There is something very disturbing at play when our trash can travel across international borders more easily than we can. Unbeknownst to most of the developed world, their waste isn’t relocated just far enough to be out of sight and mind, but is instead set on barges to the Global South. As waste production increases with every year globally, the global waste trade only grows more contentious as exporting countries send increasingly more plastic garbage abroad and receiving countries struggle or refuse to accept the heavier burden.
It’s projected that approximately half of all recyclable plastic is exported to 43 countries in the developing world, with China and Hong Kong accepting 72.4% of all plastic waste exported since 1992. Much of this trash—not an insignificant portion of it hazardous forms of waste—ultimately leaks into the environment from landfills or by incineration instead of reaching recycling facilities or other infrastructure for more responsible disposal, wreaking havoc on the surrounding living space and on the health of its inhabitants. Even in Guiyu, a city in China’s Guangdong Province notorious for recycling imported electronics waste, “up to 80 per cent of children in the town had excess levels of lead in their bloodstream.”
Despite President Trump’s claim that Asia is to blame for the ocean plastic crisis, Asian and Pacific states only account for 23 percent of all trash. Meanwhile, despite constituting less than a fifth of the global population, the Global North generates the largest amount of waste at 34 percent. The president claims that Asian plastic is polluting the United States’ west coast. It’s highly likely that the trash is of western origin, returning to its producers in the vicious cycle of an overloaded global landfill system.
It’s easy to attribute this system to the invisible hand of the global economy; after all, there are hundreds of billions to be made in this so-called global recycling trade and whole cities are now dependent on trash imports to sustain their economies. However, it is worth questioning how much of these waste-dependent economies are by the design and perpetuation of the low-income countries that accept imports or of the high-income countries that export this waste.
The 1991 memo of then World Bank Chief Economist Larry Summers might be an answer. A terrifying written tableau of neo-imperialism and absolute inhumanity, the memo boldly claims—among other statements that devalue the lives of those in the World Bank’s global periphery—that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” While there has been argument of whether the leaked memo had been edited to remove its satirical spin or whether Summers was the author of the memo or had just signed it, that does not detract from the scary slew of voices supporting such an idea, arguing that a healthy environment is not a human right, but a luxury. These supporters argue that the memo points to a mutually beneficial deal that if stopped, is “putting off the day when the poor country will no longer need to make deals like this” and they forgo human decency in their praise of the memo as truth in “a politically-correct world.”
Suppose it is true that the wealthiest nations are sending their toxic waste to the Global South in an apparent act of goodwill. Suppose it is truly all in hope that the untapped capital in waste will stimulate and strengthen developing economies. Why then is the United States doing all that it can to stop China from moving past its role as the world’s largest destination for garbage? Overwhelmed by low-quality trash material that had little market value potential in the first place, China has instituted bans on the imports of dozens of different forms of solid waste since 2017. Part of a shift in the collective consciousness, Chinese governments on several levels have recognized the value of balance between profit and a healthy environment. Despite the accompanying loss in net profit, they have also moved toxic e-waste processing to contained industrial parks away from residential neighborhoods.
The response of the United States, which is to declare that China is violating World Trade Organization obligations and demand that China immediately lift the bans, is clear indication that global waste trade is not the paternalistic boost for low-income countries that Western economists like to depict it as, but is instead a self-serving cycle that rests on the constant subjugation of the Global South as people and land to exploit. (In a staggeringsurprise, high-income states have struggled disposing of their exponentially growing stockpiles of garbage since the waste bans, resorting to incineration and proving that dependence and benefit rest on the West, not on East and Southeast Asia.) It is deception to call this relationship trade; under the guise of mutual benefit and profit, wealthy nations are making a whole business out of reaping Global South countries of their natural resources and returning it to them as trash stripped of its value. This exploitation of non-western peoples and their land is environmental violence and neocolonialism at its finest, especially considering that a substantial percent of waste exports are illegal and that oftentimes citizens and governments alike are unaware and have not consented to shipments that have been dumped on their land.
As the conditions of the global garbage crisis creep toward the proportions of eco-dystopian fiction, perhaps it is worth imagining the issue through the lens of science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s narrative “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In the story, the happiness and comfort of the inhabitants of the city of Omelas depend on the maltreatment of one child imprisoned in a basement, not unlike the Global North’s comfortable distance from the consequences of their excessive consumption, which is perpetuated at the expense of less powerful lives and environments. In this garbage crisis, the child has many faces. Following China’s bans, the child may take on the features of Malaysia or Thailand, and as Southeast Asia also restricts waste shipments, eventually the marginalized communities within national boundaries will be sacrificed to perpetuate the West’s myth of magically disappearing trash.
As long as the powerful and privileged continue to expect no consequences for the wasteful lives they lead and the wasteful industries they support or run, there will always be a child in a basement to pay for the damage they wreak. Perhaps for some individuals, it can be justified in the same ways the citizens of Omelas come to terms with their contract. They can ascribe to a hegemonic utilitarianism reminiscent of the Summers memo where the system serves the highest number of “valuable” lives. Or they can take their knowledge of the child’s suffering and turn it into compassion and gratefulness in the events they believe they can control, knowing that “it is because of the child that they are so gentle with children.”
But Le Guin ends her story with a final alternative. She describes those who choose to walk away from Omelas—those who don’t try to justify or lessen the blow of their acceptance, but refuse to tolerate such a reality instead. To seek this world where happiness does not depend on the exploitation of others: Le Guin admits herself that it is one that may not exist at all. But she also writes that those who do break from Omelas “ seem to know where they are going.”
There may be no immediate visible solution to our global garbage mountain, but part of it must be to refuse the terms of the waste exchange contract, including the detriment of marginalized lives for the comfort of privileged ones. This begins when the wealthy in the Global North come to terms with their own waste. They must recognize that the waste they create is not evanescent by nature, but by the deliberate actions of waste collection systems that place the consequences of overwhelming trash out of sight onto groups that are out of mind. They must see the trash build up in their own neighborhoods and affect the health of their own communities.
This is a test for us in the West to change perspectives and act from the top. To finally be confronted with the scope of the issue and take responsibility our own reckless attitudes. To have empathy and global solidarity in rejecting the hegemonic narratives that have been fed to us on the gold spoons of the international economic elite. To value lives and environments as equal across all borders, constructed or imagined. These are all powerful steps to where we should be going.