东南亚国家宣布禁止进口“洋垃圾”

Refusing refuse
拒绝“洋垃圾”

South-East Asian countries are banning imports of waste for recycling
东南亚国家宣布禁止进口“洋垃圾”

Too much of it is ending up in landfills or furnaces
大多数废料最终被填埋或焚烧

Jun 15th 2019

2019年6月15日

THERE IS NO point collecting recyclable waste unless someone is willing to buy it and actually do the recycling. Until late 2017 China was the world’s biggest importer of scrap by far. This made sense. Like most other forms of manufacturing, recycling is cheaper there. Moreover, Chinese factories consumed lots of the resulting plastic and pulp, whereas developed economies, which tend to be net importers of goods, had plenty of plastic bottles and cardboard boxes to spare. It also helped that shipping to China was cheap, since ships would often otherwise return to the country with empty containers.
除非有人愿意购买垃圾并进行回收利用，否则收这些垃圾徒劳无功。直至2017年底，中国是世界上最大的垃圾进口国，这并非无稽之谈，因为像多数其他制造业一样，回收垃圾的成本在中国也更低。此外，中国工厂消费了大量可回收利用的再生塑料和纸浆，而发达国家倾向于充当货物净进口国，这就空余下大量塑料瓶和纸板箱。这也得益于运往中国的航运成本的低廉，否则轮船往往将空载返回中国。

All this came to a halt when the Chinese government banned the import of all but the purest scrap material in 2017, killing a trade worth $24bn a year. Waste dealers in the rich world had to scramble to find new buyers. South-East Asia soon emerged as the pre-eminent destination for foreign waste. Unfortunately, the region’s recycling industry is much smaller than China’s; its processing plants were quickly overwhelmed. Plastics from America and Europe have piled up in landfills. Lots of toxic rubbish has simply been torched.
2017年，这一切都戛然而止，中国政府禁止了除纯废料以外的所有废料的进口，终结了一项价值达240亿美元的交易。发达国家的垃圾商们竞相另觅买主。东南亚很快成为了“洋垃圾”的理想目的地。不幸的是，东南亚地区垃圾回收产业的规模远远小于中国，垃圾回收厂很快就难以承受。欧美运来的废料在填埋场堆积成山。成堆的有毒垃圾被草草焚烧了事。

South-East Asian governments are not pleased. They have begun to ban or crimp imports themselves, abruptly diminishing a booming business (see chart). On May 28th Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia’s environment minister, complaining that “garbage [was] being traded under the pretext of recycling”, announced that her government would be sending back 3,000 tonnes of foreign plastic. Much of it was of poor quality, she noted, and hence unrecyclable.
东南亚多国政府对此颇有成见，已开始禁止或限制进口垃圾，致使飞速发展的垃圾进口业骤然颓靡。5月28日，马来西亚环境部长杨美盈（Yeo Bee Yin）斥责称“垃圾正在以被回收为借口进行交易”，宣布马来西亚政府将返还3000吨外国废塑料。她还指出这些垃圾大都质量很差，根本无法回收利用。

Thailand plans to ban plastic-waste imports by 2021. Vietnam’s government has similar ideas. Kate O’Neill of the University of California, Berkeley, reckons these bans are motivated not only by environmental concerns but also by pride: Asia does not want to be the world’s dumping ground.
泰国计划到2021年禁止进口塑料垃圾。越南政府也持有类似想法。加州大学伯克利分校的凯特·奥尼尔（Kate O’Neill）认为，这些禁令不仅是出于环境考虑，更多的是出于国家尊严——亚洲不愿成为世界垃圾倾倒场。

Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, recently threatened to go to war with Canada if it did not take back a shipment of plastic scrap. Canada agreed to take it away, and Mr Duterte stopped blustering after an election had passed. All the same, rich-world exporters might want to start work on Plan C.
最近，菲律宾总统罗德里戈·杜特尔特威胁称，如果加拿大拒不收回一批废塑料的话，菲律宾将与该国战斗到底。加拿大最终同意收回废料，而杜特尔特在大选结束后也未咄咄逼人。尽管如此，发达国家的出口商可能还是希望开始实施C计划。(译：梁佩弦)

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