UK daily reports on plastic dump site near Ipoh

KUALA LUMPUR (May 27): A plastic dump site with “20ft-high mounds of plastic waste” near Ipoh is being highlighted by UK paper/website Daily Mail Online.

And the reason for this: the bulk of the waste comes from the UK.

TV host Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who will be in a BBC programme on the issue described the site as “some dystopian nightmare… a plastic planet”.

Fearnley-Whittingstall, who is also a celebrity chef who helmed numerous food and cooking shows, “discovered mountains of plastic waste from Britain intended for recycling which had been shipped to Malaysia”, reported the UK daily.

They were then “dumped or burnt, sending a pall of toxic fumes over the nearby villages.”

Fearnley-Whittingstall managed to “pull out” plastic bags from “M&S, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Waitrose”.

He also found British local authority-branded recycling bags in the dump site – which could only mean that some Britons filling their green bins in the hope they were helping the environment had been betrayed.

“When we put this in our recycling back in the UK, we think we're doing the right thing. I do my recycling and I feel good about it. 

“At least I used to – I don't feel so good now. I feel embarrassed, I feel ashamed, I feel angry, I feel I've been lied to,” the famous chef lamented in the Daily Mail report.

In February, the BBC reported on a story about the plastic waste scourge which descended upon the Kuala Langat district of Selangor, especially the town of Jenjarom.

The UK broadcaster reported how after China banned the entry of plastic waste in 2017, “the bulk” of it ended up in Malaysia, with most of the waste coming from the US, UK and Japan.

A report by the British National Audit Office revealed that Malaysia was the largest importer of plastic solid waste from the UK, taking in 17% of the total 250,000 tonnes of solid waste generated by the country in the first quarter of 2018 alone.