After decades of processing nearly half of the world’s plastic waste imports, China has put a ban to it in the year 2018. This crisis forced a shift of importation to Southeast Asia and Malaysia opened its doors widely to receive the wastes. This caused the mushrooming of many illegal plastic recycling companies in Malaysia using low-end technology and environmentally harmful methods for disposal. Most of the imported plastic wastes are from the US, UK and Japan. In the first six months of 2018, Malaysia imported 754,000 tonnes of plastic, equivalent to the weight of 100,000 adult elephants. Based on a report findings by Greenpeace Malaysia, only 9% of this plastic wastes are clean plastic which can be recycled. The remaining 12% are incinerated and an astonishing 79% of plastic wastes are dumped into the natural environment or end up in landfills. It was claimed that the total value for the nation’s plastic import is worth RM483 million. Malaysia has become a new “rubbish bin” for these countries who export plastic wastes instead of managing wastes in the respective countries. The ignorance on accumulation of dumped plastic wastes mainly near the port as it arrives from overseas, has affected the local residents and surroundings in various ways. The illegal plastic waste companies are producing solid wastes and dumping into nearby rivers. This has caused pollution in the rivers, forcing prawn and fish farms to seize operations. Residents around the area were experiencing respiratory difficulties resulting from the open burning of unrecyclable plastic wastes.
Ever since then, the Malaysian government has made the decision to freeze all plastic waste import. However, plastic wastes still comes in the country and the pollution continues. Poor regulations and governance has caused many imprudent factories to continue to pile up the plastic waste even after being summoned to shut down its operations. Instead of looking into the legislation of policies in which the process may take up a long period of time, it is recommended that the government look into quick wins first such as utilizing the plastic waste as supplementary materials in concrete or tar roads. Journals have shown that when appropriate amount of plastic wastes are incorporated in concrete, it can help reduce the amount of plastic waste without compromising much of the concrete strength. The University of Bath led a project showing the replacement of sand with similarly sized and shaped waste plastic particles from ground up plastic bottles. It resulted in concrete which was almost as strong as conventional concrete mixtures. The study proved that by replacing 10 per cent of sand in concrete, it was calculated that this approach could save 820 million tonnes of sand a year and help reduce the levels of plastic waste. This idea may assist in reducing the huge piles of plastic waste currently situated in Malaysia.
