Listen ( duration 21 ′ : 30 ″ )

Listen Download: Ogg | MP3

There are claims that some NZ plastic waste shipped to Malaysia to be on sold, is in fact being burned and causing contamination of villages.

RNZ revealed in September that millions of kilogrammes of New Zealand's plastic was being sent to Malaysia, where it is often burned or dumped by illegal recycling factories.

Lay Peng Pua is visiting New Zealand to draw attention to the trail of waste, and to speak of the consequences for residents near the factories. A meeting will also be held with Associate Environment Minister, Eugenie Sage.

Ms Peng Pua is an environmental activist from Jenjarom in Malaysia's Kuala Langat area, where there are almost 40 waste factories.

Ms Peng Pua has lived in the town of Jenjarom most of her life and said the smoke from the illegal burning is causing health problems for the community.

"I think all countries, they should try to minimise their plastic waste and not to export their waste to developing countries because it creates a very big environmental risk [to those communities]," she said.

Greenpeace said it spent two weeks in Malaysia looking at was was being illegally dumped and by who.

Its New Zealand based plastics and oceans campaigner, Emily Hunt, said they found waste from 19 high-income countries.

She said they had created an appendix of what kind of plastic there was with food packaging and a foot product distributed in Australia and New Zealand making the list.

But Ms Hunt said finding where exactly each item comes from can be hard.

"For sure, it's a difficult process to fully track but that's part of the problem," she said.

"The world has been dumping half of the global plastic waste onto the developing countries now that China has closed it's doors."