The Malaysian government will send back up to 100 tonnes of Australian plastic waste because it was too contaminated to recycle, but will not yet name the companies responsible.
On Tuesday, Malaysia’s environment minister, Yeo Bee Yin, announced that 3,000 tonnes of waste, sent from around the world, would be returned because it was either rotting, contaminated, or had been falsely labelled and smuggled in.
Recycling sent from Australia, Yeo said, included plastic bottles that were “full of maggots”.
Australia and many developed countries export a large amount of their recyclables to other countries to process. Last year, the largest receiver, China, threw Australian recycling into crisis when it introduced new standards that ruled out 99% of what Australia used to export.
Since then, waste management companies have found new markets in other countries, many in south-east Asia.
But on Tuesday, Yeo said Malaysia had become a “dumping ground” for rubbish that was harming its environment. Up to 60 containers of subpar recycling would be returned to their country of origin “without mercy”, she said.
Some were so contaminated they could not be recycled, while others had been illegally shipped in, or mislabelled.
“Malaysia will not be the dumping ground of the world,” Yeo said. “We will fight back. Even though we are a small country, we can’t be bullied by developed countries.
“What the citizens of the UK [and other countries] think they have sent for recycling are actually being dumped in our country … Malaysians have a right to clean air, clean water and a clean environment to live in, just like citizens of developed nations.”
Malaysian authorities have not yet finished inspecting all the waste, but they have already identified rubbish to return to the UK, the US, Japan, China, Spain, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Bangladesh and France.
Yeo revealed that two containers of PET plastics from Australia were among them.
However, an official with the Malaysian environment department said they were not ready to name the Australian companies that sent them.
“What we have right now is still under investigation,” the official said. “The investigation for the containers we are going to send back is at its final stage, but we can’t yet reveal the names of the exporters.”
On Tuesday, Yeo said the Malaysian government was working on a list of the companies responsible.
“We have found a few companies from different countries, and we are compiling a list of these so-called ‘recycling’ companies. We will send the list of these names to the respective governments to take further action.”
Jane Bremmer, the co-ordinator of Zero Waste Oz, said Australian waste management companies were taking “a colonising approach” instead of adequately taking care of waste.
“It is unethical for Australia to send its non-recyclable, residual waste … to be burnt in cement kilns in other countries, effectively escaping Australian regulatory responsibility,” she said.
“We dump our waste on the environment or on vulnerable communities, or export it to developing countries in the Asia-Pacific … Our national waste and recycling policies have for decades been based on export to poor countries while we failed to develop genuine domestic recycling infrastructure.”
Last week, the Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, made a similar announcement that it would return 69 containers of 1,5000 tonnes of waste to Canada.
The waste had been illegally shipped to the Philippines in 2013 and 2014, and Canada had already agreed to accept the waste back.
But after a delay in the process, Duturte ordered his government to potentially leave it in Canada’s territorial waters, as part of an escalating diplomatic row.