In a vast slum just outside Jakarta, for instance, women work in a crowded, unventilated room, separating the waste newspapers, pieces of clothing, metal scraps, poor quality and highly contaminated plastic from the reusable plastics. It's 90 degrees and too hot to wear protective smocks or gloves, not that they are available anyway. With their bare hands the Indonesian women wipe the sweat from their brows. The huge piles of plastic bags, liquid soap bottles, food wrappers, jugs, and disposable diapers have familiar logos Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Solvay, Mobil.

A white powder blows out of some of these bags as women pull them from the pile. The Indonesian women can't read the English labels so they don't know that the powder is titanium dioxide, which causes respiratory damage. They do know, however, that when these Indonesian recycling companies began importing plastic waste from the U.S., workers developed breathing problems and skin rashes.

Once separated, the piles of discard are sent to a local dump. One Indonesian recycling company owner estimated that up to 40 per cent of the imported waste is landfilled. Workers shovel the "good" plastic into large grinding machines which turn out plastic pellets or flakes. The women next wash the surface residues and contaminants off these bits. The waste water is then poured onto the dirt floor or out the back door of the recycling plant.

The plastic pellets, sometimes mixed with new plastic or other additives, are melted and formed into long plastic cords. Once cooled, the cords are again chipped and sent to manufacturing plants in Asia to be made into shoe soles, containers, or toys.

During 1991, U.S. recycling companies sent over 35 million pounds of plastic waste to Indonesia. The majority of this went to two cities on the island of Java Jakarta and Surabaya. The U.S. exported over 200 million pounds of plastic waste last year to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, according to statistics compiled by Greenpeace from the records of a private company, the Port Import/Export Research Service. The list of recipients includes Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, S. Korea, Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, and Trinidad & Tobago.

Hong Kong is the prime target: in 1991, over 75 million pounds of U.S. plastic waste went there and so far in 1992, it has received over half the total U.S. plastic waste exports. Recycling facilities in Hong Kong look much the same as those in Indonesia: the same plastic grinding, melting, and reshaping machines, the same strong noxious fumes. As in Indonesia, the untreated rinse water is discharged down drains or out the window. However, in realestate scare Hong Kong, the recycling shops are located on upper floors of densely packed, rundown industrial skyscrapers where they pose frightening fire hazards.

Increasingly, Hong Kong importers simply warehouses plastic waste destined for China where land and labor costs are much lower than in the mainland. In China, the process is the same, but the setting is different. In the Guangzhou countryside, rural workers sort the plastic waste inside a walledin courtyard just off a dirt road. There men load plastic scraps into huge cardboard boxes, while nearby children play and women hang laundry on a clothes line. Since there was an electricity blackout the day Greenpeace arrived, none of the machinery was in operation.

A massive pile of discards lay in the center of the courtyard. The facility manager explains that there is no central dump to dispose of this material, so it was scattered in random locations in the countryside.

Not infrequently, Asian importers find most of the plastic they receive is unusable trash. In August 1991, for instance, six containers of supposedly pure plastic waste from New York arrived in Shanghai. When the Chinese importers opened the containers, they discovered a grisly concoction of household garbage, blood transfusion bags, and other hospital waste. A Shanghai City Environmental Protection Bureau report concluded the shipment was 55 per cent unusable trash and warned, "In order to prevent pollution, you must immediately request a professional unit to thoroughly sterilize the waste plastic and household garbage."

Unlike China, Hong Kong and Indonesia, the Philippines has, on its books, a strict law banning waste imports. Despite this, U.S. industries and waste brokers succeeded in shipping over 15 million pounds of plastic waste there in 1991. As is the case in other poor countries, underfunded customs and environmental agencies were unable to intercept incoming waste shipments. And since the shipments are arranged covertly, the locations of the importing companies are unknown.

Recycling companies claim exports help divert waste from diminishing landfill capacity at home and provide needed jobs and materials abroad. "They have an urgent need to employ a lot of people, and it also helps them get more raw materials," wrote Earth Circle consultant Gretchen Brewer in the September 1991 issue of Plastics News.

At congressional hearings last fall, U.S. Chamber of Commerce official Harvey Alter reassured lawmakers that "there is no basis for accusations that the United States is 'dumping' hazardous (or other waste) on unsuspecting developing countries. Materials for recycling, virtually by definition, are sold to enterprises in countries with sophisticated manufacturing facilities." However, of the 15 Asian plastic recycling plants investigated by Greenpeace, such sophisticated equipment was nowhere to be seen.

In the U.S., waste is required to be tracked and monitored at all stages from production to transport to disposal. However, there is no such federal "cradle to grave" oversight for plastic waste exports abroad. In fact, since the government does not consider plastics to be hazardous waste, no records are kept on how much is shipped overseas and how much is disposed of or recycled in the U.S.

The Ontario Plastics Recycling in California sells all its plastic to China. But the company's chief executive Harrie Cohen told a Plastic News reporter, "I don't know exactly what they're doing with it." Similarly, Don Dentz, an official with Rabanco Company argues, "It is very difficult to follow this plastic all over Asia."

U.S. companies began shipping plastic waste overseas in the 1980s when they found themselves facing a serious crisis: the amount of plastic consumed in the U.S. was skyrocketing while its public image was plummeting. In 1989, U.S. corporations used over 12 billion pounds of plastic packaging designed to be thrown away as soon as the package was opened. In the 1990s, this figure is expected to double. But rather than reduce the plastic wrap, industry set out to repackage the public image of plastics with a $150 million p.r. campaign.

In a confidential December 22, 1989 letter, Society of the Plastics Industry President Larry Thomas warned plastic manufacturers, "The image of plastics among consumers is deteriorating at an alarmingly fast pace....Public opinion polls during the 80's show that an increasing percentage of the general public believes plastics are harmful to health and the environment. That percentage rose sharply from 56 percent in 1988 to 72 percent in 1989. At this point we will soon reach a point from which it will be impossible to recover our credibility."

During the 1980s, the plastics industry developed a twopronged plan to restore its image: export plastic waste for "recycling" overseas and add small amounts of corn starch to plastic products and claim they are now "biodegradable." It did not take long, however, for the public to figure out that although corn starch biodegrades, pieces of plastic do not. So industry jumped aboard the recycling bandwagon. Instead of "biodegradable," nearly every plastic package on the supermarket shelf now is stamped "recyclable." The plastic wasn't changed, only its label was.

Marty Forman from the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries urged fellow plastics promoters to "get our act together and show the world just how recyclable these valuable polymers are." Unfortunately, the plastics industry's recycling claims are badly misleading. Recycling plastic cannot remove most of the toxic chemicals which are passed on to the new products and those who handle them.

In addition, while paper, glass and metal waste can really be recycled that is, turned back into essentially the same product this is not the case with plastics. Each time plastic is heated its chemical composition changes and its quality decreases so that it can usually not be reused more than once. Recycling used plastic, therefore, does not make a dent in the amount of plastic needed to make the original products. And ultimately, all this plastic still ends up being landfilled or burned.

As Joann Gutin wrote in Mother Jones (March/April 1992), "Plastics recycling bears as much resemblance to traditional recycling as RV camping bears to backpacking. It might be a good idea if there was some sort of linguistic flag for the difference, the way 'Kampground' has come to mean RV site. 'RecyKling' maybe."

So what is the recycling-conscious American public to do? A number of environmental and community groups contend that ultimately the bogus recycling of plastics, both at home and overseas, can only be stopped if people refuse to use plastics. The California Resource Recovery Association, for instance, is running a "Take the Wrap" campaign to get the public to mail plastic packages with recycling labels back to the Society of Plastics Industry.

Overseas, as well, communities are beginning to organize against plastic waste imports. Environmental and development organizations in the Philippines are working with groups in the United States to stop illegal waste imports. Rene Salazar, director of the Southeast Asia Regional Institute for Community Education (SEARICE), a Philippine development organization, says, "Mafialike export companies are enticing Third World countries with potential profits to be made from trade in toxins. We have a complete list of all the imports of waste into the Philippines in 1991. We challenge the Philippine government to tell us where it went."

Using data from the U.S. Department of Customs, a new coalition has begun tracking ships known to have carried waste from the U.S. In April, activists from the U.S. and the Philippines, dressed in "Hazardous Exports Prevention Patrol" uniforms, boarded two Asiabound waste trade ships in New York Harbor, talked with the captains and hung a protest banner. Philippine members of the Coalition Against Toxic Waste vowed to meet the ships when they arrived in Asia. According to Nicanor Perlas, their purpose is to prevent waste traders from conducting "business as usual."

There are efforts, as well, to get Congress to ban overseas recycling of plastics and other international waste products. Congress is currently overhauling the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the nation's major waste law and a number of amendments have been introduced to the section dealing with international waste trade. The amendments range from one introduced by Representative Ed Towns (DNY) which would completely ban international waste trade to another which would permit a virtual free trade in waste. So far plastic industry lobbyists have succeeded in obtaining a total exemption for plastic waste exports in every proposed piece of legislation, except that of Towns.

Two Months' Plastic Garbage Exports

               Plastic Scrap Exports to Asia
                February 1  March 31, 1992 
Country        Number of Shipments           Total (pounds)
China (directly)       6                         210,894
Hong Kong            586                      37,746,957 
India                 11                       2,198,339
Indonesia             50                       4,952,518
Japan                  5                         112,797
Korea                  6                         241,866
Malaysia               7                         561,530
Pakistan               1                          41,533
Philippines           58                       5,385,902          
Singapore              5                         157,350  
Thailand               6                         273,071
Taiwan                 6                         344,611
 
TOTAL                750                      52,053,376  

Greenpeace Feature Service. Written by Ann Leonard, Greenpeace Toxic Trade Project Coordinator who investigated plastic shipments to Asia. For photos of plastic recycling factories and Greenpeace waste trade protests in Seattle and New York in Asia contact Leonard at 202/319-2454.