130 tonnes of imported waste going back to Australia

Many expats living in Thailand are shocked when they see locals dumping their trash on the side of the road, but it turns out there is a much bigger perpetrator of illegal dumping in the kingdom. The Inter-Pacific Paper Company was caught by Thai authorities shipping 130 tonnes of illegal waste to Thailand from Australia.

The Department of Customs contacted the Department of Pollution Control to tackle the thankless task of examining five shipping containers full of what looked suspiciously like raw waste material. Inside they found 130 tonnes of waste materials, with about one-third of the containers comprised of household garbage. Packaging for food, medicine packets, discarded face masks, and sprays made up a chunk of what was supposed to be a shipment of paper waste.

The trash was alleged by the Australian paper company that shipped it to be raw materials they could use to refine into material for the production of paper rolls in their processing plant in Prachin Buri. But Thai law states that any company importing waste must ensure that no more than 1% of the total shipment is made up of contaminated items like household garbage.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment is submitting to the national environment board a five-year waste management plan that would add regulations that ban all plastic waste from being sent to Thailand with an exception for those plastics that can be proven to support local industries. They aim to close a legal loophole by limiting the number of plastic recycling plants in the country since they can import plastic waste still.

Thailand also plans to phase out landfills across the country, reducing the number of current landfills nationally in half over the next five years and eliminating them in the next 15 years. Part of the success of that plan lies in the ability to ramp up biomass power plants that can convert this waste to energy, increasing the current 6% use up to 50%. Projections predict that 46.6% of all the 29.9 million tonnes of household trash by 2037 will be used to produce power this way.

For now, the 130 tonnes of waste will be deported, and sent back to Australia, with the head of the Department of Pollution Control saying the Australian company accepts responsibility for the illegal waste and will comply with all punishment and procedures.

“We will ask the company to send the shipment back to Australia and the Department of Customs will take legal action against the company. The department will also work with the Department of Foreign Trade to issue a warning letter to the company, making it clear the country has no policy to accept any household waste.”

SOURCE: Bangkok Post