Fortune - 04.2020

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.”

Y

EO 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 TO

STOP GROWING

THE PRODUCTION

OF VIRGIN PLASTIC.”

ROLAND GEYER, PROFESSOR OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY,

UC–SANTA BARBARA

DEALMAKERS Plastics trader Steve Wong (left) shows plastic

samples to recycling-factory owner Saikey Yeong.

80 FORTUNE APRIL 2020

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