A man is seen sorting out plastic bottles for recycling in Dong Xiao Kou village, on the outskirts of Beijing. — AFP pic

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 23 — The government’s plan to ban plastic straws by 2020 may ultimately be futile given Malaysia’s growing popularity as a dumping ground for recyclable plastic waste previously destined for China.

According to New Zealand’s RadioNZ, the country’s plastic refuse that could no longer be shipped to China following its ban on such imports were now being rerouted to Malaysia.

The revelation will heighten local concern over the matter, after British media reported in July that Malaysia was now the number one destination for the country’s recyclable plastic waste.

RadioNZ said New Zealand’s shipment of such material here tripled in the first half of 2018. Australia’s plastic waste also regularly reached Malaysia.

The report alleged that a network of illegal factories purporting to be plastic recyclers were peppered throughout Selangor, echoing suspicions expressed by lawmakers here before of unlicensed recycling plants causing widespread pollution.

Aside from the concern that Chinese firms were diverting the shipments here, the greater fear is that the illegal local factories are not equipped to recycle the waste and simply burned them.

“Since February of this year we felt very bad and [there's been] an unbearable smell in the air, especially at night and in the morning,” chemist Lay Peng Pua told RadioNZ.

“But we didn't realise... the source until we gradually found there were more and more recycling factories around us, but due to their high fencing design we couldn't see anything.”

Petaling Jaya MP Maria Chin Abdullah acknowledged the matter, but said it will take time to resolve.

Citing the remnants of corruption from the defeated Barisan Nasional government, she agreed with suspicions that graft was involved in the matter.

For the longer term, she said such imports should be prohibited entirely.

In July, British public spending watchdog National Audit Office's (NAO) latest report showed that about 250,000 tonnes of plastic — used as product packaging — were exported by the UK as waste to other countries in 2018's first quarter. Malaysia accepted 17 per cent of this.

The NAO report noted that China had been the single biggest market for UK’s exports of packaging material for recycling, but said China had this January banned imports of various waste materials due to fears of high contamination levels.

The audit report said the decline in UK waste exports to China seems to have been replaced with higher exports to other countries instead.

Lawmakers and industry players previously told Malay Mail of their belief that corruption and lax regulations were allowing Chinese firms to use Malaysia as an alternative destination to the plastic waste that their country has since restricted.