“Historic” UN pact to stop unmanageable plastic waste exports attracts overwhelming global support

13 May 2019 --- A total of 187 countries have voted to add hard-to-recycle plastic waste to the Basel Convention, a UN-led treaty that controls the movement of hazardous waste from one country to another. Exporters will now be required to obtain consent from recipient countries before shipping plastic waste that cannot be readily recycled. It is a strategy designed to curb the overwhelming buildup of plastic waste in Global South nations, particularly in Southeast Asia.

After China banned the import of most plastic waste in 2018, developing countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have received huge influxes of contaminated and mixed plastic waste that is difficult or even impossible to recycle. Norway’s proposed amendments to the Basel Convention provides countries with the right to refuse unwanted or unmanageable plastic waste.

The Basel Convention became effective in 1992. Its purpose is to minimize the movements of hazardous waste between countries, especially from developed nations to less developed nations. The decision to amend the Basel Convention reflects a growing global recognition of the toxic impacts of plastic and the plastic waste trade. The vast majority of countries expressed their support for the proposal and over one million people globally signed two public petitions from Avaaz and SumOfUs.

Hubbub UK Founder & CEO, Trewin Restorick, tells PackagingInsights that to date there has been “too much of a financial incentive” for the waste industry to dump unrecyclable or contaminated plastic waste at the doorstep of lesser developed nations.

“Now that the Chinese have started to restrict waste imports and there are more stories about UK waste going overseas and not actually ending up being recycled, the chickens have come home to roost,” Restorick adds.

Although there was “overwhelming” international support for Norway’s proposal to amend the Basel Convention, there were a few vocal outliers who opposed listing plastic. These included the US, the largest exporter of plastic waste in the world; the American Chemistry Council, a prominent petrochemical industry lobbying group; and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a business association largely comprised of waste brokers.

As the US is not a party to the Basel Convention, it will be banned from trading plastic waste with developing countries that are Basel Parties but not part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Despite the failure to secure US involvement, the amendments to the Basel Convention are widely considered to be hugely significant in the fight against global plastic pollution. This is epitomized by Tim Grabiel, a senior lawyer for the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), who described the treaty amendments as “a critical pillar of an emerging global architecture to address plastic pollution.”

Similarly, Jim Puckett, Executive Director, Basel Action Network (BAN), states: “We have taken a major first step to stem the tide of plastic waste now flowing from the rich developed countries to developing countries in Africa and Asia, all in the name of ‘recycling,’ but causing massive and harmful pollution, both on land and in the sea.”

“A true circular economy was never meant to circulate pollution around the globe. It can only be achieved by eliminating negative externalities and not just pushing them off to developing countries,” Puckett adds.

With an increasing number of Asian countries banning the import of plastic waste, which now includes China, Malaysia, Thailand and more recently India and The Philippines, there have been fears that African nations would become the world’s next dumping grounds.

“Africa knows a lot about waste dumping due to our experience with e-waste,” says Dr. Tadesse Amera, Co-Chair of the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN). “This decision will help prevent the continent from becoming the next target of plastic waste dumping after Asia closes its doors.”

In essence, the Norwegian amendments are designed to clean up international trade in plastic waste. This would have implications not only for the reduction of plastics leaking into the marine environment but also for local communities. This would be achieved by dividing plastic waste into three general categories: “Clean,” “Other” and “Hazardous.”

While readily-recyclable “Clean” plastic waste has no controls under the Basel Convention, “Other” plastic waste” and “Hazardous” plastic waste will now require “prior informed consent from the destination country, duty to ensure environmentally sound management, information reporting and packaging and labeling requirements.”

Spurring the industry to design for recyclability
The treaty amendments also intensify the need for countries to develop viable home recycling infrastructure and packaging with designed-in recyclability so that less reliance is placed on exporting. Nerida Kelton, Executive Director for the Australian Institute of Packaging (AIP), tells PackagingInsights that her country will be hit particularly hard by India’s ban on plastic waste imports and that it must develop its own systems for dealing with packaging waste, and fast.

“All manufacturers have a responsibility to better understand the current recycling facilities and capabilities in Australia and ensure that packaging is able to be sorted and processed through these systems,” Kelton notes.

“A useful exercise is for manufacturers to take designers, marketers and agencies down to the local Material Recycling Facilities (MRF) to see what happens to the packaging collected at curbside. Also, they can arrange with suppliers to visit the paper, glass or plastics recycling facilities or review the RED Cycle program for soft plastics to really get a true view of what happens to packaging at end-of-life. This exercise will ensure that design teams develop packaging that can be reused, recycled, composted or repurposed,” she adds.

This year has seen some landmark packaging launches which have focused on designed-in recyclability. Two leading global plastic packaging suppliers, Amcor and Mondi, introduced fully-recyclable flexible stand-up pouches – a pack type that has been notoriously hard to recycle in the past. Last month, Amcor unveiled its AmLite Ultra Recyclable high-barrier laminate pack – the first product made from the company’s breakthrough recyclable polyolefin film.

Meanwhile, Mondi will showcase its new, fully recyclable stand-up pouch made of a monomaterial (polyethylene) with removable wrap-around label at the international trade show PLMA (Private Label Manufacturers Association) in Amsterdam on 21-22 May. The design overcomes many shortcomings in the recycling process and is the result of a joint four-year effort by Mondi, Werner & Mertz, EPEA Switzerland (Cradle to Cradle), Der Grüne Punkt – Duales System Deutschland and Institut cyclos-HTP to transition flexible packaging to a circular model.

By Joshua Poole