In the shadow of President Trump’s tariff fights, a different kind of trade war is playing out involving candy wrappers and plastic bottles.
On Tuesday, Malaysia, which received more discarded plastic from rich nations than any other developing country last year, effectively banned all shipments of plastic waste from the United States.
That might not seem like a big deal. But the United States has increasingly relied on countries like Malaysia to deal with plastic trash. American scrap brokers sent more than 35,000 tons of plastic waste to Malaysia last year, according to trade data analyzed by the Basel Action Network, a nonprofit group that tracks plastic waste issues.
Last year, after seizing more than 100 shipping containers of hazardous materials sent from Los Angeles that had been improperly labeled as raw materials, the Malaysian environment minister, Nik Nazmi, told reporters that “we do not want Malaysia to be the world’s rubbish bin.” The country’s Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Turmoil in the little-known trade in plastic waste has its roots in a decision by China in 2018 to ban imports of wastepaper and plastic. Before that, China had for years accepted as much as half of the globe’s discarded plastic and paper.
Western nations have since struggled with a buildup of plastic trash. The United States recycles less than 10 percent of the plastic it discards. (Food and other contamination in plastic waste hinders recycling, and a significant portion of plastic, like chip bags that contain layers of different plastics and other materials, simply can’t be recycled economically.)
The rest ends up in landfills, is burned or is shipped overseas. And while new overseas destinations have emerged, a growing number of countries are starting to say no to trash. This year, Thailand and Indonesia also announced bans on plastic-waste imports.
The world produces nearly a half-billion tons of plastic each year, more than double the amount from two decades ago, and a growing amount of plastic waste is turning up on coastlines and river banks, as well as in whales, birds and other animals that ingest them. Researchers have estimated that one garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the ocean every minute.
China’s ban “sent shock waves through the global plastic waste trade,” said Tony R. Walker, a professor at the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who researches the global flow of plastic waste. The countries that started to accept that discarded plastic “quickly became overwhelmed,” he said. Much of that plastic trash ends up dumped in landfills or is burned, which releases harmful air pollution, or is simply released into the environment.
People in rich countries may assume the plastic they diligently separate is being recycled, he said, something he termed “wish cycling.” However, instead of going into a recycling stream, “a lot of it gets redirected to waste,” he said.
Malaysia’s amended Customs Act bans all plastic waste shipments from countries that have not signed the Basel Convention, a global agreement that regulates hazardous waste including plastic. That puts the United States, the only major country that is not a party to the agreement, in a particularly tricky spot.
The amended law also sets stringent restrictions on plastic waste imports from other countries, saying they must contain only one type of plastic, with at most 2 percent contamination, to ensure that the imported plastics are recycled and not discarded. That level would be challenging to meet for any plastic waste collected from consumers.
In an email to clients sent on June 20 and shared with The New York Times, Steve Wong, chief executive of the global plastic waste broker Fukutomi, said shipments of scrap plastic to Malaysia had already “come to a virtual standstill.”
Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, an industry group, said the effects of Malaysia’s import policy on plastic waste remained unclear. Nevertheless, “Our industry remains focused on scaling up the use of recycled plastics in new products,” he said. “These efforts support American jobs and drive economic growth, while conserving our natural resources and helping to prevent plastic pollution.”
Malaysia’s ban on plastic waste imports from the United States was prompted by the discovery of hundreds of containers filled with hazardous electronic and plastic waste that had been falsely declared as raw materials in order to bypass the country’s trade control laws, said Wong Pui Yi, a researcher at the Basel Action Network.
But local industry associations have urged the government to lift the ban on clean, recyclable plastic imports, arguing that the imports are necessary to help manufacturers meet their recycled-content targets. Brands like Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have committed to using more recycled material in their products, said C.C. Cheah, the president of Malaysian Plastics Manufacturers Association, and the Malaysian recycling industry could still play a role.
Kate O’Neill, a professor of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley, said Malaysia’s ban could mean that plastic waste starts flowing to other countries that are less able to handle the waste. Monitoring will be important, she said. “The recycling industry still hasn’t caught up with the disruption, so these exports are still needed.”
That’s why experts increasingly say that, on top of investing in recycling infrastructure, policies are needed to help rein in plastic production itself, for example by curbing demand for single-use plastics. Some countries negotiating a new treaty aimed at curbing plastic pollution have also called for caps on plastic production.
That could come from packaging designs that cut down on plastic use, measures like plastic bag bans and overall policies that make manufacturers more responsible for the waste their products generate.
Those policies have been spreading across the United States as well as globally. On Tuesday, a law went into effect in Illinois that prohibits large hotels from providing small, single-use plastic bottles for toiletries like shampoo and conditioner. (Smaller hotels have until 2026 to comply.)
Also on Tuesday, Delaware began prohibiting restaurants from providing foam food containers, plastic beverage stirrers and plastic cocktail and sandwich picks, and requires that single-use plastic straws are only given out at the customer’s request.
Yan Zhuangcontributed reporting from Seoul.
Hiroko Tabuchi covers pollution and the environment for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York.
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