Thread: Number of western countries are using Thailand as a middle-man.A load of Rubbish

Plastic packaging from UK supermarket found dumped in vulnerable Myanmar communities | The Independent

West dumping on slum poor.

Packaging from a UK supermarket has been dumped 7,000 miles away in a low-income township in Myanmar - raising troubling questions about how the West’s outsized plastic pollution crisis is being forced upon vulnerable communities with little ability to push back.
Labels and plastic wrapping for bottled water and diet lemonade from a Lidl in Lichfield were discovered in the piles of festering garbage which engulf low-income areas of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.

Lidl’s plastic waste was found in a sea of foreign trash in Shwe Pyi Thar township that also included items from companies in France, Poland and Canada.




The plastic waste was collected by journalists from the independent news organisation Frontier during a six-month investigation into dumping in Myanmar. The Independent is publishing the findings in partnership with Lighthouse Reports, a collaborative newsroom working with media outlets in six countries.
The Lidl packaging was found in Shwe Pyi Thar’s Ward 27, an informal community of 700 squatters on the outskirts of the township who fear speaking up due to the threat of eviction. Around half of the 180 tiny, tightly-packed bamboo huts are flooded with sewage, according to the investigative team.
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Threats in Myanmar have escalated since a coup two years ago by a military junta which violently cracked down on protest and free speech. Another informal settlement near Yangon, Ward 17, was bulldozed last year with one day’s notice.

Shwe Pyi Thar residents spoke anonymously to Frontier Myanmar journalists for fear of reprisal. Some locals said they had been coerced by local “strong men” to sign agreements allowing plastic waste to be dumped next to their homes.
Locals described fetid air in their homes, and how the trash often catches fire, releasing hazardous fumes. During monsoon season, the plastic waste, which clogs sewers and streams, makes flooding much worse.


“When there is a dump site, people think they can throw their garbage there as well and they do,” said Daw Aye Mi, a married mother-of-two, who used a pseudonym. “After that the garbage floats down waterways to other residential areas. The water becomes dirty and dark. When we touch the water, our legs become itchy.”

Foreign plastic waste is dumped throughout Ward 27, an informal community in Yangon township, where residents are fearful of speaking out due to repercussions from Myanmar’s military junta

(Supplied to The Independent)
During the interview, she showed sores on her legs to Frontier reporters.
Daw Aye Mi said that she worried about her children falling in the dirty water and warned them not to play in the garbage. However, there was little she could do to stop the waste being dumped on Myanmar residents, some of which comes from overseas.




“We are squatters,” she said. “If the government comes to demolish the huts, we will have to move so we cannot tell them not to throw garbage here.”
Frontier journalists found Danone brand Oikos yogurt pots, and packaging from Canadian brand Unico Penne Rigate, Poland’s Kasztelan beer and cheese brand, Spomlek. None of these companies supply to Myanmar.

Mound of plastic waste in Ward 27 of Shwe Pyi Thar township in Yangon. Plastic packaging from foreign brands, not sold in Myanmar, is visible

(Supplied to The Independent )
A Danone spokesperson said: “We were disappointed to see the findings of the Lighthouse Report. Danone does not export any of its waste across the globe.”
The Independent has contacted Carlsberg Poland, which owns the Kasztelan brand, along with Spomlek and Unico for comment but has yet to receive a response.
The largest amount of plastic waste found by Frontier reporters came from Lidl UK. The printed labels named a Lidl warehouse in Lichfield, north of Birmingham, suggesting it was disposed of directly by the company rather than customers.

Plastic packaging from Lidl (pictured) was the most prevalent of the foreign waste collected from a sea of trash in a township of Yangon

(Supplied to The Independent)
The labels were found alongside water bottles from Roxane UK, a Lichfield-based supplier of Lidl UK.
Lidl, a low-price supermarket chain from Germany with stores across Europe and the US, highlighted its green credentials in a statement to The Independent.
“As founding members of the UK Plastic Pact, we’re committed to a circular future for plastics, diligently working to reduce plastic usage, enhance recyclability, and promote circularity in our materials as part of our REset Plastic targets,” the company wrote in an email.
“All our plastic waste is processed in the UK and Lidl has a strict policy against sending waste or recyclables to any country in Asia. We are therefore naturally disappointed to see this and will be investigating in close collaboration with our waste management partners.”

Labels from a Lidl UK branch in Lichfield, north of Birmingham, were discovered in low-income communities in Myanmar

(Supplied to The Independent)
A former member of Lidl’s sustainability team told Lighthouse Reports that the supermarket’s plastic being found in Myanmar was “shocking”.
"There is some responsibility on the brand, either their contractor or supplier is not doing the required checks and balances for waste management. It is particularly shocking that it is ending up in Myanmar, a very vulnerable country where many companies are debating about whether to do business,” the source said.
Lidl is also bound by European and international waste trade regulations like the Basel Convention which states that countries can only export uncontaminated waste destined for recycling, and not to dump. And yet, the rubbish found in Myanmar is not recyclable material.
With these regulations in mind, Jim Puckett, executive director of environmental advocacy group Basel Action Network, told The Independent that Lidl’s packaging was likely “illegally exported to Myanmar” by a third party. He pointed out that companies usually don’t handle their own shipments and hire a separate waste management company.
“Something went wrong," said Mr Puckett.
A Byzantine system

How is it that plastic waste from the English Midlands ends up in a township in southeast Asia?
The answer lies somewhere in the global recycling supply chain - an opaque, Byzantine system riddled with contradictory regulations, loopholes and corruption. Laws intended to stop illegal dumping of plastic waste are proving toothless in reality, the investigation found.
Official data from 23 countries showed that 143,000 tonnes of plastic waste was exported to Myanmar in the past five years, according to Comtrade, the United Nations global trade data platform. However, the investigation found there was likely much more entering the country because Comtrade does not cross-check or verify the data it gathers.

“When there is a dump site, people think they can throw their garbage there as well and they do. After that the garbage floats down waterways to other residential areas. The water becomes dirty and dark. When we touch the water, our legs become itchy.

Daw Aye Mi, a resident of Ward 27, speaking with use of a pseudonym
China’s ban on plastic imports in 2018 saw an explosion in shipments to Southeast Asia from the West. But public backlash has meant that Thailand, Viet Nam, and Malaysia, are gradually introducing their own national plastic bans. While this may have begun to solve the problem for some countries, greater volumes of plastic waste are now ending up in more vulnerable places with little capacity to deal with it.
Under Myanmar’s domestic laws, the only plastic waste that should be imported is uncontaminated, recycling-ready shreds or pellets. But the problem is telling the difference in thousands of shipments - a tricky task for which there’s little will or capacity along the supply chain.
Recycling companies in Myanmar also told the investigative team that they would prefer to buy foreign plastic waste - even if much had to be sent to landfill or burned - as it’s typically higher quality than what is available domestically.
“For imported waste we have to buy the whole container and in the container there is a lot of mixed waste,” said Win Tun Tun, a recycler in Myanmar, who used a pseudonym. “We cannot return unusable waste, we have to dispose of it.”