JOHOR BAHRU, Malaysia—Walking through a plastic recycling factory in this southern Malaysian city is nearly akin to navigating a dimly lit Ikea warehouse. But instead of sleek, flat-packed furniture, rows of large square containers brim with tiny, glinting plastic pellets meticulously sorted by colour.
Visitors wear the same flimsy face masks as the workers, which serve merely as a cosmetic remedy against the thick smoke that fills the air.
Unlike most of its peers, Heng Hiap Industries, a family-run business, claims it only processes locally sourced plastics — an exception in a country that imports an estimated 405,000 metric tonnes of plastic waste annually and that’s struggling to rid itself of the image as the world’s plastic garbage dump.
Malaysia, now the world’s second-largest importer of plastic waste from the EU after Turkey, received 344,000 metric tonnes from the bloc alone in 2024, up from around 283,000 tonnes in 2023, according to the Basel Action Network (BAN), an NGO that campaigns against the global toxic waste trade.
What makes dumping plastic waste a particularly perilous practice is that recipient countries, often in Southeast Asia, tend to be ill-equipped to deal with the vast consequences of plastic pollution.
Failing to properly manage plastic waste poses risks to both the environment and human health, through air pollution and contamination to soil, water, and food supply. It can also lead to the increased spread of diseases such as respiratory illnesses, cancer and reduced fertility, according to the World Health Organization. While the export of hazardous materials should always be disclosed, it’s not unusual that waste labelled as “clean” carries certain chemicals or additives that poorer countries have no adequate means to handle.
International leaders have announced a raft of measures to better regulate flows of plastic waste between countries or even halt them altogether. But surging plastic production, inefficient domestic recycling capacity, and what anti-plastic campaigners described as a deeply opaque international trade network mean that a meaningful crackdown remains unlikely.
Cracking down on the global plastics trade
The EU, long among the top global offenders, has routinely offloaded waste to other countries, as it was considered a cheaper way to dispose of its trash instead of investing in local recycling capacities. Today, six of the top ten plastic waste exporters globally remain EU member states — including Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Austria.
Facing accusations of “waste colonialism,” Brussels is now trying to fix the bloc’s reliance on developing countries to sort out its plastic trash problem. To get there, the EU last year committed to tighten the screws on shipments of plastic waste to non-industrialised countries that are not part of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). The ban, expected to enter into force in 2027, is meant to last two and a half years and can be extended.
For advocates, though, the outcome won’t be a net positive unless the EU curbs its plastic production at the root.
“It brings back the realisation that we really need to cut our waste generation within the EU,” said Justine Maillot, a coordinator for the Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) movement.
With Europe’s plastics recyclers struggling to remain afloat amid fierce competition from Asia, and high energy costs, one of the most likely consequences of the 2027 ban is that the amount of plastic trash burned to generate energy — typically called waste-to-energy — will increase. An uptick in the bloc’s incineration rates would likely cause a significant surge in the emissions tied to electricity production, as plastics release carbon when burnt.
Meanwhile, unlike materials such as aluminium and glass, plastic is often too contaminated to be properly recycled, while the quality of that which is recycled is generally poor. And virgin plastic is typically cheaper than recycled plastic, making the process economically unattractive. In 2022, the EU recycled only 40.7% of its own plastic packaging waste.
“The word recycling makes it all sound green and wonderful, but it's really a dirty business,” Jim Puckett, executive director of BAN, told The Parliament. “Avoiding single-use plastics is the first direction people need to look at,” he added.
Calls for a Global Plastic Treaty
Indeed, that’s in part the focus of the United Nations’ nascent Global Plastic Treaty, which hundreds of negotiators are trying to hash out this week in Geneva. The treaty — to which the EU would be a key signatory — would reshape the global plastic trade. Instead of just regulating waste after it's created, the binding treaty would limit the production and export of hazardous plastics from the start, while ensuring that only countries with safe recycling sites can import plastic waste.
Globally, the challenge of excessive plastic waste came into sharp focus after China — once the world’s largest importer of plastic waste — implemented a sweeping ban on such imports in 2017.
“China was ahead of everyone in realising that it [importing plastic waste] cost the country more in terms of contamination than they were making from the recycling,” Puckett explained. He argued that the costs of cleaning up soil and water in the recycling process often outweigh the financial upside of being paid to treat other countries’ waste.
The ripple effects of China's decision were felt worldwide, leaving the EU, the US and Japan scrambling to find alternative destinations for their plastic waste. Countries with well-developed recycling industries — including Turkey, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia — quickly became the new dumping grounds.
It also led the international community to reckon with the excesses of plastic waste. In 2019, signatories to the Basel Convention — a treaty on the cross-border movement of hazardous waste — amended the declaration to require industries to disclose how they manage and dispose of toxic plastic waste.
At the same time, the Chinese ban also resulted in the share of EU plastic waste exported overseas to fall sharply — to just 3% today, down from around 10% in the 2010s. But even if total volumes have declined, today’s recipient countries have begun to follow China’s lead in calling for cuts to harmful plastic waste imports.
Thailand enacted a full ban from the start of this year, amid growing public health concerns. Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia have also imposed stringent restrictions and even repatriated large volumes of illicit or non-recyclable plastic waste to exporting countries.
“If you were to look at the general direction, that’s already set in motion,” Kian Seah, founder and CEO of Heng Hiap Industries, said of reduced plastic waste imports from the EU and elsewhere. When the bloc’s export ban is enacted in 2027, other Malaysian recyclers will also have change their business model, Seah told The Parliament.
“They will have to pivot more to locally sourced plastic."
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