An ABC News investigation offers a rare glimpse into the plastic waste trade.
Plastic bags from Walmart US recycling bins tracked to controversial plastic facilities in Southeast AsiaMalaysian anti-plastics advocate Pua Lay Peng searching through a burning dumpsite outside a plastic facility near her hometown of Jenjarom, Malaysia.Pua Lay Peng lives on the front lines of the global plastic pollution crisis. The 52-year-old's hometown of Jenjarom, Malaysia has been transformed in recent years by thousands of tons of imported plastic waste from the U.S.
Only four trackers last pinged from a U.S. facility that said it was involved in plastic bag recycling. However, subsequent public records requests and additional research have revealed that all four of these facilities likely either trashed the plastic bags in the U.S. or exported them abroad, though none of the facilities would divulge to ABC News specifically where the bags were sent.Exporting plastic waste, particularly to poorer nations, is a controversial practice.
"I decided to fight until death, okay?," she said. "If I don't stand up to fight, the consequences will allow my family members, my friends will be killed. Just a matter of time, okay? But if I stand up to fight, I have chance then." Kumar says the facility's pollution has devastated the river that fishermen like him once depended on for their livelihood.
In response to ABC News reporting, the Malaysian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment wrote in a preliminary statement that they take "the illegal plastic waste trade issue raised by ABC News very seriously," and committed to "analyse and investigate" the information ABC News provided. Only one major shipping company, CMA-CGM, heeded that call with a voluntary public pledge to stop carrying plastic waste aboard their ships entirely, beginning in June 2022.
CMA-CGM later told ABC News that nearly all the shipments marked as plastic waste by S&P Global Market Intelligence were coded by their customers in CMA-CGM's internal booking system as items other than plastic waste. S&P Global Market Intelligence analyzes raw descriptions pulled from customs authorities to assign a code.
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