India bans plastic waste imports, throws Australian waste management into more chaos

01 Apr 2019 --- India has banned the import of plastic waste, making it the latest waste disposal giant to close its doors to international recycling problems. The country prohibited the import of solid plastic waste from March 1. The announcement comes roughly a year after China also banned the import of plastic waste. The India ban is expected to hit Australia particularly hard as India is one of its largest waste export destinations.

The Australian Council of Recycling has warned that with an increasing number of Asian countries implementing import bans, which already now includes China and India, and will include Malaysia and Thailand by 2021, the countries’ ability to manage its waste is “greatly under threat.”

“We are back to where we started with the China crisis but worse because we have fewer alternative markets,” says Peter Shmigel, the Council's Chief Executive.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australia’s waste exports to China declined by 41 percent last financial year, while its overall waste exports actually increased by 5 percent. “It led to the hazardous stockpiling of recyclable material, while rubbish collectors scrambled to find alternative overseas markets,” the newspaper states.

Countries including India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia offset the decline in waste exports to China by taking more of Australia’s recyclable rubbish. However, with India now banning the import of plastic waste, Australia’s problems look set to intensify. India is reportedly Australia’s fourth-biggest waste export destination.

Analysis commissioned by the Australian Department of the Environment and Energy claimed that if Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand enacted waste import bans similar to China’s, Australia would need to find substitute domestic or export markets for approximately 1.29 million tons of waste a year, based on 2017-18 export amounts.

Waste and recycling groups within Australia have called on the government to urgently invest in the recycling industry in the country rather than exporting waste overseas.

“We call for a meaningful proportion of the AUS$1.5 billion (US$1.07 billion) that are raised by state governments through hidden waste disposal levies to be spent on recycling infrastructure,” Shmigel said after the Malaysia ban was announced.

However, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson recently claimed that the federal government has spent “nothing” to implement the National Waste Policy. “The recycling industry is at a fork in the road. If we are to save the industry we have to reboot recycling and change the way we consume. But the federal government just won’t take the crisis seriously,” Whish-Wilson warned.

Australia’s National Waste Policy – announced in the wake of China’s import ban – is designed to establish a circular economy for materials after first-use, including plastic packaging. It aims to divert 80 percent of the country’s waste from landfill by 2030.

First world problems
When China announced its import ban in April 2018, University of Georgia, US, researchers estimated that it could see an estimated 11 million metric tons of waste displaced by 2030.

As 89 percent of exports into China previously consisted of polymer groups often used in single-use plastic food packaging (polyethylene, polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate), bold global ideas and actions for reducing quantities of non-recyclable materials, redesigning products and funding domestic plastic waste management are needed, the researchers claimed.

China was the “dumping ground” for more than half of the world's trash before the ban and, at its peak, was importing almost nine million metric tons of plastic scrap a year, according to Greenpeace.

In October 2018, Thailand also announced a ban on the importation of plastic waste from wealthy nations by 2021, citing concern over rising pollution and limited recycling capacity. Like Australia, the UK is another country which has come under huge scrutiny for its inability to effectively handle waste at source.

A Greenpeace Unearthed analysis of official customs data revealed that UK plastic waste exports to countries as diverse as Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Poland shot up in the first three months of 2018, after which all countries introduced restrictions on imports.

The investigative journalism group, Unearthed, reported that Environment Secretary Michael Gove said in December 2018 that Britain had to “stop offshoring its dirt” and deal with its plastic waste at home. But he also said that in the short term, the country would continue sending its waste abroad.

Trewin Restorick, Founder & CEO of environmental sustainability charity Hubbub tells PackagingInsights that it has been too profitable for the UK waste industry to offload waste to Asia and the strategy must change urgently.

“The UK waste industry has been sticking its waste on boats and shipping it to China and other countries and we have basically exported our problem. There’s been a financial incentive for the waste industry to do that,” Restorick says.

“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. It is a problem that could get even worse should we have a no-deal Brexit.”

“We really do not have adequate recycling infrastructure in the UK, so the government needs to provide more financial incentive to ensure waste is recycled domestically. I also think we have been very lax in looking at the quality of the recycling we collect – again, the UK lags very far behind other European countries in terms of collecting quality recycling material that can be of use to the industry,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Simon Ellin, CEO of The UK Recycling Association, has called for the UK value chain to band together to create a uniformed system based on an approved list of materials that are easy to collect, easy to recycle and in demand from manufacturers in the UK, the EU and Asia. This will help to minimize the reliance on waste export.

“What is really clear is that we must develop UK markets for recovered plastic to create a balance between the material used here in the UK and that exported,” he tells PackagingInsights. “Key drivers for this will be the creation of minimum recycled contents, like the 35 percent recommended by the EU, and increased taxation of virgin polymers.”

By Joshua Poole