In the technological era, e - waste is increasing and while attempts have been made to recycle these materials, a large amount of it is being generated. Following the ban of e - waste in china, countries are looking to Thailand to be a dumping ground for these futile materials.
Thailand is a new dumping ground for scrap electronics from around the world, say police and environmentalists, the latest country to feel the impact of China’s crackdown on imports of high - tech trash.
Electronic refuse, or e - waste, is turning up from Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, police said, some of it imported by companies without the required permits.
These waste materials include Electrical and electronic assemblies or scrap (not included scrap from electric power generation) containing accumulators and other batteries, mercury - switches, glass from cathode - ray tubes and other activated glasses and PCB - capacitors, or contaminated with Cadmium, Mercury, Lead Polychlorinated Biphenyl.
While “e - waste” — defined as any device with an electric cord or battery - can be “mined” for valuable metals such as gold, silver and copper, it can include hazardous material such as lead, mercury and cadmium.
China imposed a ban on overseas trash last year, telling the World Trade Organization (WTO) that it would stop accepting imports on 24 types of foreign waste, leading some to fear that the waste could end up in neighboring countries.
The ban has upended the world’s waste handling supply chain and caused massive pile - ups of trash from Asia to Europe, as exporters struggled to find new buyers for the garbage.
Thailand, with its lax environmental laws, has become a dumping ground for this e - waste over the past six months, but authorities are clamping down, fearful that the country will become the “rubbish dump of the world”. The global implications could be enormous.
For locals, it is unclear why Thailand should be taking this waste. The Samut Prakan factory sits in the middle of hundreds of shrimp farms and there were concerns it was poisoning the landscape, with no environmental protections or oversight in place.
Thailand has become the first south - east Asian nation to follow China’s example and crack down on the legal and illegal e - waste coming in.
Up to 411 kinds of e - waste will be banned without a specific timeline set, pending the issuance of a new regulation, while all plastic waste imports will be banned in the next two years, Natural Resources and Environment Minister, Surasak Kanchanarat said.
Thai customs officers are now pushing back 20 containers of e - waste a day that are landing in Thai ports, and in the next two months the government plans to pass legislation to bans foreign e - waste and plastic waste from entering Thailand.
But with countries such as the US and the UK already relying on south - east Asia to pick up the e - waste and plastic waste slack in the wake of China’s ban – in the past four months alone, UK exports of plastic to Thailand have risen fiftyfold – this presents a problem.
In Hong Kong and Singapore, where most of the world’s e - waste is sent before it is bounced to less - developed countries, there is already a backlog of e - waste in shipping containers. If south - east Asian countries do not take it, it has nowhere to go and countries have to either reduce their waste produce or come up with more innovative ways to get rid of them.