Since the Chinese market said no to imports of waste, we would have expected the most technologically and economically advanced country to find a correct and "democratic" solution to the recycling of its own waste materials.

We would have expected, as happens in Europe, that the best minds of industry and private and public research, would find valid solutions on recycling of various domestic and industrial waste, improving business and the environment.

Has it been done? For nothing

Considering that the USA produces about 34.5 million tons of plastic waste every year and that their recycling rate, established in 2015 by the Environmental Protection Agency was 9%, China and Hong Kong handled about 1.6 million tons per year on behalf of the United States.

We talk about household waste polluted by food residues or other materials, multilayer plastics, industrial polymers that cannot be recycled with traditional mechanical systems which, in the end, they ended up in landfills for the rest of their days.

Despite the Basel agreement of 2019, it effectively establishes the ban on exporting waste to developing countries as they do not have industrial facilities, tight controls and resources to manage them legally, the United States has not ratified the agreement, therefore feeling free to export waste where social, economic, corrupt and legal conditions allow this trade more easily.

After China's ban, American plastic waste has become a global problem, ping-ponging from one country to another.

The Guardian's analysis of shipping documents and export data from the US Census Bureau found that America still ships today over 1 million tons per year of its plastic waste abroad, most of which in places where living conditions, due to the masses of waste received, are unsustainable.

But what are these countries after the Chinese closure?

Vietnam, despite an official ban on imports, Laos, Cambodia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Turkey, Senegal and many countries in South America, which had never previously handled American waste.

In Turkey, for example, US plastic imports could jeopardize the entire national recycling chain, aggravating the problem of internal recycling of waste produced by same Turkish inhabitants.

Since China closed its doors, the amount of plastic waste that Turkey receives from abroad has increased dramatically, from 159,000 to 439,000 tons in two years.

Every month, about 10 ships call at the ports of Istanbul and Adana, carrying about 2,000 tons of US plastic waste that cannot be found elsewhere. Most come from the ports of Georgia, Charleston, Baltimore and New York.

In the Philippines, on the other hand, about 120 containers per month arrive in Manila and in an industrial area of the former US military base in Subic Bay. Shipping logs indicated that the containers were full of plastic waste shipped from places like Los Angeles, Georgia and the Port of New York-Newark.

Many times it is the same entrepreneurs who in the past received waste from United States, which, after the blockade imposed by their governments, has reorganized in countries where there are no strict bans, creating defined recycling companies, in peasant environments where waste management activities, which go to landfills or are separated and partially recycled, puts the population at serious health risk and subjects the environment to pollution with no return.

This is allowed as the border offices do not check whether the imported waste is recyclable or not, also there is no real waste tracking from the moment of entry in the country, there are no effective controls once these self-styled recycling companies receive the material and there is a certain regulatory-legal laxity that prevents an effective fight against the problem.

For this reason, we can find in various parts of the world entire countries transformed into open-air waste bins, where the need for water for the activity has created contamination of rivers and seas, harmful and potentially deadly chemicals are widely dissolved in the aquifers, in the soils, and the air that workers and inhabitants breathe becomes impregnated with poisonous substances.

An unprecedented ecological disaster, far from the home of those who produce waste and in the silence of the most advanced world to the game of money, which imposes the destruction of the lives of populations and natural habitats, in spite of all the democratic principles that have apparently made Western countries great.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.

Photo: The Guardian