wanted stocks here, in violation of Malaysian
law. When a dump-truck driver spotted us, he
hurriedly left the area. (Two days later, the site
was set alight; local newspapers showed pho-
tos of thick black smoke rising over the trees.)
Malaysians hope to defend themselves
from some of these depredations with the
help of the Basel Convention on hazardous
waste, which goes into effect next January.
The convention bars the shipment of plastic
contaminated with any kind of waste, and it
has been signed by almost every country in
the world—though not the U.S.
Malaysian officials have already begun
blocking containers that they suspect violate
the rules. On a blustery Sunday afternoon,
customs officials escort us around Penang’s
dockyard, showing us which containers are
marked for return to the U.S., France, and
Britain—at the shippers’ expense. Those re-
turns can quickly get mired in a bureaucratic
labyrinth, however. One container from
Oakland, marked for repatriation, has sat on
the dockside in Penang since June 2018.
Yeo, the former minister, believes plastic
waste imports should be limited until the new
Basel rules are strictly enforced, not only in
Malaysia but also in nearby recycling hubs like
the Philippines and Indonesia. People are in-
creasingly rankled by the trade, she says. “Why
are we a dumping ground for you? Because
it is more convenient for you?” she asks me.
“The feeling is there is perhaps injustice in it.”IN TRUTH, few people give
even a passing thought to
where their trash goes. Most
assume that after they wheel
their garbage bins to the side-
walk, a well-oiled recycling system takes over.
Early one January morning, we tracked
Smithtown’s garbage trucks as they proved
how far off the mark that assumption is. On
the first recycling day of 2020, the trucks
tipped out 103 tons of plastic at a collection
center that was once a full-service recycling
facility. In 2014, Smithtown earned about
$878,000 selling its waste to eager recyclers.
Now, they pay nearly $80,000 a year to get
disposal companies to take it off their hands.
Smithtown’s difficulties typify what has
happened across the U.S.—and they predate
China’s ban. As oil and gas prices crashed,
the market for the town’s used plastic driedup; virgin plastic was simply cheaper. So it
drastically cut its recycling and now accepts
only higher-quality polymers, called “ones”
and “twos”—the numbers inside the triangle
recycling icon. Lower-grade plastics, num-
bered three to seven, are no longer market-
able. Hundreds of towns across the U.S. have
made similar decisions, and dozens have
simply stopped curbside recycling altogether.
These days, a trucking company collects
Smithtown’s plastic waste and delivers it
to the Sims Municipal Recycling Center in
Brooklyn. Since Long Island, where Smith-
town is located, bans solid-waste landfill-
ing, many low-grade plastics wind up being
burned for electricity at a plant in nearby
Huntington. Actual recycling of the waste is
almost out of the question, says Smithtown
sanitation supervisor Neal Sheehan. “It is still
cheaper to ship it across the world to some-
place, to come back as something,” he says.
If current trends continue, that’s unlikely
to change. Oil and gas companies are making
major investments in a future virgin-plastic
boom. Multinational goliath Royal Dutch
Shell is building a mammoth complex
near Pittsburgh—one of America’s fracking
epicenters—that will produce about 3.5 bil-
lion pounds a year of polyethylene plastic.
(The plant won a 25-year tax break from the
Pennsylvania state legislature that’s worth an
estimated $1.6 billion.) In January, Taiwan’s
Formosa Plastics Group won approval from
state lawmakers to build a $9.4 billion
plastic-production complex in Louisiana,
which it says will create 1,200 jobs.
These plants are an environmental
problem in their own right. The Center for In-
ternational Environmental Law, an advocacy
group, argues that the industry’s expansion
could pose “a significant and growing threat
to the earth’s climate.” It calculates that the
greenhouse gases emitted in the production
of plastics will equal the output of about 615
new coal plants by 2050. And Geyer, the
UC–Santa Barbara professor, estimates that
by then, the world will be creating more than
1.1 billion tons of virgin plastic a year.
Geyer says that after years of studying
industry data, he has reached one conclu-
sion. “There is one thing we absolutely must
do, and it is also the hardest,” he says. “WeA PLANET IN CRISIS : THE PLASTIC FLOODEstimated
annual revenue
of the global
plastics industry
SOURCE: THE BUSINESS
RESEARCH COMPANYShare of U.S.
used plastic that
ends up in landfills
SOURCE: U.S.
ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION AGENCY$1
TRILLION76
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