With garbage containers sent back to developed economies, Southeast Asian countries are fighting through legal and business means to stop them being treated like the rubbish dumps of richer countries.
The Philippine Congress, which met on July 22, discussed a bill to ban the import of garbage. The decision got here after the archipelago country returned 69 containers of waste to Canada.
Philippine Senator Franklin Drilon, who proposed the bill, said in a press release that he hoped it could “send a transparent message to other countries that the Philippines will not be a garbage dump.”
“We must ban the import of all kinds of waste and scrap, including recyclable materials. We should never allow our country to turn into a garbage dump,” he said.
In recent weeks, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia have also sent back garbage collected by the United States, Australia, Canada, Western Europe and Japan.
However, returning waste is barely step one. Like the Philippines, other Southeast Asian countries have announced plans to ban or restrict imports of all kinds of waste.
Thailand desires to stop all imports of foreign plastic scrap by 2021. Vietnam has stopped issuing permits for imports of paper, plastics, metal and other waste and cracked down on illegal shipments. The Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forests also plans to tighten regulations on the import of paper waste.
Abigail Aguilar, a Greenpeace Philippines activist, welcomes motion against waste imports. But she said the important thing to stopping industrialized countries from dumping waste in Southeast Asia is regional motion, not only unilateral policy.
“It is nice that these countries have policies against waste imports, but it surely will not be enough. What happens if one Southeast Asian country bans waste imports? The exporter will simply ship to a neighboring country with fewer restrictions,” Aguilar told China Daily.
Developed countries are turning to Southeast Asia following last 12 months’s move by China, which once collected 45 percent of the world’s plastic waste, to ban waste imports.
According to Greenpeace’s policy document “Tackling Southeast Asia’s Plastic Waste Trade,” published in June, imports of plastic waste into the region increased by 171 percent in 2018, to 2.26 million tonnes.
The environmental group said a few of these imports were illegally shipped as “recyclable” though they contained contaminated plastic and other mixed waste.
Greenpeace and other environmental groups within the region are calling on the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations to incorporate a waste import ban on the regional bloc’s agenda and be sure that all ASEAN countries ratify the Basel ban amendment.
The Basel Convention is a global treaty signed in 1989 that goals to limit the flow of hazardous waste between nations.
Source: This is a component of a story originally published on China day-after-day
