Daily Mirror

BRITAIN’S PLASTIC SHAME

We send our bottles to Bangladesh for kids aged 7 to sort in squalid conditions

- BY TOM PARRY Special Correspond­ent in Bangladesh

BRITAIN ships tonnes of plastic scrap to Bangladesh, where recycling gangs hire children as young as seven.

In the first four months of this year, we sent 110,000kg there.

Greenpeace said: “It’s not the solution to our plastic problem.”

He is one of many children working in squalid conditions in Bangladesh, where Britain sends plastic waste for recycling, earning less than 30p an hour and often working 12-hour days.

Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta bottles discarded in our bins are among those being sorted some 5,000 miles away.

And critics say UK firms involved in exporting household plastic rubbish have no way of checking whether youngsters will be involved in processing it in such countries.

Fiona Nicholls of Greenpeace UK said: “Sweeping our waste under someone else’s carpet is not the solution to Britain’s plastic problem.

“Instead of just moving our plastic scrap around the globe, we should turn off the tap at the source.

“The industry is churning out single-use plastic at an alarming rate, with global production set to quadruple by 2050. That’s clearly more than our recycling system can cope with.”

Britain shipped more than 110,000kg of household plastic waste for recycling to Bangladesh in the first four months of this year.

Earlier this month, an Internatio­nal Labour Organisati­on report found 1.2 million youngsters aged under 14 were trapped in poorly paid jobs in the densely populated Asian country.

On a visit to the capital Dhaka, the Mirror encountere­d children sifting through mountains of bottles in tips.

At Matuail’s dump site on the edge of the city, next to a highway choked with diesel fumes and open sewers, hundreds of motorised rickshaws are piled with crates of plastic bottles.

There I meet Rithoy, 12, who should be at school but instead works fulltime at a roadside recycling factory.

He talks to me from the top of a 16ft-high hill of bottles, about as large as a tennis court. I spot familiar brands such as Fanta, Sprite, CocaCola, Evian and 7Up.

Rithoy scrambles nimbly across the unsafe mound, which is filled up with truckloads of bottles every day. He says he is paid less than 30p an hour to separate bottles by colour alongside his mother and other family members.

An unofficial worker since he was 10, Rithoy’s typical shift lasts 12 hours.

Inside a gloomy unit under the bottle mountain, boss Monir Mumtaz says he employs 10 people, including Rithoy and several other children.

Bottles are chopped up then thrown into a huge metal centrifuge with water. They come out as flakes, which are dried and then packaged in sacks.

Each 25kg sack is sold on to dealers, then exported to China. The flakes are transforme­d into polyester fibres to make clothes, bed sheets and carpets.

Monir tells me he is paid £30 for each sack of white or green flakes. He gets less for brown.

Crouched on the ground is 25-yearold mum Rabia Rabi, whose son Ahnaf, two, sits at her side. He spends

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LABOUR Man carries sacks in Kamrangirc­har
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