Current estimates only cover 'the tip of the plastic waste iceberg.' (via grist)
High-income countries have long sent their waste abroad to be thrown away or recycled — and an independent team of experts says they’re inundating the developing world with much more plastic than previously estimated.published last week, United Nations data on the global waste trade fails to account for “hidden” plastics in textiles, contaminated paper bales, and other categories, leading to a dramatic, 1.
“Toxic chemicals from these plastics are poisoning communities,” said Therese Karlsson, a science and technical adviser for the nonprofit International Pollutant Elimination Network, or IPEN. IPEN helped coordinate the analysis along with an international team of researchers from Sweden, Turkey, and the U.S.
Many estimates of the scale of the plastic waste trade make use of a U.N. database that tracks different types of products through a “harmonized commodity description and coding system,” which assigns each product category a code starting with the letters HS. HS 3915 — “waste, parings, and scrap” of plastics — is often assumed by researchers and policymakers to describe the total volume of plastic that’s traded globally.
Discarded clothing, for example, may be tracked as HS 5505 and not counted as plastic waste, even thoughof all textiles are made of some kind of plastic. And another category called HS 6309 — used clothing and accessories — is assumed by the U.N.
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