Transcript
Theme Music – Pling by Dorian Roy
Nirere Sadrach
Among the consequences of this growing plastic pollution crisis is the issue of waste colonialism. It has been now confirmed that countries in the global North are making the global South their dumping ground by exporting their waste.
Sharifah Norkhadijah Syed Ismail
And in certain countries, like Malaysia, most of this plastic being burning, illegally burning – it can create hazardous gases that can affect the humans or the populations nearby to the facilities. And also this plastic has been dumped carelessly on land or in the rivers or the oceans. Even though we think that we may be really recycle the plastic, but we are not really sure whether they’ve been treated efficiently or not.
Anja Krieger
Welcome to the #PlasticsTreaty Shorts on Plastisphere. My name is Anja Krieger. For a long time, we treated disposable plastic and waste as if there was an “away” – a place, where we could safely dispose of our trash. But as we all know, nothing disappears just magically. Each year, the world produces over two billion tons of waste, and hundreds of millions tons of that are plastic. There is no away, and all this stuff goes somewhere – to landfills, dumps, incinerators, recycling facilities, or into the environment. But our plastic products don’t always end up close to where they are used. Waste is traded globally, and especially the hard-to-recycle plastics are shipped to places abroad. Often, there’s not enough infrastructure to deal with this waste plastic in a safe way. So it is openly dumped, recycled without protecting the workers’ health, or lost to the environment – with impacts for the local people and ecosystems. Today, I want to share two messages with you. The first by Nirere Sadrach from Uganda, and the second from Sharifa Ismail from Malaysia. Nirere is an activist with End Plastic Pollution, an NGO in Uganda. He calls for plastic pollution to be addressed at a global level – but treated within the borders of each country.
Nirere Sadrach
I live in a global south country, which is Uganda and it is important because the global South will live with the impacts of the plastic and climate crisis every day. Every day, every where you can find plastic is discarded in the environment. Uganda’s largest landfill, which is on 36 acres, is full. And now more 130 plus acres are being consumed of virgin land, are being consumed of to create a new landfill.
Through our brand audits at End Plastic Pollution, we have found brands from Europe and brands from the USA polluting our rivers and lakes. Neither do these companies nor these countries of origin play a role in managing their waste in our communities. So it is very important that we stop the practice of exporting waste from higher income countries to lower income countries and so that we can address this environmental injustice.
It is important that the Global Plastics Treaty ensures that all countries have to be responsible for how they produce, how they manage, and how they dispose their waste. Countries in the global South cannot even have the scale or the infrastructure, neither do they have the expertise to deal with their own plastic pollution problem. It is unacceptable to make this worse by not stopping waste colonialism.
Anja Krieger
That’s Nirere Sadrach from Uganda. I received another message on the same topic, from Sharifa Ismail from Malaysia. Sharifa is currently a lecturer at the University of Putra, and her research focuses on the impacts of plastics on the environment and human health. She wants to see regulations for the global trade with waste in the plastics tready. In her message she refers to the Basel Convention. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal is an international treaty that’s already in existence.
Sharifah Norkhadijah Syed Ismail
So, I guess what the plastic treaty needs to cover is a policy to control the transboundary movement of plastic waste from one country to the other. Although we have this Basel Convention, in the current practice – but perhaps with this plastic treaty it will more focusing on the plastics, it will helps us more.
And what has been experienced in Malaysia, where plastic waste has been imported to our country and it has been classified as a recycle item. But when we found out that it’s actually not recycled, it is a waste that cannot be recycled, and it seems that we are receiving waste to be dumped in our country, in our land. So this is happen since China banned of receiving waste to be treated in the country, so most of the country are searching for places to treat their waste.
And then, I think another important item or element to be covered is to reduce or to replace the single-plastic usage. Because this single-use plastic has significantly contributed to marine litter, and I guess another one is to, the treaty can control the booming of recycling waste facilities or industry, that does not treat the plastic waste appropriately, and it will end up being disposed near to the water sources or even marine, and pollute the environment. So I guess that is all important, that can be highlighted, with this plastics treaty.
Theme Music – Pling by Dorian Roy
Anja Krieger
Thanks Sharifa and Nirere, for your messages! Global South countries are not only receiving the waste from the North on top of their own. According to a new report by the WWF, the “lifetime cost of plastic” is “10 times higher for low-income countries than rich ones”. This “reveals crippling inequities in the plastics value chain”, the NGO says. If you’d like to learn more about which role your own country plays in this global shipping and treatment of waste, check out our episode on the “Plastic Overshoot Day”. Is your country a “toxic exporter”, a “spunge”, a “waste savior” – or another archetype? I’ll paste the link in the shownotes.
This was a new episode of the PlasticsTreaty short series. It’s an interactive format. If you’d like to share a thought with me and the other listeners, send me a voice message. I will pick some of these messages for publication. Please follow the recording instructions on plastisphere.earth. That’s it for today, be well and see you soon!