Free report May 2019- Stop dumping plastic waste into poor nationsby Aaditya Singh | 13-05-2019 04:55 |
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I had reported the below content in one of my earlier reports in 2017 as a clear example that waste can be treated as a resource. ¡°Believe it or not, trash travels from Rome to Austria by train and is converted to electricity that powers Austrian homes! Rome had been struggling with a rubbish crisis and Austria had spare capacity at a waste-to-energy biogas plant. So a deal was struck. The Italians are paying Austrian company EVN to dispose Roman household refuse.¡± Please read my earlier report through the link below. Waste trade is a reality of our times and it can be considered beneficial if it is a win-win situation as I cited in my report above when waste from Italy was used as a resource in Austria to generate power. However, on the other side there was also a completely different picture of waste travelling from one country to another. Many developed countries have been sending lower-quality plastic waste to private entities in developing and underdeveloped countries without proper approvals, practically turning villages into dumpsites. Some years ago China stopped recycling waste from the US, and plastic waste started being dumped into other developing and underdeveloped countries. The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) found waste from US piled up in villages throughout Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, that had once been primarily agricultural communities. Thankfully the practice is on its way out as I came to know from a recent web report (cited under references at the end of my report). International community has agreed on a deal aimed at controlling and restricting shipments of ¡®hard-to-recycle¡¯ plastic waste from affluent countries to poorer countries. The deal was signed last week at a two-week meeting of UN-backed conventions on plastic waste and toxic, hazardous chemicals. The convention brought together 1400 delegates from 187 countries in Geneva, Switzerland. It ended with a legally binding framework to curb unethical dumping of less valuable and harder to recycle plastic that gets discarded rather than being recycled. Exporting countries will now have to obtain consent from countries receiving contaminated, mixed or non-recyclable plastic waste arising from products used in a broad array of industries, such as healthcare, technology, aerospace, fashion and food and beverages. Such conventions and historic deals can control shipping hazardous waste and exploitation of poor nations at the hands of richer first world nations. The deal will indeed make the global trade in plastic waste more transparent and better regulated, thus protecting humans and the environment. However, the epidemic of plastic pollution needs a systematic approach to curb the problem in the bud. We must stop flooding the market with plastic products, minimise purchase and use of plastics, control discarding of plastic waste and then start monitoring where plastic waste goes when it leaves our borders, to try making plastic a part of a circular economy. Reference: |
