What do you believe is the single most important factor driving up the cost of living in Nigeria?

Countries like Malaysia import many metric tons of plastic waste from Europe each year, paying a few pennies per kilo. This might seem strange, but according to Kai Li, it makes sense.

"As a resident of the Netherlands, you pay waste collection fees to dispose of your plastic waste. That money is used to collect, sort, and clean the waste. As a result, a significant portion of that waste is transformed into a valuable raw material, such as polyethylene pellets made from certain bottle and can packaging."

Li studied Management Science and Engineering in China and is now researching the environmental effects of the global trade in plastic waste at the Department of Industrial Ecology at the Leiden Institute of Environmental Sciences.

Does this trade promote a circular economy, or does it ultimately lead to more pollution? Li, now in the fourth year of his Ph.D., and his colleagues have taken an interesting step toward answering this question. Their research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers had previously assumed that countries importing plastic recycled the same low proportion as the plastic waste generated domestically. Unrecycled waste is either incinerated or dumped in landfills.

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