Toxic Trade
Power and profit in the recycling industry

It was a dark morning. I could feel a dampness in my socks. We watched a grey tarpaulin drift down towards the lock gate.
I felt like a fraud standing here.
We were mostly amateurs, actors, writers and poets, hoping that one day we would consider ourselves young professionals.
Fundraising was a good gig, sometimes.
But we weren’t here for our love of the British waterways. Most of us still lived at home. We were looking for a way to prove our independence. Or at least something to get us off our backs.
The day had started slowly and my neuroses were taking hold.
Would I raise any money? Would I hit my targets? Would a vengeful boater sweep my legs from behind and hurl me into the canal?
Probably not. But still, best not to let my guard down.
“What’s that over there, then?”
I spun around. A young man had perched himself on the fence behind us.
“Aren’t you lads trained to deal with all the rubbish that gets chucked in?”
He pointed to the tarpaulin, now floating limply in a patch of duckweed. I shook my head and told him we had strict orders to stay two metres from the water, the stock answer.
“It’s the same old story, isn’t it?’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘What’s that about, then?”
I gave him another cookie-cutter response, mumbled without conviction. Most of us felt unqualified. We were salespeople, told to compete. This meritocracy had ironed out any real passion, any earnest desire to do the right thing.
It was our job, rain or shine, to pitch the same product to vast numbers of people. Some days it was like sleepwalking, gushing out monologues on muscle memory and caffeine.
“The further up the ladder I go, the more cynical I become”, said the man, without me prompting him. “I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you were able to haul that tarp out of the water. If you’d taken that to my old place of work we would’ve said “Thank you very much, we’ll take that off your hands”. And we would’ve put it in the green bin, all good and responsible. Now, off you pop none the wiser, thinking that we’ve all done our jobs nicely. End of story, right? But what you didn’t realise is that our two chutes go down to the same receptacle. It all gets tipped in the end.”
It all gets tipped?
He reminded me of something I’d read years ago.
**
Sometimes it’s easy to believe that a bin is a black hole. Some of the major industries seem to operate on this same principle.
Developed countries export a significant proportion of their supposedly “recyclable” waste.
It’s simple:
- Exporting waste costs far less than treating it in-house.
- Certain governments are willing to import this waste.
- Exporting countries come to view this relationship as a practical, profitable, and discrete means of waste disposal.
- However, many importing countries lack the infrastructure to effectively recycle this material.
- Therefore large amounts of waste are dumped in open landfills, leach into water sources, and cause serious harm to local populations as a result.
The corporate rebuttal becomes a battle of buzzwords.
“Recycling” is positioned as the gold standard. It becomes synonymous with responsibility. So long as we recycle, we are being good citizens.
By contrast, the word “dump” (at least in my mind) conjures up imagery of disease and vermin, a bedsit with cockroaches crawling across the ceiling. Why would you send something to a dump when you could give it a fresh green life?
Industry executives are conscious of this. In a 2019 interview with the BBC World Service, Arnaud Brunet (director of the Bureau of International Recycling) insisted that recycling “cannot go out of business”, that it “shouldn’t end”, and that it’s a “positive industry”. Simple terms blanket the industry in benign imagery. It may not be the only solution, but at the very least Brunet expects us to believe that his companies are responsibly safeguarding society’s waste.
The truth is that used plastics do not recycle well.
According to Jim Puckett (founder of the pressure group Basel Action Network), only nine percent of plastics will be recycled at all. And only one percent will be recycled twice before going to landfill.
Plastics degrade quickly. Most plastic is single-use.
The 2010s saw an increased reliance on China to process Western plastics. However, in 2018 the Chinese government implemented Operation Sword, a catchy initiative that effectively embargoed the import of contaminated plastic.
For years China had been quietly processing this material. It was easy to ignore these mountains of single-use plastic. Out of sight, out of mind, on an industrial scale.
But when China removed itself from the equation, brokers were left scrabbling to remodel their business. They found their answer in places like Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, which offered cheap labour and lax industry standards. Plastics were sorted by hand, workers wading through troughs of bottlecaps and Evian wrappers. Journalists went in with shutters blazing.
Some have argued this dynamic constitutes a form of “waste colonialism”: western industries shirking their responsibility and maximising profits through a developing third party. Sounds pretty iffy when you put it like that.
Some of this model’s proponents sound like Bond villains. A Chief Economist of the World Bank was quoted saying that he “always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted. Their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles… Just between you and me shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?”
Even if you were to forgive the “vastly” overused adverbs, this way of thinking is just plain evil. I don’t even feel the need to rebut. Surely this argument speaks for itself?
Thankfully the situation has been steadily (if slowly) improving over the last three decades. The 1989 Basel Convention banned the legal export of hazardous waste. Then, in 2019, Norway lobbied to update the Convention and include plastic waste in its list of controlled exports. There is now a growing consensus that the recycling and waste disposal industries must be closely regulated.
However, recent figures from BAN show that Central and South-East Asia continue to be positioned as the dumping ground for Western waste plastics. Public opinion and industry standards continue to clash.
**
The tarp and its flotilla of duckweed had drifted into the open lock. The young man cleared his throat.
“Shall we try getting it out?”
“Alright.”
I found a forked stick and tried guiding it back towards us. The man squatted and made a vague attempt at retrieval.
But it was too late.
The tarpaulin caught a gentle eddy and whirled away over the edge.
He laughed.
“Same old story.”
For more information on these issues visit Basel Action Network (ban.org).
I’d also highly recommend you listen to the BBC World Service’s 2019 podcast titled The Global Trade in Trash.