MANILA, Philippines When the MV Bavaria cargo ship chugged out of a Philippine port one morning last month carrying 69 containers of rotted Canadian garbage, it didnt just end a messy diplomatic spat between the two countries.
It also signaled a sea change in the global recycling system.
After years of pressure, Canada had agreed to take back the waste, which had been exported to the Philippines beginning in 2013 falsely labeled as plastic scrap. The shipments were part of a decades-old practice in which rich countries including the United States sent used plastic to Asia to be recycled. Often, the shipments included contaminated waste that couldnt be recycled but made it past customs checks anyway, and countries had few legal avenues to send it back.
That began to change 18 months ago, when China, the biggest consumer of discarded plastics, banned nearly all waste imports to stop the smuggling of non-recyclable scrap. The trade in plastics quickly rerouted to neighboring Southeast Asian countries that lacked effective recycling plants and disposal laws, leaving much of the waste to be burned or dumped in fields and waterways, creating health and environmental hazards.
Now those countries are also closing their doors.
Amid a growing global movement against non-recyclable plastic, Vietnam and Thailand have said they will block all imported plastic waste in the next few years. Taiwan announced it would only accept plastic scrap if sorted into a single type, making it easier to recycle.
The Philippines and Malaysia are also considering outright bans and have led the way in demanding that exporting countries take back containers of waste that entered its ports illegally, often with improper documentation. Indonesia said last week it had sent five containers of Canadian scrap paper back to Seattle, the transshipment point, after discovering that used plastic, wood, diapers and shoes were also packed inside.
Countries in this region are bucking this whole idea that they should be dumping grounds for the worlds waste, said Lea Guerrero, a campaigner with Greenpeace in the Philippines.
The outcry over plastic has echoes of three decades ago, when the United States routinely shipped dead car batteries, mercury-laced concrete and other toxic materials to the lightly regulated shores of Southeast Asia.
A 1989 global treaty known as the Basel Convention placed significant restrictions on the shipment of hazardous waste to poor countries but left open a loophole for materials mainly plastic that were designated for recycling. The U.S., as one of the few countries that has not ratified the treaty, can export hazardous wastes only under bilateral agreements, one of which it has with the Philippines.
In May, at a meeting in Geneva, representatives of more than 180 countries agreed to expand the treaty to include most plastic waste, placing it under the same trade restrictions as toxic substances.
It was a belated acknowledgment that although plastic has long been marketed as a reusable material, much of it cannot be recycled because it is dyed, contains food or liquid residue, or is mixed with other non-recyclable waste.
Ever since the Basel Convention was developed, there was always an eye toward addressing plastics, but the biggest challenge was the political will of countries to take that on, said Richard Gutierrez, founder of BAN Toxics, an environmental action group in the Philippines.
As long as China was buying more than half the worlds plastic waste it imported 6.4 million tons in 2017, before the ban was enacted much of the industrialized world was blind to the fate of its cast-off soda bottles, grocery bags, yogurt tubs and other trash.
As global plastic consumption soared to 400 million tons annually an amount that is projected to double over the next 15 years no country could match Chinas relatively efficient domestic recycling plants or its massive industrial base that repurposed old plastic into new products.
