The Human Rights Impacts of Plastic Waste Exports

Throughout their life cycle, plastics pose significant threats to human rights, the environment, and the climate. Although the plastic crisis is often considered a strictly environmental issue, plastic waste management poses significant threats to human rights. For years, many of the world’s largest producers of plastic waste in the Global North, including the United States, Canada, Japan, and European Union member states, have exported their plastic waste to countries with weak or nonexistent environmental regulations, low labor costs, and little government enforcement of environmental and labor laws. When plastic waste arrives in importing countries, it can threaten human rights, including the rights to health, water, access to information, and a healthy environment. Alongside the climate-intensive fossil fuel feedstocks used to make plastics, plastic products include toxic chemical additives that can cause serious health problems. When plastic waste is recycled, poorly enforced and often inadequate environmental and occupational standards expose plastic recycling facility workers, workers in the informal economy, and nearby residents to air pollution and toxic chemicals that can lead to serious, lifelong health impacts. Microplastics shredded from imported plastic waste can contaminate freshwater resources, threatening the human right to safe drinking water. A lack of access to information is also a key element of the global plastic waste trade, as community members and workers in importing countries are denied information about the potential impacts on their health and other rights, and people in exporting countries are misled that their plastic waste will be recycled. By enabling wealthy countries in the Global North to export their waste, a modern act of colonialism, the plastic waste trade is a global threat to the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment by polluting ecosystems, harming human health and wildlife, contaminating food chains and water systems with toxic pollutants, and threatening the climate.