Turns out that no export permits to ship trash to Asia have been given out for three years but new shipments are still arriving their because Canada-originated garbage is still permitted to go to the US. It's then out of the Canadian system but ends up in Asia because American companies transfer it there anyway:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/garbag ... -1.5154278$1:
The federal government has issued no permits for Canadian companies to ship trash overseas since regulations changed three years ago — raising questions about how waste is still ending up on the shores of Asian nations.
Canada introduced new regulations in 2016 requiring exporters to get permits to ship waste other countries would consider hazardous, including trash. The changes were the result of the diplomatic dustup with the Philippines over 103 containers of trash that arrived in ports there in 2013 and 2014 wrongly labelled as plastics for recycling.
"This garbage was shipped to the Philippines under the previous Conservative government, when Canada's regulations did not comply with the international standards set out in the Basel Convention," said Sabrina Kim, spokeswoman for Environment Minister Catherine McKenna. "In 2016, we amended our regulations to prevent this situation from happening again."
Canada is investigating the Malaysia situation now. Canadian officials have thus far refused to say whether any other countries are requesting Canada take back garbage.
Statistics Canada reports the country exported 44,800 tonnes of plastic waste in 2018, much of it to the United States. Once waste goes to the U.S. it is not tracked to determine what happens to it in the end. Brooks said plastics that originate in Canada are often mixed with American waste and then shipped to Asia.
Canada is not the only culprit. Canada's container was among 60 that Malaysia says were imported illegally from 14 different countries, including the United States, Japan, France, Australia and the United Kingdom. The Philippines has complained of illegal trash turn up from Australia and South Korea. Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand have all reported an increase in global garbage dumps, as unscrupulous business owners try to get in on the $3-billion trash industry.
Both Malaysia and the Philippines are looking at their own importing businesses as part of the problem — companies that get paid to take plastics for recycling but then just dump them in landfills or burn them.
The issue has become particularly bad since China, once the world's largest importer of recycling plastics, slammed its doors to the materials last year. China found it was disposing more than it was recycling because the materials arriving in its ports were often too contaminated with food waste and non-recyclables to be useful.
Clever end run around taking responsibility for the problem. Third-party shipping has always been a terrific way to create the appearance of innocence out of obvious guilt.
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