Nation 07 Apr 2021
Datuk Seri Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man. -filepic
PETALING JAYA: The Environment and Water Ministry will investigate a report claiming that a US-based company had sent a shipment of “bales of plastic scrap” to Malaysia last month, says Datuk Seri Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man.
“I am getting information about this. I will make this known at a later date, ” he said when contacted.
The minister was asked to respond to a New York Times report, quoting information provided by Material Research, a research firm based in Maine, that Sigma Recycling Inc in Georgia had sent plastic scrap to Malaysia.
The Straits Times
Exports of US plastic garbage rise, despite ban
In a photo taken on Feb 28, 2020, trash pickers search for recyclable plastic and other items of value at a landfill in Bantar Gebang, Indonesia.PHOTO: NYTIMES
PublishedMar 13, 2021, 9:15 am SGT
https://str.sg/JjXy
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Countries Tried to Curb Trade in Plastic Waste. The U.S. Is Shipping More.
Data shows that American exporters continue to ship plastic waste overseas, often to poorer countries, even though most of the world has agreed to not accept it.
Trash pickers scoured the Bantar Gabang landfill in Indonesia for recyclable plastic last year.Credit.Adam Dean for The New York Times
March 12, 2021
When more than 180 nations agreed last year to place strict limits on exports of plastic waste from richer countries to poorer ones, the move was seen as a major victory in the fight against plastic pollution.
Getty Images / WIRED
Every weekday, Ibrahim wakes up at six in the morning. By eight he is usually bent over a smoking fire, burning the insulation from copper wires, as he has done for the last eight years. Ibrahim is working as a “burner boy” – the name given to the young boys and men who trawl through piles of electronic waste in Agbogbloshie, a vast dump near the centre of Ghana’s capital, Accra, looking for circuit boards and wires to burn.
The abandoned phones, computers, and home appliances stretch across 20 acres in the scrapyard that neighbours the slum Ibrahim lives in, separated by the Odaw River. The Old Fadama slum has been home to poor Ghanaians from the rural regions of the country since the 1980s. What the government sees as a blight of poor sanitation, crime and poverty, the migrants see as an affordable access point to the economic opportunities the capital has to offer.
Post-Brexit Britain will continue to use the Global South as its dumping ground for unsorted plastic waste, despite the EU banning the practice.
On 1 January 2021, an EU law preventing unsorted and contaminated plastic waste being shipped to non-OECD countries came into force. But the UK, now separated from the EU and its laws, has fallen short of expectations by failing to adopt equally rigorous policies.
Environmental campaigners have accused the UK government of going back on promises made in the 2019 Conservative Party
manifesto. The political party, which is currently in power in the UK, said it would push the country to “lead the world in tackling plastics pollution” and “ban the export of plastic waste to non-OECD countries.”