Where Does Plastic And Other Trash Go After We Throw It Away?

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. I think we have all had that experience of getting to the end of– I don’t know, a peanut butter jar and thinking, where should this go, trash or recycling? Should I rinse it out? And where will it actually end up?

My next guest had those same questions and went to great lengths to answer them, visiting five continents to chronicle how our trash travels. And along the way, he discovered a multi-billion dollar trash trade run by shady waste brokers, a whole global industry powered by slimy spoons and crinkled plastic bags and all the other stuff we throw away. It’s a putrid business that we’re all a part of and know little about.

Here to help us sort through this garbage story is Alexander Clapp, journalist and author of the new book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times and The Economist, and he’s based in Athens, Greece. Alex, welcome to Science Friday.

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Flora, thank you so much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Why did you write this book? Did you have a turning point moment with trash?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Yeah, it’s a good question, a fair question. I mean, most people don’t decide to give up two years of their life to travel around the world and visit landfills and ports, and attempt to understand where some of the nastiest, smelliest material is going. But I would say that the turning point was maybe six or seven years ago.

I was on a bus in Romania. And I remember looking outside the window and seeing stacks of plastic waste on the side of the road, and thinking that was sort of strange. I mean, it wasn’t in a landfill. It was unclear what was happening to this waste.

I did what any journalist, I think, would do. I started asking around, what was that waste that I saw. Long story short, a lot of that trash had actually arrived into Romania from France and Germany. So here were two powerful, rich Western European countries, France and Germany, that liked to pride themselves on their environmental credentials. And here they were, sending plastic waste to Romania, a poor Eastern European country that had dismal waste management practices.

And I remember being struck by the fundamental irony, the contradiction of this. I’m a journalist who writes mostly on organized crime and corruption. The more I dug into the waste trade, the more I realized that it bore striking resemblances to the drug trade. Only waste travels from rich countries to poor, and the supply is endless.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We asked our listeners for questions about trash, and we got heaps and heaps. And many of them revolved around this question, which I think actually gets to the heart of your book. So let’s play it for you.

LUCAS: My name is Lucas. And I live in Tracy, California. But I’m originally from Michigan, and I remember growing up in the ’80s, we were the first generation tasked with recycling. And I remember how difficult it was to get my parents to recycle, and the rest of my family.

And I continue to recycle living here in California. And my parents have since stopped recycling, saying that it just all ends up in a landfill anyway. So my question is, how much of our recycling gets recycled and how much ends up in a landfill?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Or as another listener put it very succinctly–

SPEAKER: What the hell is happening with recycling?

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, what is happening with recycling?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: All very good questions. I want to be really clear about this because I can tell, there is a lot of confusion about recycling. There are materials that are genuinely recyclable. In fact, most materials are.

Your old copy of The Washington Post, or whatever have you, that can turn into a new copy of The Washington Post, an old can of Diet Coke, or whatever can turn into a new can of Diet Coke. Steel is perfectly recyclable. Cardboard is perfectly recyclable. These are genuinely circular economies.

The problem is when we get to plastic. A lot of your plastic cannot actually be recycled. The problem with plastic recycling is that, A, it just doesn’t make any money.

It’s always cheaper to produce new plastic than it is to attempt to resurrect old plastic. It’s not very efficient. Of all the plastic ever discarded by humanity, less than 10% has even attempted to undergo the plastic recycling process.

And I think the third reason here is that plastic recycling is toxic and often dangerous. When your plastic goes to a poorer country to be recycled, it doesn’t remain a solid inanimate object. It’s getting mechanically reduced.

Now, what happens when it’s getting reduced? Modern plastics are full of thousands and thousands of toxic additives, contaminants, flame retardants. None of this stuff is very well regulated. And so the process of recycling this plastic is actually unleashing all of that stuff into local environments in poorer countries.

And these things are eternal. They go into soil, they go into water systems, they go into food systems. They never get out.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. So, Alex, what do you do? Do you recycle plastic? When you get to the bottom of that peanut butter jar, what do you do with it?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: So I think there are a few answers to this question. First, you have to try to avoid avoidable plastics at all costs. The second thing is that I think landfilling has gotten a really bad reputation with respect to plastics.

When you send plastic to a landfill, it gets buried in the Earth. These landfills are lined. It’s not harming someone in a poor country. It’s not unleashing a billion microplastics into water systems.

The contaminants aren’t going into local food systems in Vietnam or Thailand or Bangladesh. It’s just sitting there. I know it’s not what people want to hear. But might be the more honest solution to plastic is that if you have to use it– if you have to use it, it might be better to landfill it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to go back in time. I mean, you argue that our modern relationship with trash starts after World War II. Will you walk me through that?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Yes. Previous societies, before the 1950s, they had largely attempted to reuse materials. They tried to avoid waste at whatever cost possible. I mean, waste was a loss. If you had to throw that resource away, that was generally considered a bad thing.

But in the 1950s, something rather different happened, especially in the United States, and especially with the rise of plastic. We started living in a disposable culture. We started just throwing things away after one use.

And we lived in a society in which waste was actually considered a sign of prosperity. The more you threw away, the more your society was producing. This was seen as a sign of progress.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, you write in the book that we sometimes think about waste as a consumption problem. But it’s an overproduction problem.

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Exactly, and I often point to plastic. In the 1950s, no one was sitting around saying, I really wish that this steel spoon that I’m using could actually be replaced by a piece of plastic that I have to throw away in five minutes. Plastic was actually imposed on American society.

If you look back carefully through the history of plastic– I mean, a lot of this is like the Mad Men advertising world in which they concocted uses for this stuff that we didn’t even know that we needed. And this happens in the United States in the 1950s. It happens in Europe slightly later. And it’s still happening in many parts of the world today.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, so I want to understand this. How did waste go from waste or trash to a product that could be shipped, could be bought?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: It’s a really interesting question, and it gets at something psychological that I think happens in the 1970s and 1980s. And it ironically begins with a kind of contradiction. It begins with the Western environmental movement.

Now, in the 1960s and 1970s, Americans looked around and they saw a really bleak place. I mean, there were rivers in Ohio that were spontaneously combusting. There were toxic chemicals everywhere. And we wanted to clean this up, rightfully.

We passed a series of legislation in the 1970s that made the cost of disposal of many toxic chemicals prohibitively expensive. And the idea was, if you made the price of disposing of asbestos, for instance, or lead paint, market forces would generally phase these things out of existence. People would just stop using them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is that what happened?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Well, I’m here now talking about this. So yeah, what actually happened is that this came with a dirty little secret. These laws and rules, which apply to the United States, did not apply beyond them.

So if the cost of disposing of asbestos was $1,000 a ton in 1980, the cost of sending that to Africa, where there were no regulations, the cost was, like, $2 a ton. So suddenly, you had this really uneven sort of geography of legislation and waste output that set up a profit incentive. You could send your stuff to poorer countries and save a lot of money.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So I’m following. But there’s also this thing that happens where countries are buying waste, not just disposing of it more cheaply. How does that happen?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: This is also an interesting story. And again, it’s a kind of shift. This happens in the 1990s. So basically, in the 1980s, the period that I’ve just been describing, poorer countries were effectively bribed with huge sums of money to take in your toxic waste. A country like Guinea-Bissau was bribed $600 million, which amounted to something like 35 years worth of annual exports for that country.

But in 1989, a lot of these poor developing countries band together, and they say you know what? Enough is enough. We’re not taking this stuff anymore.

We’re not poisoning our children. We’re not contaminating our future. And so we’re going to stop this.

So they band together, and they pass the Basel Convention. And it gets ratified in 1994 by every country in the world except for five, one of which is the United States. What the Basel Convention says is that it is illegal to ship toxic waste from rich countries to poor countries.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK.

ALEXANDER CLAPP: But the waste trade continues. It keeps going. And how does it keep going? Well, we stopped calling a lot of our waste “trash.” We had the listener a little bit earlier who was saying that, in the 1980s and 1990s, we were encouraged to recycle everything.

That’s because a lot of the things that we discarded– and this is namely plastic, but it’s also things like batteries. It’s also things like old electronics that no longer work. We were encouraged to consider this stuff recyclable material.

We were told that this was no longer trash. And therefore, it didn’t apply to the Basel Convention because it wasn’t a form of residue. It was a resource.

And that’s where you get importers in poorer countries– who are part of the problem, I should be very clear, who began paying peanuts for this stuff. So they began paying for Western plastic or old Western electronics. And it falls to the poorest people in the poorer countries to actually have to process this stuff, which is incredibly dangerous.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, why are they paying for it at all? Is there value in it?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: At scale, there can be value in it. But again, there’s a reason why this stuff generally has to go to poorer countries. Your energy costs have to be very low. You have to be able to pay your labor essentially nothing. And then at the end of the day, at scale, there’s a small amount of profit to be made out of it.

Let’s take a country like Germany, for instance. Most of the plastic that Germany recycles actually leaves Germany. Where does it go? It goes to a country like Turkey, for instance.

Now, some of it might become new plastic. Some of it might be turned into a nylon bathmat, for instance. But a lot of that plastic and Turkey– and I witnessed this, will just get torched in a cement kiln or tossed onto a field, tossed into a river system. Germany gets to claim that it’s all being recycled. The truth is a lot darker, though.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Who are the middlemen in this system, the brokers?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Yeah, the middlemen are sort of– I mean, what I found was that a lot of these guys really fly under the radar. I mean, these networks tend to work a little bit like drugs. I mean, they’re kinship networks. It’s hard to access these people. If they give you an address, it’s probably a kind of post office type of thing.

I find what they do highly unethical. I mean, they basically profit off the often publicly funded collection of your trash, and then the privatized fate of your trash. And they make money because, in a place like California, to landfill a ton of plastic would be very expensive. But if you can just get that away, if you can ship that to Indonesia and make a small amount of money, well, why wouldn’t you do that?

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to talk a little bit about solutions. And I want to kick it off with this listener question.

JACKIE: Hi. Science Friday. This is Jackie from Sacramento. What role and level of accountability does the plastic industry have in all of this?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: 100%. I mean, they’re producing this stuff. They know how dangerous this stuff is. I mean, I want people to keep in mind, there’s plastic in your brain right now.

This plastic is in our bone marrow. It’s in our reproductive organs. The stuff is everywhere.

They know this. By 2060, they are planning on producing three times more plastic than humanity has ever discarded to this point. This is their business model.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do you think the solution is. Is it regulation? What needs to happen?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: I would say three things, I think. The first– you discard it, you own it. This idea that countries are sending their waste to poorer countries that cannot handle their own waste outputs, in which we know that the stuff is toxic, that needs to stop. I think that’s where we begin.

The second is that I encourage people not to use plastic if they can. But this is not a problem that is going to be solved through individual morality. We need regulation. We need to hold plastic producers accountable. There needs to be either a quota, or it needs to stop being so scandalously cheap and easy to produce this stuff.

The third thing, I think, is that– people always throw up their hands and say, the plastic, I can never stop using this. It’s futile to even attempt. But I’m sure there are listeners here who are alive when plastic really wasn’t so ubiquitous. I mean, you only have to go back to the 1950s or so to realize we didn’t always have this stuff. This is a reversible phenomenon because it really wasn’t always like this.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I feel like every once in a while, we see a headline that’s like, researchers have discovered a new molecule or a fungus that’s going to eat up all the plastic. What’s your take on that? Is there a way to science our way out of this?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Yeah, I’m always hearing that. And I think this is generally a distraction. I mean, first of all, there’s little evidence that any of this stuff, if it even works, can get at microplastics, which is the big problem.

And if you think that plastic is this solvable phenomenon, you’re basically letting the petrochemical industry off the hook because they’re just going to keep on producing this stuff. Every day that goes by in which people are like, oh, that technology is developing, we’re eventually going to solve our plastic pandemic, that’s another day of profit for them. What I think we need to do, and I think would even be easier than inventing some germ that eats plastic, would be to attempt to stop the problem at its source, which is reducing our plastic production in the first place.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think a lot of people are going to hear this conversation and feel distraught and also feel motivated to try to do something. And I hear what you’re saying, that this is not going to be solved on an individual level. But I want to ask you to get personal for a second. I mean, how has writing this book changed the way you think about trash and waste and your own habits?

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Yeah, I mean, I think probably like many people listening to this, I just assumed that this plastic bag, or whatever it is, that I tossed away would maybe, through some kind of weird alchemy, turn into a new plastic bag somewhere within my own country or whatever.

But the point of plastic, and the point of a lot of waste, is that it’s not inanimate. It’s not these inert objects. These things travel to foreign countries and they get broken down, and desperate people attempt to make use of these materials.

And unbeknownst to them, they are often unsuspecting victims in this. This stuff is really dangerous. There’s a human element to everything you throw away.

In terms of what I do, I’m not one of these people who thinks that plastic should be completely thrown off the table. I mean, there’s actually a lot of really important forms of plastic in the medical industry, for instance, and in the airline industry, for instance. But I think there’s a lot of avoidable plastic out there. And I think every opportunity you can to just not buy it– even if you don’t care for the planet, that’s fine.

But you should do it for your own personal health. As I mentioned earlier, I mean, plastic is now in our brain tissue. It’s in our bloodstreams. We should be avoiding this stuff for your own sake.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Alex, thanks for taking the time today.

ALEXANDER CLAPP: Thank you so much, Flora. I really appreciate it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Alexander Clapp is a journalist and author of the new book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. You can read an excerpt from the book on our website, sciencefriday.com/waste

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