But as its pace of manufacturing slowed and labor costs rose, Beijing’s desire to be the world’s recycling bin rapidly diminished. Much of the imported recyclable waste was so contaminated that it could not be recycled anyway, Chinese officials complained, and piles of imported waste were ending up in China’s landfills and polluting the country’s waterways.

“Recycling is such a moral gray area,” said Adam Minter , a recycling expert and the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. “When you put your recyclables in the bin, you want it to feel green, but it’s really very complicated. If you think you’re not wasting resources and not making an environmental or social impact, then you clearly don’t understand what’s happening.”

This moral grayness has been thrown into sharp relief in Malaysia, where hundreds of plastics recyclers from China—lured by cheaper labor and less stringent environmental regulations—have relocated their operations in the aftermath of the Chinese ban.

Activists say these Chinese recyclers have been setting up factories, often illegally, across Malaysia and have been processing and disposing of waste without regulatory oversight. Whatever they manage to recycle is allegedly flowing back to China, where it’s used for manufacturing. “China still needs a lot of raw materials,” Minter said.

“You have to understand that recycling is really about manufacturing, and it’s only about manufacturing,” continued Minter, whose family has operated a scrap business in Minnesota for several generations. “We’ve come to see recycling as this environmental thing that’s dusted with green fairy dust—but [recyclables] are really raw materials, and the reason they went to China in the first place is because all the manufacturing was happening there. And it continues to go there now because manufacturing is still happening.”

A Malaysian environment official explained that while legal recyclers may be unwilling to import contaminated plastic recyclables, unauthorized recyclers have no such qualms. “It’s lucrative for them,” said Phee Boon Poh, the chairman of the state environment committee in Penang, speaking from his office in February.

Processing contaminated plastic recyclables requires more sorting (to sift out the good stuff) and incurs additional costs for legal recyclers, which need to meet regulatory requirements and shell out cash to discard whatever waste they aren’t able to recycle.

Unlicensed recyclers, however, can set up factories and hire workers cheaply, Phee said, and illegally access groundwater for the recycling process. Without any environmental regulations to worry about, the recyclers can leave contaminated water untreated — which, Phee said, has been affecting local waterways and biodiversity. Leftover recyclables that can’t be processed can then be dumped illegally (in other words, for free). Often these dumped plastics are then burned, their noxious fumes polluting neighborhoods and sickening residents. “These naughty boys are importing a lot of what’s basically just rubbish.”

“These naughty boys are importing a lot of what’s basically just rubbish,” said Johnson Lai, a licensed recycler based near the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, referring to the rash of illegal recycling facilities that have cropped up around the country. “The recyclables they import, they’re [so contaminated and poorly sorted] that only approximately 30 percent of it can be used.” The rest ends up getting dumped.

At one illegal dumpsite in Jenjarom, a small industrial town about 40 miles south of Kuala Lumpur, HuffPost found plastic waste from the US, the UK, Germany and elsewhere in Europe piled high in charred heaps, the result of an attempted burning. In one blackened bale, apparently from America, various colorful plastic bags and packaging items had melted into one another—a 7/11 bag with a US phone number on it for potential franchisees to call, a torn Sour Patch Kids packet singed on one side and a wrapper from an Arizona green tea container. “An American Company,” the wrapper boasted.

Local firefighters went to this site a few weeks earlier to put out the blaze after plumes of white smoke, thick with pollutants, choked the surrounding neighborhood. The people who set the trash alight—presumed to be the unlicensed recyclers who dumped it there — were never caught.

“They’ve given us legal recyclers such a bad name,” Lai lamented. “It’s been very bad for business.”

But these “naughty boys” in Malaysia aren’t the only ones to blame for this crisis. According to Powell, recycling exporters in the US should be scrutinized as well.

Exporters have been known to hide bales of contaminated plastic waste in shipments that contain otherwise clean plastics, he said. “American recycling processors may not want to pay to dump stuff in landfills here. It could be easier and cheaper to just shove them in the back of a container and ship them off.”

Low shipping costs could be encouraging this behavior, Powell said.

Shipping containers are constantly arriving in the US from Asia, “filled with Nike shoes and Apple phones,” he said. But since American goods aren’t getting shipped back to Asia in the same quantities, freight companies—rather than ship empty containers—offer low rates to recycling exporters to ship recyclables there.

“It might cost $3,000 for a 24-ton container to be shipped from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, but the return journey could cost as low as $400 or even $200,” Powell said. “It costs more money to move a bale across Los Angeles than from the Los Angeles pier to Hong Kong.”

Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia’s minister of environment, said she had no clue just how much plastic waste was being traded globally—that is, until bales upon bales of the stuff began appearing on her country’s shores.

“We didn’t feel the impact of just how much trash we have in the whole world until China banned it,” she said from her office in Putrajaya. “It wasn’t just a wake-up call for us. It was a wake-up call for the world.”

Yeo was appointed to her post last year after embattled Prime Minister Najib Razak’s Barisan Nasional party, which had ruled Malaysia for over 60 years, was ousted in the national elections.

There were, quite literally, fires for her to fight from Day One. Malaysians across the country complained of plastics being dumped and illegally burned in their neighborhoods. In Jenjarom, a group of community activists raised the alarm after locals, including children, began suffering en masse from headaches, respiratory problems, skin allergies and other ailments. Activists blamed the illnesses on the incessant and widespread burning by unlicensed recyclers around town.