Malaysia to ship back hundreds of tons of plastic waste

PORT KLANG, Malaysia: Hundreds of tons of imported plastic waste will be shipped back to where it came from, Malaysia said Tuesday, insisting the country did not want to be a global dumping ground.

Around 300 million tonnes of plastic are produced every year, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), with much of it ending up in landfill or polluting the seas, in what is becoming a growing international crisis.

China had previously taken a large amount of waste for recycling, but abruptly stopped last year, saying it wanted to improve its own environment. Now Southeast Asian countries that stepped in to plug this gap say they have had enough.

"We urge developed countries to stop shipping garbage to our country," said Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia´s minister of energy, technology, science, environment and climate change, adding it was "unfair and uncivilised".

"We will return it back to the country of origin without any mercy," she said, after an inspection of several waste-filled containers at Port Klang, the country´s busiest port. Plastic imports to Malaysia have tripled since 2016, to 870,000 tonnes last year, official data showed. The influx has sparked a rapid increase in the number of recycling plants, many of them operating without a licence and with little regard for environmental standards.

Lee Chee Kwang, an activist with Environment Protection Agency Kuala Langat, said Malaysia has "failed miserably" to manage the rubbish coming into the country. "The government must ban entry of plastic waste and declare it as public enemy number one," he said.

While Malaysia allows the import of homogenous and clean waste plastics for the recycling industry, there are growing public calls for the government to ban the import of used plastics altogether. The country´s move to ship the refuse back was "only a symbolic public stunt which does not solve the problem," Lee said. "The solution is a total ban of imports of all kinds of plastic."