It’s a load of rubbish, and it’s sinking us
Better late than never jumped immediately to mind when I read the authorities were about to return illegal containers carrying 196 tonnes of hazardous electronic garbage to Japan. The shipment, which arrived last year at Laem Chabang port in Chon Buri, violated the Basel Convention, the international treaty on hazardous waste management and local environmental laws that ban the transport of hazardous electronic garbage to be disposed of in the country. According to the Department of Industrial Works, it is the first time that electronic garbage was to be returned to the port of origin.
I must applaud the authorities for their decisive action, even as I wonder who will pay for it. However, I feel officials should have started returning illegal shipments long before.
It is known Thailand is one destination in Asia where rich countries can illegally ship discarded electronic gadgets for dumping as there have been reports of similar cases in the past.
In rich countries, manufacturers have legal obligations in the disposal of electronic waste. It’s not unusual for some of them to seek the easy way of evading those responsibilities by sending the waste to poor countries in Asia and Africa which enables them to cut costs.
In a village in Surin province, a number of villagers make a living from extracting metals from electronic circuitry by burning the circuit chips in the open air. For garbage scavengers, or saleng, electronic garbage is sought-after because of the valuable metals.
Thus, they will do anything — cutting, chiselling or burning — to separate the precious metals. It is a risky work because sometimes they are unfamiliar with the materials they are handling. The most notorious example, more than a decade ago now, involved scavengers trying to break open a metal container with highly dangerous radioactive cobalt 60 waste inside.
But the case of the illegal shipment is just the tip of the iceberg. In my humble opinion, our garbage problem is no less messy than our political problems.
The mess is increasing to a level where we are starting to believe there is no way to end it, and I firmly believe that we cannot make real substantial reforms unless we manage our garbage.
It sounds silly but my logic is quite simplistic: how can one country achieve reform on a grand scale when it cannot take care of the garbage in its own backyard!
Like our politics, any attempts to tackle real structural reform of garbage management has been opposed by vested interests. Take a look at the packing tax that the Pollution Control Department (PCD) has tried to mandate for the last two decades. It has hit the wall because the business sector does not want to pay for disposal.
The measure to use a polluter-paysprinciple for garbage in Thailand hardly works. For instance, as many countries around the world force consumers to pay for plastic bags, we still stick to simply campaigning and trying to raise awareness without any substantive result to speak of.
No agency dares force consumers to pay for plastic bags. We have talked a lot about the need for our country to put in place a law that forces local households to recycle garbage, and the city administrations to charge us more in this area. Yet the plan has never got off the ground.
Even so, it’s misleading to paint a hopeless picture. Indeed, there was a positive sign of change last year when the government approved a bill on hazardous and electronic waste management, and it is expected to become law in the near future.
The draft, prepared by the PCD, will require manufacturers to take responsibility for disposal. The law will allow consumers to return used electronic appliances to producers. That will at least set good practices for electronic waste disposal in the country.
But that is far from enough. We need a law that forces people to sort and recycle garbage and a law for a packing tax that will force producers and consumers to pay for the waste they generate.
I believe we need to change our behaviour too, not just wait for the state to impose laws on us, or to take care of all garbage problems. We can do simple acts such as taking cloth bags to do our shopping, use refillable water bottles, sort out used items for donations, or even suppressing our urge to get a nice, new mobile phone.
After all, the way we deal with garbage is a reflection of our society. We all produce garbage and when we see littered roadsides, we know it is not the fault of garbage collectors.