Malaysia to send mountains of plastic waste back to Britain

HUNDREDS of tons of plastic rubbish shipped to Malaysia will be returned to the countries who sent it there, including the UK, after the nation declared that ‘it will not be a dumping ground to the world’.

Ten containers holding 450 tons of contaminated plastic waste, from British cables to Australian milk cartons and Bangladeshi CDs, will be shipped back, the Malaysian government said.

Yeo Bee Yin, the minister of energy, technology, science, environment and climate change, said: ‘We urge developed countries to stop shipping garbage to our country,’ adding it was ‘unfair and uncivilised’. Plastic imports to the country have tripled since 2016 to 870,000 tonnes last year – when China, which previously took a large amount of waste for recycling, abruptly stopped.

The influx has sparked a rapid increase in the number of recycling plants, many of them operating without a licence and with little regard for environmental standards. The ministry said: ‘These containers are filled with contaminated, non-homogenous, lowquality, non-recyclable plastic waste, and are routed to processing facilities which do not have the technology to recycle in an environmentally sound manner.’ Mr Yeo vowed a crackdown on illegal imports and recycling facilities, dubbing Malaysians involved in importing the waste as ‘traitors’.

However, Lee Chee Kwang, an activist with environment protection agency Kuala Langat, said Malaysia had ‘failed miserably’ to manage the rubbish coming into the country, criticising its move to ship the waste back as ‘only a symbolic public stunt which does not solve the problem.’ He added: ‘The solution is a total ban of imports of all kinds of plastic.’

The Daily Mail has long campaigned to reduce the amount of plastic waste in the environment – successfully calling for the charge on plastic bags, which greatly reduced the amount of carrier bags thrown away.

Around 300 million tons of plastic are produced every year, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, with much of it ending up in landfill or polluting the seas, in what is becoming a growing international crisis.

This week a BBC documentary presented by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall revealed that plastic rubbish collected from councils including Braintree in Essex, Rhondda Cynon Taf in South Wales and Milton Keynes were being dumped in the Malaysian jungle.

Brands found in the undergrowth included many familiar UK names such as Waitrose, M&S and Tesco.

‘Those importing waste are traitors’