2019年经济学人 东南亚国家对洋垃圾进口说“不”（在线收听）

东南亚国家对洋垃圾进口说“不”

Asia

来源于《亚洲》版块

Recycling

回收利用

Refusing refuse

拒绝废弃物

South-East Asia is fed up with foreign waste

东南亚受够了外国垃圾

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.

只有有人愿意购买可回收的垃圾，并实际进行回收，收集可回收垃圾才有意义。到2017年底为止，中国一直是世界上最大的废料进口国。这是有道理的。像大多数其他形式的制造业一样，回收在中国更便宜。此外，中国工厂消耗了大量由此产生的塑料和纸浆，而发达经济体(往往是商品的净进口国)则有大量塑料瓶和纸箱可供备用。此外，运往中国的航运成本较低也起到了一定作用，因为如果不这样做，船只往往会带着空集装箱返回中国。

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，中国政府禁止进口除最纯净废料外的所有废料，导致每年240亿美元的贸易损失。从此之后，情况便截然不同。富裕国家的废品经销商不得不争先恐后地寻找新的买家。东南亚很快成为外国垃圾的首选目的地。不幸的是，该地区的回收产业规模远远小于中国；它的加工厂很快就应接不暇。来自美国和欧洲的塑料堆积在垃圾填埋场。许多有毒的垃圾被简单地焚烧了。

South-East Asian governments are not pleased. They have begun to ban or crimp imports themselves, abruptly diminishing a booming business. 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.

东南亚各国政府对此并不满意。并已经开始禁止或限制进口，这突然削弱了蓬勃发展的业务。5月28日，马来西亚环境部长杨碧吟抱怨“垃圾(以回收为借口)被交易”，并宣布马来西亚政府将退回3000吨外国塑料。她指出，这些垃圾大部分质量很差，因此无法回收。

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年禁止塑料垃圾进口。越南政府也有类似的想法。加州大学伯克利分校的凯特?奥尼尔认为，这些禁令不仅是出于环境考虑，也是出于自豪感：亚洲不想成为世界的垃圾场。

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.

菲律宾总统杜特尔特最近威胁称，如果加拿大不收回一批塑料废料，他将与加拿大开战。加拿大同意运回塑料废料，杜特尔特在大选结束后停止了咆哮。尽管如此，发达国家的出口商可能还是想开始实施C计划。