Plastic packaging from a UK supermarket found dumped in vulnerable Myanmar communities

‘The more you dig into the recycling of plastic, you realize that it’s really a sham,’ an international waste trade expert tells senior climate correspondent Louise Boyle

Packaging from a UK supermarket has been dumped 7,000 miles away in a low-income township in Myanmar - raising troubling questions about how the West’s outsized plastic pollution crisis is being forced upon vulnerable communities with little ability to push back.

Labels and plastic wrapping for bottled water and diet lemonade from a Lidl in Lichfield were discovered in the piles of festering garbage which engulf low-income areas of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.

Lidl’s plastic waste was found in a sea of foreign trash in Shwe Pyi Thar township that also included items from companies in France, Poland and Canada.

The plastic waste was collected by journalists from the independent news organisation Frontier during a six-month investigation into dumping in Myanmar. The Independent is publishing the findings in partnership with Lighthouse Reports, a collaborative newsroom working with media outlets in six countries.

The Lidl packaging was found in Shwe Pyi Thar’s Ward 27, an informal community of 700 squatters on the outskirts of the township who fear speaking up due to the threat of eviction. Around half of the 180 tiny, tightly-packed bamboo huts are flooded with sewage, according to the investigative team.

Threats in Myanmar have escalated since a coup two years ago by a military junta which violently cracked down on protest and free speech. Another informal settlement near Yangon, Ward 17, was bulldozed last year with one day’s notice.

Shwe Pyi Thar residents spoke anonymously to Frontier Myanmar journalists for fear of reprisal. Some locals said they had been coerced by local “strong men” to sign agreements allowing plastic waste to be dumped next to their homes.

Locals described fetid air in their homes, and how the trash often catches fire, releasing hazardous fumes. During monsoon season, the plastic waste, which clogs sewers and streams, makes flooding much worse.

“When there is a dump site, people think they can throw their garbage there as well and they do,” said Daw Aye Mi, a married mother-of-two, who used a pseudonym. “After that the garbage floats down waterways to other residential areas. The water becomes dirty and dark. When we touch the water, our legs become itchy.”

Foreign plastic waste is dumped throughout Ward 27, an informal community in Yangon township, where residents are fearful of speaking out due to repercussions from Myanmar’s military junta (Supplied to The Independent)

During the interview, she showed sores on her legs to Frontier reporters.

Daw Aye Mi said that she worried about her children falling in the dirty water and warned them not to play in the garbage. However, there was little she could do to stop the waste being dumped on Myanmar residents, some of which comes from overseas.

“We are squatters,” she said. “If the government comes to demolish the huts, we will have to move so we cannot tell them not to throw garbage here.”

Frontier journalists found Danone brand Oikos yogurt pots, and packaging from Canadian brand Unico Penne Rigate, Poland’s Kasztelan beer and cheese brand, Spomlek. None of these companies supply to Myanmar.

Mound of plastic waste in Ward 27 of Shwe Pyi Thar township in Yangon. Plastic packaging from foreign brands, not sold in Myanmar, is visible (Supplied to The Independent )

A Danone spokesperson said: “We were disappointed to see the findings of the Lighthouse Report. Danone does not export any of its waste across the globe.”

The Independent has contacted Carlsberg Poland, which owns the Kasztelan brand, along with Spomlek and Unico for comment but has yet to receive a response.

The largest amount of plastic waste found by Frontier reporters came from Lidl UK. The printed labels named a Lidl warehouse in Lichfield, north of Birmingham, suggesting it was disposed of directly by the company rather than customers.

Plastic packaging from Lidl (pictured) was the most prevalent of the foreign waste collected from a sea of trash in a township of Yangon (Supplied to The Independent)

The labels were found alongside water bottles from Roxane UK, a Lichfield-based supplier of Lidl UK.

Lidl, a low-price supermarket chain from Germany with stores across Europe and the US, highlighted its green credentials in a statement to The Independent.

“As founding members of the UK Plastic Pact, we’re committed to a circular future for plastics, diligently working to reduce plastic usage, enhance recyclability, and promote circularity in our materials as part of our REset Plastic targets,” the company wrote in an email.

“All our plastic waste is processed in the UK and Lidl has a strict policy against sending waste or recyclables to any country in Asia. We are therefore naturally disappointed to see this and will be investigating in close collaboration with our waste management partners.”

Labels from a Lidl UK branch in Lichfield, north of Birmingham, were discovered in low-income communities in Myanmar (Supplied to The Independent)

A former member of Lidl’s sustainability team told Lighthouse Reports that the supermarket’s plastic being found in Myanmar was “shocking”.

"There is some responsibility on the brand, either their contractor or supplier is not doing the required checks and balances for waste management. It is particularly shocking that it is ending up in Myanmar, a very vulnerable country where many companies are debating about whether to do business,” the source said.

Lidl is also bound by European and international waste trade regulations like the Basel Convention which states that countries can only export uncontaminated waste destined for recycling, and not to dump. And yet, the rubbish found in Myanmar is not recyclable material.

With these regulations in mind, Jim Puckett, executive director of environmental advocacy group Basel Action Network, told The Independent that Lidl’s packaging was likely “illegally exported to Myanmar” by a third party. He pointed out that companies usually don’t handle their own shipments and hire a separate waste management company.

“Something went wrong," said Mr Puckett.

A Byzantine system

How is it that plastic waste from the English Midlands ends up in a township in southeast Asia?

The answer lies somewhere in the global recycling supply chain - an opaque, Byzantine system riddled with contradictory regulations, loopholes and corruption. Laws intended to stop illegal dumping of plastic waste are proving toothless in reality, the investigation found.

Official data from 23 countries showed that 143,000 tonnes of plastic waste was exported to Myanmar in the past five years, according to Comtrade, the United Nations global trade data platform. However, the investigation found there was likely much more entering the country because Comtrade does not cross-check or verify the data it gathers.

“When there is a dump site, people think they can throw their garbage there as well and they do. After that the garbage floats down waterways to other residential areas. The water becomes dirty and dark. When we touch the water, our legs become itchy.

Daw Aye Mi, a resident of Ward 27, speaking with use of a pseudonym

China’s ban on plastic imports in 2018 saw an explosion in shipments to Southeast Asia from the West. But public backlash has meant that Thailand, Viet Nam, and Malaysia, are gradually introducing their own national plastic bans. While this may have begun to solve the problem for some countries, greater volumes of plastic waste are now ending up in more vulnerable places with little capacity to deal with it.

Under Myanmar’s domestic laws, the only plastic waste that should be imported is uncontaminated, recycling-ready shreds or pellets. But the problem is telling the difference in thousands of shipments - a tricky task for which there’s little will or capacity along the supply chain.

Recycling companies in Myanmar also told the investigative team that they would prefer to buy foreign plastic waste - even if much had to be sent to landfill or burned - as it’s typically higher quality than what is available domestically.

“For imported waste we have to buy the whole container and in the container there is a lot of mixed waste,” said Win Tun Tun, a recycler in Myanmar, who used a pseudonym. “We cannot return unusable waste, we have to dispose of it.”

A photo, taken on October 11, 2023 shows plastic waste clogging waterways in Yangon’s Shwe Pyi Thar township. The build-up of plastic makes the water dark and dirty, residents said, and exacerbates monsoon flooding (AFP via Getty Images)

The investigative team found that the porous 1,500-mile border between Thailand and Myanmar is allowing a vast flow of illegal plastics. Established routes for trafficking drugs and people are being used to smuggle plastic waste, a trade lubricated by weak law enforcement, political instability and poverty.

Overland shipments get less scrutiny than what arrives at maritime ports, and sources told the investigative team that border officials could be bribed in order to bring banned plastic into Myanmar.

It was also discovered that a number of western countries are using Thailand as a middle-man. An Interpol survey of national law enforcement agencies found that 60 per cent reported an increase in illegal waste shipments using transit countries to obscure their routes since China’s plastic ban five years ago.

Myanmar can ill-afford this influx: the country is already drowning in 2,000 tonnes of plastic waste that it generates within its own borders each day, only 11 per cent of which gets recycled, the investigation found.

World of plastic

The world’s addiction to plastic is being fuelled by the fossil-fuel industry as it seeks out ways to sell more oil in the face of booming renewable energy and electric cars.

Plastics account for 3.4 percent of global emissions to date, a figure that is expected to more than double by 2060.

Hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic are produced annually with most being used in rich countries. The average American uses 560lbs of new plastics every year while a person in sub-Saharan Africa uses less than one-tenth of that, according to OECD’s 2022 Global Plastics Outlook.

Yet only 9 per cent of plastic is being recycled around the world. Half ends up in landfill, and one-fifth is incinerated. Another 22 per cent is burned in open pits or dumped, especially in poorer countries.

“The more you dig into the recycling of plastic, and plastics in general, you realize that it’s really a sham,” Mr Puckett said.

“It’s very difficult and costly to recycle plastic as it’s not that valuable, so the margins are low. The price of virgin plastic is so cheap right now that huge quantities of these shipments to places like Myanmar will be dumped or burned because there’s no market for a lot of the polymers, especially if they’re dirty.”

Next month 175 countries will gather in Nairobi to hammer out the first, legally-binding global treaty on plastic pollution intended to go into effect by the end of 2024.

While some environmental campaigners are optimistic that the pact could ban “high-risk” plastics like those for single-use or with hazardous additives, and improve waste management, others are concerned that it will be another global agreement rendered futile by powerful interests.

Petrochemicals are expected to account for more than a third of growth in global oil demand this decade, and nearly half of growth by 2050, adding nearly 7 million barrels of oil a day by mid-century, according to the International Energy Agency.

“But [the fossil fuel industry] is going to have to sell the world on the idea that [plastic] is circular,” Mr Puckett noted.

It’s a pitch that may strain credulity as images emerge of children playing knee-deep in mounds of rotting plastic in Myanmar and beyond.

“It’s going to be very much a public relations battle to try to convince us all that recycling works,” Mr Puckett said. “And the more you look at it, you realize no, it doesn’t.”

Reporting for this investigation was supported by the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.

Additional reporting by: Allegra Mendelson & Rachel Moon* (Frontier Myanmar), Charlotte Alfred, Eva Constantaras & Nalinee Maleeyakul (Lighthouse Reports), Kannikar Petchkaew (freelance) Sicha Rungrojtanakul (Prachatai). *Pseudonym used for security reasons