China used to be the largest recipient of excess plastic waste, but the country cracked down on the practice in 2018. Since then, countries like the UK, the US, and Canada have scrambled to find other dumping grounds.

Many of these countries have since restricted the practice as well after getting inundated with junk plastic. Both the Philippines and Malaysia have sent shipping containers full of plastic waste back to where they came from.

"Malaysia will not be the dumping ground of the world", Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia’s environment minister, said at the time. "We will fight back. Even though we are a small country, we can’t be bullied by developed countries."

"What the citizens of the UK [and other countries] think they have sent for recycling are actually being dumped in our country," she added. "Malaysians have a right to clean air, clean water, and a clean environment to live in, just like citizens of developed nations."

Low-income countries such as Bangladesh, Laos, Senegal, and Ethiopia have emerged as the new dumping grounds due to lax environmental laws, according to the Guardian.

Environmental groups have long warned that the plastic pollution crisis has been spiraling out of control. Many countries have vowed to reduce plastic production, and global conventions have been convened to improve international recycling and waste management. But plastic production is expected to increase by 40% over the next decade.

While the EU will seek to take responsibility for the amount of waste it generates, countries such as the UK will continue to pass the responsibility elsewhere.

"We had assumed the UK would at least follow the EU, and so it is a shock to find out now that instead they choose to have a far weaker control procedure, which can still permit exports of contaminated and difficult-to- recycle plastics to developing countries," Jim Puckett, director of the Basel Action Network, told the Guardian. He added: "They are talking the talk, but they have failed to walk the walk."

From: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/uk-still-sends-plastic-waste-low-income-countries/ Accessed on 02/14/2022