What is waste colonialism, and which countries and companies do it?

Waste or toxic colonialism is exporting waste, like plastic or textiles, from rich countries to the undeveloped world. The term was coined in 1980.

Around this time, according to The Diplomat magazine, developed nations started tightening their legislation, limiting the areas where trash can go.

The risks of having landfills or toxic waste near residential areas became more apparent, which meant more restrictions, costs, and complexity to get rid of certain materials.

So, companies and governments started exporting garbage to developing countries with fewer resources and laxer legislation instead of reducing production or finding alternatives.

The practice continues in many rich countries. Some nations with the tightest climate change legislation are among the ones that export the most. In the 2023 picture, a landfill in Ghana containing German garbage, among other things.

Germany is a good example. According to The Guardian, it exports 1 million tons of plastic yearly, despite being named one of the world's top recyclers.

If plastic consumption continues, the resulting waste can only be dumped or incinerated. If a country does not have landfills, burning is the only option.

"But this has a carbon footprint, and many countries trying to cut carbon emissions don't want to incinerate their waste," Sedat Gündoğdu, a plastics pollution researcher, told the newspaper.

That is why they let receptors deal with it. In most cases, developing countries, like Vietnam or Ghana, receive mixed plastics that must be sorted before recycling or nonrecyclable fabric.

The trade changed a lot for some countries that saw a rise in the amount of plastic they received since 2018 when China, the biggest receptor then, banned mixed plastic imports.

Just a year before the ban, China received 7.3 million tons of plastic waste from developed countries. Those tons then had to be relocated to other countries.

Mexico is an example. According to the newspaper El País, the country went from receiving 73,534 tons of plastic from the US in 2019 to 167,548 tons in 2021.

Mexican environmentalists suggested that the country may be re-exporting those materials to other ones, which is becoming common among middle-to-high-income countries as their laws tighten.

Turkiya, for example, banned the import of mixed plastics in 2021, narrowing the options for European Union countries since they can only export to countries inside the OCDE, the international club of developed nations.

Still, The Guardian claims that traders tried to re-export containers with hundreds of tons of mixed plastics from Germany to Vietnam when they couldn't enter Turkiya─ something legally questionable.

But plastics are not the only waste that rich countries and multinational companies dump on developing countries. Textiles are a big concern too.

StopWasteColonialism, an organization that fights these practices, claims that the fashion industry uses the secondhand clothing trade as waste management—sending millions of tons to developing nations.

That is visible in the Kantamanto Market, in Ghana's capital, the largest secondhand market in the world.

The organization says companies export lower-quality items claiming environmental and social benefits, but around 40% of what they send is useless.

In a 2022 feature by the Deutsche Welle, a Kantamanto Market trader said that what they have started to receive since the growth of fast fashion in rich countries is hard to resell because of its low quality.

All the useless items of clothing end up in landfills, polluting the environment and affecting the health of residents. That is why activists call for extender producer responsibility (EPR) policies in developed countries.