Thailand Is Tired of the Noxious Fumes From Recycling Your Trash
The plastic industry says recycling is the solution to reducing waste. But in Thailand, where much of the world’s trash ends up, it’s created a new set of problems.
About two years ago, Vinyou Jiaramankong learned his neighborhood was changing. Next to the 40-year-old’s neat house in the southern suburbs of Bangkok, a storage yard was being converted into a plastic recycling factory. Shielded by high walls that extended directly to the edge of Jiaramankong’s property, the facility would take in used plastic, melt it down, and run the resulting mixture through an extruder. After being chopped into pellets, the recycled plastic would be used to package new products. In its general outlines the process sounds harmless, even virtuous, putting plastic waste to good use instead of sending it to one of Thailand’s many landfills.
Beginning in late 2020, Jiaramankong learned that the truth was more complicated. He and his wife noticed an acrid smell that drifted across their front yard and into the house, infiltrating every room. They started to get headaches and felt their skin getting irritated, with Jiaramankong developing a red, itchy patch just below his nostrils. In the mornings, he would sometimes find pigeons lying immobile outside, dead or obviously very ill.
“After that, the happiness was gone,” Jiaramankong, who has short hair and a rounded face, said in an interview on his front porch. Behind him were a group of empty birdcages; he’d relocated his own birds to a shelter after they got sick, too. Sometimes the fumes would be so bad that he and his wife would take their young son to a hotel for the night. “It’s like an evacuation,” he said. “You cannot wait.”
Jiaramankong had come face to face with a set of facts that the plastic industry has never been eager to advertise. For decades, it has promoted recycling as an effective solution to dealing with used packaging, the center of a “circular economy” that uses the waste from one generation of products to seamlessly create the next. But in reality, even when used plastic is recycled—something that happens to only about 9% of the global volume—the term is a catch-all for a wide range of processes, some of them dirty and unpleasant, that can have significant negative consequences for the communities where they take place.
Most of those communities are in poor and middle-income nations, where more people like Jiaramankong are starting to push back. With public sentiment on their side, political leaders are under pressure to act. But the struggle in Thailand to block plastic waste from overseas and rein in recyclers shows how difficult the fight will be, not just in that country but in the many places in the Global South that bear the brunt of the world’s plastic pollution.
In its simplest form, plastic is a byproduct of oil or natural gas, and melting or burning it releases hydrocarbons that can damage the lungs, nervous system and kidneys. Modern packaging is much more complicated and contains a broad array of additives selected for qualities such as grease resistance or flexibility. When processed, these chemicals can combine to create toxic substances including dioxins, which have been found in high concentrations around recycling facilities. When such plants catch fire—as they do with disturbing frequency—the same substances can contaminate wide areas and sicken local populations.
Many of them are in developing countries—and are particularly plentiful in Southeast Asia, where labor tends to be cheap and environmental standards low. In addition to processing domestic waste, Southeast Asian recycling plants are major destinations for plastic from the US and other wealthy economies. If you drop a bottle into a blue bin in California or Texas, there’s a good chance that a recycling broker will eventually pack it into a shipping container bound for Indonesia, Thailand or Malaysia. Once it arrives, it will enter a vast ecosystem of recycling plants staffed by migrant workers from still-poorer countries. Generally, only higher-quality plastic can be profitably recycled; after those items are removed, the rest may be incinerated, dumped or simply burned in the open, dramatically worsening its environmental impacts.
Not surprisingly, the idea of being a dumping ground for the rich world’s trash is unpopular, and several Southeast Asian governments have imposed restrictions on the volume and types of plastic that can be imported. Thailand, for example, banned imports of household waste in 2019, and is nearing a decision to block shipments of cleaner plastic “scrap,” which are still permitted, from the middle of this decade. But such measures often contain significant loopholes and are difficult to enforce. No country has the capacity to check every container unloaded in its seaports, and corrupt officials may turn a blind eye to illegal shipments.
Nor will import bans do anything about the huge volumes of refuse that are generated within developing nations—and as Jiaramankong’s experience shows, dealing with plastic waste can pose problems, whatever its source. Unlike those more typically affected by recycling plants, he’s well-off, with a successful accountancy business, and last year he sued SSRT Plastic Intergroup, the company that operates the facility next to his house. Sansanee Lertvikul, a partner at SSRT, said in an interview that it always complies with environmental regulations and took steps to upgrade its machinery, in consultation with government inspectors, after Jiaramankong complained.
A court ordered SSRT to pay Jiaramankong 100,000 baht ($2,760) in compensation. But he decided in the meantime to sell his property, anxious about the effect that plastic fumes—generated when recyclables are melted down—were having on his son. “This business is not good for anyone besides the factory,” he said.
The boom in plastic imports in Southeast Asia is the result, in part, of decisions made in Beijing. Until recently China was the No. 1 destination for shipments of recyclable materials, receiving over 50% of all plastic waste exported worldwide, with the US, Japan and much of Europe all depending on it to absorb their excess. All that material was the basis for a large and profitable recycling industry. It also caused considerable pollution in air, water and soil, adding to the broad range of environmental challenges faced by the world’s most populous country. In 2017 the Chinese government stunned the waste industry by unveiling a policy called National Sword, which banned imports of all but the cleanest plastic. National Sword was aggressively enforced, and imports to China essentially disappeared overnight, dropping 99% in the first year after it took effect.
Losing access to China created a waste-collection crisis in the developed world, but trash brokers and recycling companies soon found a solution. As National Sword came into effect, residents near Port Klang, one of Malaysia’s main gateways for seaborne trade, noticed a huge influx in plastic-waste shipments, many of them bound for hastily built, unlicensed recycling plants. In all, Malaysia received almost 900,000 tons of imported plastic waste in 2018, an increase of more than 200% from two years earlier.
People in communities near the plants began reporting a range of health problems, which activists attributed to open burning of material that couldn’t be processed profitably. When Malaysian authorities raided facilities around Port Klang, more popped up in remote areas around the country; as with a balloon, pressing down in one spot increased the pressure somewhere else. There were similar import surges in Thailand and Indonesia.
To critics, the trend amounted to “waste colonialism”: literally dumping the effects of the rich world’s plastic addiction on less fortunate countries. “Waste should stay in the country where it’s produced,” said Dawan Chantarahassadee, a senior community advisor at Earth, a Thai environmental group that documents the impacts of the industry. In nations far from the places where plastic is shipped, “recycling seems like a cheap option, because the costs of pollution are not included. If you price in the externalities, it’s much more expensive.”
Images of developing-world towns deluged with plastic created an uproar among environmentalists, who stepped up campaigns for restrictions on the international waste trade. In May 2019, the nearly 200 governments that are party to the Basel Convention, a United Nations treaty that regulates international flows of hazardous waste, agreed to overhaul its legal framework for the material. Among other changes, the amendments required exporters of plastic to obtain explicit consent from importing countries before shipments depart. Even though the US never ratified Basel, the changes still applied to American companies, at least on paper, since virtually anywhere they might be sending plastic is governed by the convention.
Advocates for the Basel changes were quickly disappointed, however. Earlier this year the Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based nonprofit that campaigns against waste shipments, warned that it was still “business as usual” for plastic exports, and that “very little action is being taken to enforce” the amended treaty. In particular, it found, countries like the US and Japan were still sending large volumes of plastic waste to Southeast Asia, as well as poorer European economies such as Turkey and Bulgaria. Enforcing the rules “falls to the importing countries,” explained Jim Puckett, BAN’s executive director. “That takes a lot of organization and resources, which a lot of these countries don’t have.”
It also requires a willingness to cut off plastic supplies that recycling-plant owners depend on to feed their operations. In 2018 Thailand announced plans to prohibit all plastic waste imports after a two-year grace period. (It is also attempting to curb domestic sales of single-use plastic.) But recycling companies lobbied for a longer timeline to transition to using domestic plastic, which they argue is of lower quality. The most recent government proposal calls for the ban to come into effect in phases between now and 2025, and last year Thailand received just over 158,000 tons of plastic from abroad. Activists have been concerned throughout the debate about loopholes in implementation. Earlier proposals envisioned allowing continued imports for companies located in “free zones”—business parks that enjoy carve-outs from certain customs regulations. Currently there are more than 100, concentrated in the heavily industrialized regions around Bangkok.
Managing the impacts of plastic recycling in Thailand falls to Varawut Silpa-archa, the minister of Natural Resources and Environment. The son of a construction magnate who served briefly as prime minister, Silpa-archa was educated in the UK and US and speaks almost flawless, British-inflected English. In an interview at the ministry’s Bangkok headquarters, he was eager to emphasize the seriousness of Thailand’s intention to stop accepting foreign plastic. “We’ve got enough waste and we have enough rubbish of our own in Thailand,” he said. “I always say that Thailand is not a global dumpster.”
Sentiments like these tend to be political winners. In the Philippines, former President Rodrigo Duterte relished his role in a long-running dispute with Canada over trash that had been sent to his country illegally, threatening to “declare war” over the issue. At one point his administration proposed simply dropping off the disputed containers in Canadian waters.
Yet backing up such declarations with effective policies is difficult, as Silpa-archa noted. Shipments can be mislabeled—describing plastic as paper waste is a common tactic—or jumbled together with other products, or simply smuggled in with the help of paid-off customs staff. Inspecting containers means slowing down operations at ports. When illegally shipped waste is found, it can be difficult to determine where to send it back, since it might have passed through several companies, as well as busy transshipment ports like those in Hong Kong and Singapore. “I can’t put a stop to it, like putting a cork on a wine bottle,” Silpa-archa said, but “eventually, I’ll slow it down and make sure that it gets better.”
Silpa-archa’s other problem, of course, is that plenty of Thai companies make money from imported waste—and other parts of the government have been reluctant to stop them from doing so. Free zones, which were initially expected to be exempt from import bans, are an important part of Thailand’s sales pitch to foreign investors, offering low-cost, lightly regulated land near ports and other transport links. Some are likely to be permitted to keep bringing in plastic for the next couple of years, as long as they have sufficient pollution controls in place. And there’s always the possibility of further extensions to that timeline.
Free zones’ role in the business is “quite a tricky situation,” Silpa-archa said, emphasizing that he’s trying to focus on lower-hanging fruit. “We tackle one problem at a time. It’s not just the free zones that are a problem. We have problems outside the free zones too. So let’s deal with what we can do at the moment.”
In most countries the plastic trade is an obscure issue, but in Thailand there are at least a few people in every urban neighborhood who care about it deeply. For decades, recyclables in Bangkok and other Thai cities have been picked up by saleng, informal collectors who root through household bins and municipal landfills, looking for anything of value. (The name comes from the sturdy, cargo-carrying tricycles they pedal from street to street). The Saleng and Recycle Trader Association, which represents the industry, estimates there are more than 20,000 saleng in the capital alone, and they play a critical role in the waste-management system, since municipal recycling programs are rudimentary. Although saleng make their living selling plastic waste, a glut of it from abroad is, paradoxically, a threat to their livelihoods.
After collecting each day’s load, saleng bring them to places like Sunee Recycle 59 Group, in eastern Bangkok. Essentially a sophisticated junkyard, Sunee Recycle functions as a middleman between street-level waste collection and industrial recycling plants, buying from saleng and selling the material after it’s been cleaned and sorted. During a recent visit, mountains of crumpled plastic bottles reached nearly to the corrugated-metal roof. Nearby, a rainbow of discarded consumer packaging had been sorted into piles based on color and composition: milk jugs in one basket, laundry detergent and motor-oil containers in others. In the center of the largest load of bottles, a female worker sat cross-legged on the ground, methodically peeling the label from each one and placing it to one side. Plastic plants want bottles that are as clean as possible, and removing the label can mean getting 20% more for each kilogram.
Near the entrance of the facility, SRTA board member Panida Sermwaraphan explained why plastic imports are such a concern for Thailand’s traditional recycling industry. Saleng collectors earn a meager living; often, it’s a job of last resort for those with little education. Their earnings are in part a function of how much they can carry, generally not more than 50 kilograms (110 pounds). At the height of the imported-plastic boom, the supply glut meant that plastic prices plunged to as little as 5 baht ($0.14) per kilogram. “It’s not enough to live on, so saleng decided to stop picking up plastic,” Sermwaraphan said.
The irony was substantial: Thai recycling plants were busier than ever while domestic plastic was sent to landfill or washed into rivers and streams. Controls on imports have allowed prices to rebound since, but Sermwaraphan remains worried. Imports “break down the recycling system in Thailand,” she said.
New plastic recycling plants are still being built around the country, with investors betting that waste supplies will be available no matter where government policies land. One of the larger proposed operations is in Bo Thong, a rural district on the edge of the industrial belt that extends eastward from Bangkok. There, amid pineapple and sugarcane fields, a firm called Ken United has set up a free zone that may ultimately house multiple recycling facilities. The material they handle will be at least partly from abroad; the company has a license to import plastic, and the LinkedIn page of its US division says its business is to “purchase recycled plastic materials in North America and ship overseas.”
The waste management and plastics industries have a bad reputation in Thailand, worsened by events like a recent fire at a recycling plant in Ratchaburi, west of Bangkok, that required the evacuation of residents from a 4-kilometer radius. An earlier blaze, at a plastic-manufacturing facility on Bangkok’s outskirts, killed a firefighter and injured over 60 other people. Residents in Bo Thong are determined to stop Ken United from expanding. At one corner of the site, only a small part of which has been built on so far, opponents have strung up a banner that reads “NO Recycle plants” in English, beneath an image of a skull and crossbones. In 2020 they organized a protest, marching to the gate of the Ken United complex, demanding the company halt its construction plans.
“We know that every place that gets recycle plants becomes chaos. Companies don’t follow the rules,” Jakkrit Kunthong, an engineering professor who’s involved with the effort, said in an interview just outside the free zone boundary. It’s demarcated by a high concrete wall, studded at regular intervals with surveillance cameras and spotlights. “At the end, all the waste is left in Thailand,” he said. “All the pollution is transferred to a developing country.” (A representative of Ken United declined to comment). Kunthong is working with Earth to pressure the local government to step in, though Chantarahassadee, the community adviser with the group, warned that it’s an uphill struggle, since “everything in Thailand is tilted towards the recycling industry. In many areas, especially in the east, you have a lot of empty land just waiting for recycling factories to come.”
Even if Kunthong and his neighbors succeed in stopping the Ken United plant, the next community that tries to restrict plastic facilities may not be so successful. The same is true at the national level. With a large, vibrant economy and a relatively effective state, Thailand might succeed in curbing imports. But the industry is now accustomed to upping stakes and relocating to a new country whenever rules become inhospitable. Already, activists are warning that dirty recycling could shift to extremely poor countries such as Myanmar, whose citizens will have even less ability to push back. That’s likely to continue as long as consumer goods companies keep selling so much plastic, especially in the rich world, without being responsible for the cost of its disposal.
“It’s just a supply-demand question,” said Virginia Comolli, a researcher at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime who studies illicit waste flows. “In the west, we don’t want our streets to be filled with waste.” As a result, “our municipalities will look for ways to process it, and because they can never do it domestically, there will always be brokers willing to take it off their hands and move it elsewhere.” —With Anuchit Nguyen