For years, in the world of politics, Latin America was considered “the backyard of the United States”, its “zone of influence”. Now, environmental groups in the region say it has become something else: their dump.
Since 2018, plastic waste export levels from the United States to Latin America have increased considerably, with 2021 being the year in which the largest amount of waste was exported on record.
According to data from the Last Beach Cleanup, a California-based environmental organization, as of October last year, the US had sent more than 89,824,167 kg of plastic waste to countries in the region, some of which received twice as much as in 2020.
The situation led the environmental platform Gaia, which brings together 130 organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean, to publish a statement last December demanding that governments in the region act in what it considers an emergency.
“We warn that we are facing an imminent danger of contamination of nature and violation of the rights of communities to live in a safe environment for their health and that of their territories”, reads the statement.
The main destination for plastic waste exports is Mexico, which from January to October 2021 received around 60,503,460 kg, which is equivalent to around 57 containers per day.
However, tons of garbage were also sent during 2021 to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic and even Venezuela.
In Brazil, there was a drop in the amount of garbage sent from the US, according to the Last Beach Clean Up report: there were 481 tons in the first ten months of 2021, against 1,700 tons in the entire year of 2000.
“The United States is flooding Latin America with plastic waste, mainly from California to Mexico. But while the amount of garbage that is exported to Mexico is excessive, the amount that is sent to the rest of Latin America is not less if comparing the size of the countries and the amount of population,” Jan Dell, environmental engineer and founder of the Last Beach Cleanup, told BBC News Mundo (the BBC’s Spanish service).
“And it’s not just a question of size or population. It’s that these countries, in most cases, already have enough problems dealing with their own waste and processing it to have to deal with US plastic waste as well,” he adds.
This is the case of countries such as Honduras, which had environmental conflicts with Guatemala due to the issue of garbage and which until November 2021 received 6,127,221 kg of plastic waste, more than double the 2,250,593 kg received in the entire year of 2020
El Salvador, which has few waste processing centers, received around 1,932,206 kg in November 2021 alone.
For environmentalists, the big question is what happens or where the garbage sent to these countries goes.
the new dump
According to MarÃa Fernanda SolÃs, an expert on environmental issues at the Universidad Andina Simón BolÃvar in Ecuador, while US plastic waste exports to Latin America have been going on for years, they began to increase with China’s announcement that it would stop receive this waste.
“In 2018, China decided to stop being the world’s dump, and that’s when the US found an escape route in Latin America”, says the expert.
“With weakened governments and weak regulatory, regulatory and legal frameworks as in our countries, the region is a perfect scenario for gigantic imports of plastic waste”, he says.
According to Dell, other specific contexts contributed to the records reached in the last year.
“US plastic waste exports to Latin America increased strongly in 2021 compared to 2020 and I think this is due to the stricter import restrictions they have imposed in Turkey and Asia, but it could also be due to the container crisis, that significantly increased the cost of shipping US waste to Asia,” she says.
The main reason for exports, according to the expert, is because it is easier (and cheaper) for US companies to ship waste to other countries than to process it and have to deal with US environmental regulations or the high costs of few processing centers in the US.
“At the end of the day, it’s a question of money. It’s much cheaper to put plastic waste on trucks and ship it overseas in a container than to have to pay to go to a landfill. somewhere else and ‘we all live happily ever after,'” she says.
“Also, there’s also the fact that producing plastic today is much cheaper than recycling it. So it’s not a business that brings benefits to American companies, it’s cheaper to send it elsewhere.”
the garbage market
According to SolÃs, these contexts have turned garbage into a business for non-state companies throughout Latin America.
“Generally, it is private companies that import this waste in direct agreement with American companies or American municipalities”, he says.
“In the case of Ecuador, for example, we receive the same amount of waste from the US annually as 40 of our cities would produce. In other words, 20 companies in Ecuador import the same amount of plastic waste from the US that 40 cities in our country produce.”
However, the practice is controversial, as environmental groups and experts denounce that these companies take advantage of some loopholes to import garbage that they shouldn’t be able to… at least not legally.
Many of the Latin American nations that receive this waste are signatories to the Basel Convention, which regulates the import of plastic waste.
“However, in our countries there are mechanisms, loopholes and legal black holes to allow this waste to continue entering, despite these countries being signatories of these international agreements and therefore the entry of this waste constitutes a violation of these international treaties”, says SolÃs. .
According to the academic, the research carried out shows that one of the ways in which this occurs is that, generally, when this waste is imported, it is made with the label “raw material”, which, according to her, is a way to “disguise” the content.
“In most countries, customs barely check these shipments of garbage, so it’s very difficult to regulate what goes in,” he says.
But for her, there is an even more worrying aspect.
“What studies show is that, in reality, more than 50% of the plastic waste that reaches us cannot be processed, because it is contaminated. So, it ends up being buried, abandoned in streams, rivers or landfills”, he points out.
The expert says that several investigations carried out show that the authorities do not follow up on this waste after leaving the ports, and that there is no control over what happens to this waste, how it is processed or where it ends up.
Environmental and human impacts
Those involved in the garbage business in the region claim that the plastic waste import market is a source of employment for thousands of people, as well as contributing to the “circular economy” and the recycling of raw materials.
However, environmentalists believe that, in practice, the reality is often quite different.
Dell points out that, because it is not a process supervised by the authorities, there are complaints that many of these companies not only pay their workers low wages, but also do not offer them safe working conditions or adequate protection.
Several local press reports in recent years have reported people working in the garbage without even wearing gloves. Some of these companies have been accused of using child labor.
“It has the environmental dimension, the damage done to the environment when this waste is taken to countries that do not have the conditions to process it or that already have many problems with their own waste, but also the human dimension, the dangers of not have regulation or supervision over the work done by thousands of people who come into contact with this waste”, says Dell.
Environmental problems
Dell and SolÃs agree that most countries in the region struggle with processing and disposing of their own waste, so it’s an additional problem for them “to also have to bear responsibility for US waste.”
“In addition to the fact that this waste can end up anywhere or be burned and generate toxic gases, its processing also requires large amounts of water, which causes many communities to see their access to water affected”, says Dell.
The engineer explains that this is one of the major concerns in northern Mexico, which has serious problems of water scarcity and is the area that receives the most garbage because it is so close to California, Texas and New Mexico.
SolÃs, in turn, believes that the problem has become a matter of State, since sometimes it is the governments that end up bearing the cost of disposing of waste.
“Although it is private companies that import this plastic waste and there are few who are getting rich with this business, in the end it is the State that has to cushion not only the economic costs of managing this waste, but also the environmental impacts that it can cause in the short, medium and long term for entire communities”, he adds.
In his opinion, this situation reproduces colonial mechanisms from previous decades.
“The expressions of colonialism have evolved and are now also expressed in this way: in the export of large amounts of contaminated plastic waste to the south, which end up transforming these territories into sacrifice zones”, he says.
“It’s more of a colonial occupation, a kind of garbage imperialism, and as a consequence they are generating all kinds of environmental impacts on communities whose most serious consequences have not yet been seen”, he concludes.
