That label that won’t go away

In early December last year, Sarath Wijesinghe, Managing Director of Aqua Packaging (Pvt) Ltd, contacted this newspaper. Along with two sister companies, his business produces plastic bags for export to the US and Europe.

One of the products that go to the US is the newspaper bag. Folded newspapers are inserted into them before delivery. Aqua Packaging is one of the major exporters of the newspaper bag with an average monthly volume of around 400 metric tonnes or about 220 million bags.

Recently, however, an American competitor had sponsored an advertisement that depicted Sri Lanka as being among the worst ocean polluters in the world. It used the five- country list of offenders first compiled by Science Magazine and showed Sri Lanka’s annual contribution towards ocean pollution to be 640,000 metric tons of plastic waste.

“This number is completely inaccurate,” Mr Wijesighe protested. Sri Lanka does not have plastic manufacturing capability and all plastic raw materials are imported. At least 25% of locally-made products are recycled.

The approximate annual imports of all types of plastic raw material falling under the HS code 39 is below 450,000MT (based on 2019 Customs import data). Some of these are used in the paint industry.

“It is my opinion that only around 200,000MT of plastic resin is used for manufacturing single application products. At least 20,000MT of this gets exported directly as finished products. Another 25,000MT or so gets exported indirectly as garment bags, grow bags, packaging in fishery products etc.

There are a few other forms of finished plastic products coming in as packaging and wrapping but there is no way 640,000MT of plastic waste ending up in oceans, he said.

“I hope we can get the inaccuracies of data circulating among international bodies such as the World Bank and the UN can be corrected,” he said.

The Sunday Times did find at least one international publication that referred to the Jambeck et al research paper and attempted to set the record straight. A 2016 report titled ‘Stemming the Tide: Land-based strategies for a plastic-free ocean’ by a Washingtonbased nonprofit environmental advocacy group called Ocean Conservancy had its own list of top offenders.

It replaced Sri Lanka at number five with Thailand, saying they have research to suggest the majority of plastic enters the ocean from a small geographic area, and that over half comes from just five rapidly growing economies—China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

And in its footnotes it refers to research paper in Science Magazine, clarifying that the list was modified to substitute Thailand for Sri Lanka. Why? Because their methodology suggested that Sri Lanka contributed “a lower quantity of ocean plastic than that originally reported”.

“Further, the methodological adjustments made to Sri Lanka, if applied to India, imply that India would likely rise to be a top-five source for ocean plastic-waste leakage,” it held.