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Letters | Another trade war is brewing as Asia fights back over the world’s plastic waste
- The planet is only just waking up to the problems that plastics cause, a reader writes – but what is to be done?
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Tired of being the world’s dumping ground for recycled waste materials from other countries, Asian nations are striking back with punitive environmental trade regulations that should leave the waste exporting nations in delirium. Last week, the Malaysian Environment Minister, Yeo Bee Yin, stated clearly that countries should manage their own waste, and that Malaysia will take care of its own.
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Modern economic theory maintains that the trade of global “goods” and services should be optimised by countries embracing their competitive advantages – letting others excel where their own advantages exist.
What it did not account for is the trade in “bads” between nations, whereby a country’s externalities (in this case waste) are sent to another’s shores to take advantage of the other country’s “competitive advantages” – low labour costs and lax environmental enforcement.
As a result of the planet’s awakening to the vast challenges of what do to with plastic in its second life, we now have two large-scale trade wars to contend with. One is between the two largest economies, the US and China. The other is much broader in scope, undercutting the previously perceived values of globalisation, using environmental trade barriers as a proxy for national benefit.
This trend should be expected to continue, as plastic pollution is not the only ill which countries share with one another, but it is one that has generated the most sharing of ideas and momentum across virtually every country on the planet.
To put the scale into context, one can conservatively estimate that at least 10 per cent of the plastic waste sent to Asia for recycling was of quality too poor to make value from.
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