
Seeing political danger in its growing pollu-
tion crisis, China blocked most plastic imports
in 2018, and this “National Sword” policy roiled
international recycling markets. Attempts to
re-create the China model in less authoritarian
economies of Southeast Asia have backfired in
pollution and protest — pulling back the curtain
on what one waste executive describes to ROLL-
ING STONE as “our dirty little secret”: Americans
who believed they were diverting plastic from
the trash were, ironically, fueling a waste crisishalf a world away. “It is easy to find American
and European packaging polluting the country-
side of Southeast Asia,” states a 2019 report from
the Break Free From Plastics coalition, which co-
ordinates an annual global audit of plastic waste.
“When people in the global north throw some-
thing ‘away,’ much of it ends up in the global
south because there is no such thing as ‘away.’ ”T
HE WORST of our global plastics crisis
is borne by the oceans. Roughly 8 bil-
lion kilograms of plastics enter the
world’s waters every year, and the
problem is most acute in emerging
coastal economies. The volume entering oceans
can be hard to comprehend, admits Jenna Jam-
beck, an engineering professor at the University
of Georgia who has published pathbreaking sci-
ence that quantifies plastic “leakage” to the
oceans. “It’s equal to five grocery-size bags full ofOUTSOURCING TRASH
Cattle graze in Indonesia.
For decades, America has
exported plastic waste.
“Our dirty little secret,”
one executive calls it.8
1 MARCH 2020