The amount of material exported to Asia, mostly made up of non-OECD countries, increased from around 9% in 2022 to almost 20% in 2023. Malaysia and Vietnam, two non-OECD countries that had received decreasing volumes of UK waste in recent years, took around 8% each. Indonesia took a further 3.4%, and Taiwan 2.5%. A Recoup graph mapping the destinations of plastic waste from England for recycling also shows India and Egypt as destinations. A total of 155,000 tonnes of plastic waste was exported to non-OECD countries, 15,000 of which was to EU member states Bulgaria and Romania.
“Whilst discussions take place around a ban on export to non-OECD countries, these figures show the market’s resilience and flexibility at a time when recycled plastic demand was at a low across Europe, not least in part due to low virgin oil prices and high virgin plastic production, particularly outside of Europe,” said Tom McBeth, Recoup’s policy & infrastructure manager. “As such, this material exported for recycling would likely have otherwise gone to landfill or incineration.”
Recoup sees the shift in exports to non-OECD countries as reason to rethink whether OECD membership is the sole metric for a country’s suitability for accepting plastic waste for recycling. A consultation on a ban on export of waste from the UK to non-OECD countries was part of the UK’s Conservative Party manifesto and is still expected, although it did not materialise in 2023. The UK is also expecting a general election in 2024, which is yet to be scheduled.
“It is known that whilst countries seen in the news with poor quality waste management and incidences of illegal burning or burying of waste are more often non-OECD countries, there are high quality reprocessing facilities in a number of these countries,” McBeth noted. “Equally, being an OECD country does not guarantee that all facilities and national waste and environmental policies are of a sufficient quality.”
Recoup thus argues that material should only be exported as long as there is ‘robust evidence that the infrastructure is in place to handle it, and to help that ensure illegal, unethical or unnecessary exports are stopped’.
“The UK requires development of its recycling infrastructure, as well as its policies, to limit the need for exporting of material in the first place, regardless of where to. An outright ban does not feel an appropriate course of action, at least not without sufficient time and planning to develop domestic infrastructure to compensate for the loss of available markets. A sudden ban would likely result in more material being sent to landfill, incinerated, or exported to other markets. Worse still, this may increase the likelihood that these countries merely act as a transfer station for the material to move on to other markets,” McBeth argued.
Recoup added that digital waste tracking and digitalisation of the Packaging Recovery Note (PRN) will be vital policies to help the UK achieve better results.