Your plastic waste might be traded by criminals

How does a sweet wrapper thrown away in Germany end up in a Malaysian river? Well, there’s a bizarre plastic waste trade network, made murky by fly-by-night operators, weak international laws and corruption. So how does this entire thing operate? And can it be stopped?

We’re destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we’ll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

#PlanetA #PlasticWasteTrade #PlasticPollution

Reporter: Aditi Rajagopal
Camera: Henning Goll
Video editor: Julie Rosskopf
Supervising editor: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann, Joanna Gottschalk

Interpol findings:
https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2020/INTERPOL-report-alerts-to-sharp-rise-in-plastic-waste-crime

Waste exports crime case study in Italy:
https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-15-00292.html

Basel Governance convention on waste trafficking:
https://baselgovernance.org/news/illegal-waste-trade-whats-driving-multi-billion-dollar-transnational-crime-and-what-could-stop

Greenpeace Reports:
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/malaysia-endures-toxic-legacy-of-uk-plastic-waste-exports/ and greenpeace.org/international/press-release/47759/investigation-finds-plastic-from-the-uk-and-germany-illegally-dumped-in-turkey/

00:00 Intro
01:14 The recycling myth
02:20 Enter: China
04:46 Post China’s ban
05:34 The legalities of it all
09:45 Environmental justice
10:36 A business opportunity
11:25 Conclusion