Events

The plastic that has long been shipped around the world is ostensibly intended for recycling. To be sure, some of that material is ultimately converted into new goods. But it became apparent after China’s closure that much of what was being stuffed into shipping containers in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the developed world was badly contaminated with trash, such as used diapers, or contained high percentages of unrecyclable types of plastic.

Today, Indonesia allows only well-sorted scrap imports and bars batches whose impurities—any material other than the main one being shipped—exceed 2 percent of the total volume. Every container headed its way must be inspected before shipping. Exporters have to register with the Indonesian embassy in their country, an effort to introduce transparency into a trade rife with fly-by-night operators whose frequent name changes have long made it hard to know who was responsible for contaminated shipments, said Yuyun Ismawati, co-founder of the Nexus3 Foundation, a Jakarta-based research and advocacy group.

Environmentalists and experts agree that this toughened stance has succeeded in significantly reducing the volume of tainted waste arriving in Indonesia. Many fields covered with foreign plastic a few years ago are significantly less tainted now. While the change is hard to quantify—and at some dumpsites, imported plastic has simply been replaced by domestic trash—activists who monitor such sites say the improvement is undeniable.

Indonesian industries want easy-to-recycle plastics—particularly PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, commonly used in beverage bottles. Such material isn’t waste, said Novrizal Tahar, director of solid waste management at the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. “This is raw material.” Manufacturers—making new bottles, or consumer goods such as buckets and crates—rely on imports because Indonesia’s lack of formal trash-sorting systems means domestic supplies are inadequate, said Arisman, executive director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Jakarta, who like many Indonesians has only one name.

But recycling plastics, even those easiest to process, is problematic: it can concentrate dangerous chemicals such as benzene and brominated dioxins at higher levels, and the resulting material is typically of lower quality than the original. Recycling also releases microplastics into the air and water, and in poor countries unable to strictly enforce labor and environmental protections, it can expose workers to hazardous toxins. Outsourcing those risks to nations like Indonesia, in Ismawati’s view, “is a new type of colonialism.”

While Indonesia has begun to get a grip on its imports, the scrap trade’s opaque global web is an ever-shifting cat-and-mouse game. When one country erects barriers, those with material to get rid of often just find someplace else to send it. The US, for example, ships less plastic waste to Southeast Asia than it did even a year ago, but it sends more to Mexico and India. European nations that previously shipped to Thailand now favor Turkey, data show.

The trade’s tumult has also led to increasing amounts of the plastic that North Americans and Europeans sort for recycling simply being incinerated close to home. The Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based advocacy group that monitors waste shipments and advocates for tighter restrictions, has been putting GPS trackers into US recycling bins and has found that some of it ends up in domestic landfills.

In Indonesia, while the reduction in problematic imports is real, the limitations of progress are visible about 50 miles outside the capital, Jakarta, where a giant mountain of plastic towers above red rooftops, emerald-green rice fields, and groves of banana trees. The plastic stretches as far as 10 football fields, at least, and it’s piled so high it takes a few minutes to climb from the narrow, rutted road at the mound’s base to its top. The plastic is clean and odorless, and it feels spongy underfoot. Much is shredded, but there are legible labels—Trader Joe’s roasted chicken breast, salt-and-vinegar peanuts from New Zealand, bottle caps with Korean writing, wrapping from an Italian children’s audiobook.