74 FORTUNE APRIL 2020end of an odyssey of as much as 8,000 miles. The fact that
the waste has traveled to this distant corner of the planet
in the first place shows how badly the global recycling
economy has failed to keep pace with humanity’s plastics
addiction. This is an ecosystem that is deeply dysfunc-
tional, if not on the point of collapse: About 90% of the
millions of tons of plastic the world produces every year
will eventually end up not recycled, but burned, buried, or
dumped.
Plastic recycling enjoys ever-wider support among
consumers: Putting yogurt containers and juice bottles in a
blue bin is an eco-friendly act of faith in millions of house-
holds. But faith goes only so far. The tidal wave of plastic
items that enters the recycling stream each year is increas-
ingly likely to fall right back out again, casualties of a bro-CUT INTO A HILLSIDE in northern Malay-
sia, amid oil palms and rubber trees, stands
a large, open-air warehouse. This is the
BioGreen Frontier recycling factory, which
opened last November in the village of Bukit
Selambau. On a searing-hot afternoon in
January, Shahid Ali was working his very
first week on the job. With his feet square
in front of a chute on the production line,
he stood knee-deep in soggy, white bits of
plastic. Around him, more bits floated off
the conveyor belt and fluttered to the ground
like snowflakes.
Hour after hour, Ali sifts through the
plastic jumble moving down the belt, picking
out pieces that look off-color or soiled—re-
jects in the recycling process. Though it looks
like backbreaking work, Ali says it is a great
improvement over his previous job, folding
bedsheets in a nearby textile factory, for much
lower pay. Now, if he eats frugally, he can save
money from his wages of just over $1 an hour
and send $250 a month to his parents and six
siblings in Peshawar, Pakistan, 2,700 miles
away. “As soon as I heard about this work, I
asked for a job,” says Ali, 24, a squat, bearded
man with glasses and an easy smile. Still, he’s
working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. “If
I take a day off, I lose a day’s wages,” he says.
In the warehouse, hundreds of bales are
stacked more than 60 feet high—each stuffed
with plastic wrappers and bags tossed out
weeks earlier by their original users. The
address labels still stuck inside the bags offer
clear clues to their origins. You can see toilet-
tissue wrappers from a household in Half
Moon Bay, Calif., packaging from El Paso,
and polymeric film from energy-drink maker
Red Bull’s U.S. headquarters in Santa Monica.
For this detritus, factories like Ali’s are theken market. Many products that consumers believe (and
industries claim) are “recyclable” are in reality not, because
of stark economics. With oil and gas prices near 20-year
lows—thanks in large part to the fracking revolution—
so-called virgin plastic, a product of petroleum feedstocks,
is now far cheaper and easier to obtain than recycled mate-
rial. That unforeseen shift has yanked the financial rug
out from under what was until recently a viable recycling
industry. “The global waste trade is essentially broken,”
says Graham Forbes, head of the global plastics campaign
at Greenpeace. “We are sitting on vast amounts of plastic,
with nowhere to send it and nothing to do with it.”
This gargantuan overload is creating a conflict that in-
dustry and government can no longer ignore—one that pits
the profitability and usefulness of plastic against its threat
to public health and the environment. There are few places
where that conflict is more visible than in Malaysia. Here,
rock-bottom wages, cheap land, and a still-evolving regula-
tory climate have enticed entrepreneurs to build hundreds
of factories in a last-ditch bid to stay profitable. The real
economic and environmental costs of plastic recycling are
on vivid display, as I discovered traveling across the country
with photographer Sebastian Meyer. Over the course of 10
days, we visited 10 recycling factories—some of them, in-
cluding BioGreen Frontier, operating without official regis-
tration, under threat of a shutdown—as they grappled with“THE GLOBALWASTE TRADE ISESSENTIALLY BROKEN.”GRAHAM FORBES, HEAD OF THE GLOBAL PLASTICS CAMPAIGN,
GREENPEACECA PLANET IN CRISIS : THE PLASTIC FLOODPLA.W.0420.XMIT.indd 74 FINAL 3/10/2020 4:00:12 PM