VOA常速英语:富国将垃圾出口到其他国家 导致环境问题

50 kilometers outside Kuala Lumpur in the middle of a palm oil plantation, mountains of plastic waste lie abandoned. Much of it has travelled thousands of kilometers from wealthy countries in Europe and North America. Local residents are suffering the consequences. They just dump the non-recyclable plastic or the rejected product, and then they burn it in the backyard of this factory. So, those toxic fumes actually already caused a lot of health problems to our residents. Last year, China banned the import of plastic waste, sending the global industry into turmoil. Wealthy countries are exporting their own plastic waste problems overseas, says Greenpeace.

They have a good collection of facilities. It’s actually they like sending like half of their collective waste to other countries. Before the trial ban, they just ran to China for recycling, but they do not take this further step to ensure those recyclable are properly recycled. And now after the China waste ban, they just find another new places to send their recyclables to. The Greenpeace report says more than half of that waste, three million tons a year, is being redirected toward Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand. They do not have enough capacities for handling such a large amount of imported foreign waste, so there some pollution to the local environment. In response, many Southeast Asian countries are imposing their own restrictions on plastic waste imports, forcing the trash into less regulated markets, such as Indonesia and India. At a United Nations conference in Geneva this week, 180 countries are discussing a proposal to force plastic waste exporters to receive permission from destination countries in advance, a system known as “Prior Informed Consent”.
For those dealing with the impact, the changes can’t come soon enough. We are killing ourselves by using too many plastic. We are too dependent on plastic. Please manage and handle your own trash. Don’t dump to our country. Greenpeace says the ultimate solution does not lie in improving, recycling, but in cutting back drastically on plastic production and consumption worldwide.
Henry Ridgwell, VOA News London.