Four years ago, city officials in Palo Alto, California, posed what they thought was a straightforward question: Where did their recycling go?
Concerned citizens had seen dire headlines about plastic dumping in Southeast Asia, and they wanted to know if their waste contributed.
But the city’s investigations have not offered much clarity. Palo Alto’s best reckoning, today, is that about 40% of its recyclable material stays in North America, where it’s supposed to be processed according to strict environmental and labor standards. The other roughly 60% goes abroad, mainly to Asia, with next to no transparency about its fate.
Experts say cities and towns across the United States would probably have similar difficulty in determining how much of their recyclables are actually recycled.
“If you keep stuff out of landfill but just dump it in Laos, that’s not achieving a good goal,” said Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a group that advised Palo Alto in its pursuit of transparency. “That’s not what the whole idea was of recycling.”
The main obstacle that Palo Alto encountered was that the half-dozen companies that trade the city’s recyclables on world markets declined to name their trading partners, citing business reasons.
Unable to force disclosure, Palo Alto city staff concluded they are stuck.
“It is not possible to definitively determine whether the materials are being recycled properly or whether they may be causing environmental or social problems,” they wrote in a report published this year.
In 2020, international police organization Interpol said it had noticed coordinated efforts to export plastic, particularly to Southeast Asia, in violation of national laws.
But investigators still struggle to track suspicious shipments, said Ioana Cotutiu, a project coordinator with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime who works on the trade in illegal waste.
“Very often there are a lot of intermediaries and we’re losing track of the waste,” she said in a webinar this year. “Once it reaches the destination country, we don’t know what happens after.”
The global recycling trade dates back at least 30 years, enabling rich countries like the U.S. to keep the cost of recycling lower for consumers by outsourcing some of it to developing countries.
In recent years the global plastic trade has shrunk amid new controls by rich and developing countries alike. U.S. plastic waste exports to Asia fell to 330 million pounds in 2021, according to government data, half their 2017 level.
But even these reduced volumes, environmental groups charge, can overwhelm developing countries that lack the facilities to manage them. Asia is a key danger zone: According to a World Bank estimate, only about 9% of waste in the East Asia and Pacific region gets recycled.
The balance goes to landfills and incinerators or into nature, with local and global consequences.
“Some in Laos see the imported waste as an opportunity,” said Serge Doussant, head of Green Vientiane, an advocacy group in the Laotian capital. “But Laos doesn’t have the necessary factories to treat the amount of plastic waste coming from wealthy countries.”
At one informal dump site in Vientiane, discarded water bottles, shredded plastic bags and shards of styrofoam were strewn across a 50-foot stretch of the bank of the Mekong River.
According to the World Bank, this is one of 149 known informal dump sites in Laos. Such sites can leach plastics into the 2,500-mile Mekong and — as it travels downriver through several other countries — into the sea. Research suggests countries in Southeast Asia rank among the top global sources of ocean plastic.