The global recycling industry pollutes low-income communities. Here’s how.

Most plastic isn’t recycled in the first place — only about 9% of what’s created — and the plastic yogurt cups, takeout containers, bottles and bags that are so-called recycled exacerbate a complex problem that’s invisible to much of the world.

The global plastic waste trade ships plastic from mostly wealthy nations to mostly developing countries, passing the burden of plastic pollution. The trade disproportionately impacts women, people living in low-income countries, and People of Color. It’s also responsible for a ton of greenhouse gas emissions —the carbon emissions of the plastic waste shipped overseas from the U.S. alone is equivalent to the annual emissions of 26,000 cars. It is absolutely better to recycle plastic than to toss it in the trash — recycling a plastic bottle consumes 76 percent less energy than making it from scratch — but recycling can spark a false sense that single-use plastic is harmless as long as it’s turned into something else.

In part one of a three-part series on social justice and plastics, we’re getting into the human toll of current recycling systems, and how the global waste trade disproportionately impacts marginalized people.

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What happens to the plastic you recycle?

When you do toss something into the recycling bin, you might think it goes to a nearby facility where it’s melted and formed into a new bottle or takeout container. It usually isn’t. Instead, recycled plastic typically makes a carbon-heavy trip across the globe to low-income countries that are tasked with sorting the often toxic mess. The contents of your recycling bin can travel as much as 8,000 miles before it reaches a recycling facility. That’s because just a handful of countries are responsible for processing the lion’s share of global plastic waste, and shifting policies are constantly changing to which countries plastic waste is being routed.

Estimates vary as to which countries are the biggest contributors to the plastic waste stream, but one thing does stay constant. High and upper middle income countries account for almost all plastic waste exports, and lower income countries bear the brunt of the plastic waste burden.

In 2020, a United Nations report found that 71% of plastic exports came from developed countries, the biggest contributors being the European Union (40% of the global total) — especially Germany — the U.S. (15%), and Japan (12%). At the same time, 75% of this plastic ended up in developing countries. For three decades, most of this plastic was shipped to China, which is also the world’s largest virgin plastic producer and exporter. But in 2017, China banned most plastic imports. The following year, Indonesia, Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan introduced restrictions of their own. These countries had absorbed a huge amount of global plastic waste exports after China’s restrictions. The loads flooded the countries with plastic waste, including toxic chemicals.

So the flow shifted again. Plastic garbage from wealthy nations, especially the U.S., rerouted to other developing countries. Mexico, Jamaica, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Kenya took the brunt of it. In 2020, 40% of plastic waste from the U.K. was shipped to Turkey. Not all plastic is recycled equally – a lot of the plastic waste that makes it to these countries is the least-valuable and most difficult to recycle, meaning it often clogs rivers and makes its way to the coast, and never becomes a new plastic product at all.

The human toll of plastic waste

Waste workes in Chattogram, Bangladesh. Image by Mumtahina Tanni.

Waste worker at the Supiturang Malang Indonesia garbage collection point. Image by Bamban Heru.

While wealthy nations produce most of the world’s plastic, low-income, marginalized countries are predominantly tasked with disposing of it.

A report published in 2021 documented the human toll this waste route has on people living in low-income countries. Although most countries now ban the importation of anything but the highest quality plastics, that doesn’t stop wealthy nations like the U.S., the biggest plastic waste producer in the world, to ship their cheap waste to countries that haven’t yet imposed restrictions.

As a result, plastic waste from high income countries contaminates water supplies, kills crops, causes respiratory illness from exposure to burning plastic, and fuels the rise of organized crime abound in areas that accept shipments of plastic waste. And once it arrives, the most socially marginalized people — many times women — are most affected.

Women are more likely to work as informal waste collectors than in formal waste management and reports show that in informal waste management economies, highly recyclable, and therefore more valuable plastics, are typically reserved for men in countries throughout Africa, Latin America and Asia. If women do sell these types of plastics, they’re often paid less for them than a man would get. So in the end, women are paid less for working in the same toxic environment as men.

Celebrating marginalized waste pickers

For now, the global waste trade is how wealthy nations deal with plastic. It isn’t a solution, but it’s still important to highlight the people at the end of the line who currently play a critical role in reducing plastic pollution around the world. In India, roughly 2.2 million people work as informal waste pickers. The work is typically done by people from marginalized groups and people in lower castes. The implications of informal waste management are complicated. The industry both creates jobs for women and exasperates gender inequality in the plastic industry.

During India’s first pandemic lockdown, in 2020, informal waste workers were deemed non-essential. They weren’t allowed to leave their homes to work. These people, largely women, were left with no work for four months and plastic waste piled up in landfills, rivers and coastlines. This made artist and activist Shilo Shiv Suleman, founder of Fearless Collective, think about how so-called disposable plastics permeate essentially every place on Earth.

“Very often in our environmental and social justice movements, we become so focused on one struggle that we don’t see the interconnectedness of our issues,” Shilo told Parley. “We started to see the intersections between disposable plastics, disposable lives, disposable incomes, and consumption and waste management, exposing a framework within which some lives are considered disposable and labour is not valued equally.”

In Delhi, waste pickers mostly belong to Dalit and Muslim minorities. And so, women waste pickers face intersectional discriminations along the lines of gender, caste, religion, and occupation. Through Fearless Collective, Shilo used art — in the form of a mural in Delhi — to highlight female waste pickers and the essential service they provide in preventing recyclables from ending up in landfills and oceans.

“Often when we talk about power, we talk about caste, class, gender, race but we don’t talk about visibility. Those who are the most visible and whose stories are the most articulated are most often also the most powerful and those who are on the margins are often left behind,” said Shilo.

At the same time, marginalized people play crucial roles in the ecosystems of society. “When we work with communities of women, especially women who have been made invisible in some way, we make these huge participative monuments with them. We have their histories and contributions recorded,” said Shilo. “In the process, we shift the scales of power.”

Landfill in South Tangerang, Indonesia. Image by Tom Fisk.

What can I do?

Corporations are always at the base of the plastic crisis. In fact, 20 firms produce 55 percent of the world’s single-use plastics. It’s their products that create these problems in the first place. Put pressure on these companies to change their product — through social media campaigns, local legislation, or otherwise — and refuse to buy products made by known plastic polluters like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.

You can also push the President of the United States — leader of the biggest plastic-polluting country in the world — to curb plastic production at the highest level and hold the companies that created the plastic crisis accountable. Sign the #PlasticFreePresidency petition and learn more about how we can all push for systemic change.

If you haven’t yet, review our Plastic Free Guide for tips on how to reduce your plastic use and gather talking points to share with your community. The burden of responsibility shouldn’t fall to the individual, but not using plastic in the first place is still one of the biggest impacts you can make as a single person. If you have to use single-use plastic, don’t recycle low-grade plastics like takeout containers, those clamshells that berries come in, styrofoam or plastic to-go cups. These are cheap and often can’t be recycled, so you end up shipping your garbage across the globe and making it someone else’s problem.