Editor's note: Rachana Gupta is an Indian blogger, poet and a freelance writer based in Shanghai. The article reflects the author's views, and not necessarily those of CGTN.

In a landmark pact of the United Nations (UN) on May 10, almost all the countries from across the globe, except the U.S., have agreed upon regulating the movement of plastic waste to the world's impoverished nations.

This move is seen as a game-changer in protecting the environment of these countries. Currently, almost all the developed nations including the U.S. dispose their most contaminated, mixed, or unrecyclable plastic waste in the poorer countries and count it as recycled. They do so by directly shipping the trash containers to the private organizations without requiring any separate government approval for hazardous wastes in those regions.

However, with the new pact in place, the waste exporting nations have to get consent from the governments of the importing countries before dispatching any such shipment.

The resolution was a culmination of a two-week-long UN-backed consultation on hazardous chemicals and plastic waste contaminating the oceans and endangering aquatic creatures. This pact is the revised version of the prior Basel Convention of 187 nations. The earlier convention lacked in the ability to address the movement of the radioactive waste, thus triggering an urgent need to add a new provision of regulating the transboundary movement of these materials.

Notably, every day about 429 - 157,000 large 20-ft (TEU) shipping containers of plastic waste was exported from the U.S. alone in 2018 to the poorer nations where the mismanagement of hazardous waste is already a mounting problem, as per the data revealed by U.S. Census Bureau.

The report further stated that the actual percentage of the waste material shipped from the U.S. to these nations could be more than 78 percent, since other countries such as Canada and South Korea may have been reexporting U.S.' plastic waste to these regions.

If we look at the combined figures of the waste dumped from all developed countries to these nations, the result would be astonishing. This irresponsible behavior has grave repercussions as overwhelming quantities of waste is getting piled up in the poorer nations, where due to the lack of sufficient recycling capacity and infrastructure, the hazardous material is either burned in open fields or disposed of in the oceans.

Plastic waste once deteriorates, emits toxic chemicals and further breaks down into microplastic which is hard to see from naked eyes, but still can cause dangers to humans and other living beings.

Sadly, this dangerous effect of plastic waste largely remains undocumented in the poorer nations. To make matters worse, the livelihood of millions of poverty-stricken rag pickers from across the globe depends on scavenging through the stockpiles of rubbish dumps only to make a pittance from this highly hazardous work.

Additionally, almost a third of the farm cattle lose their lives because of consuming plastic in these nations, causing loss to their farmers' livelihood and creating a negative impact on other agricultural industries.

The detrimental effects of plastic pollution are not just limited to humans but also extended to the natural environment. As per the UN report, a staggering eight million tonnes of plastic waste is disposed into the oceans every year, retrieving of which is, unfortunately, an onerous task.

Rolph Payet of the United Nations Environment Program mentioned that, "an estimated 100 million tonnes of plastic are now found in the oceans, 80-90 percent of which comes from land-based sources," resulting in the death of fishes and other sea mammals such as dolphins and whales, and hampering coral reefs at an alarming rate.

In order to address this impending threat, the Chinese government in 2018 introduced a National Sword policy under which it imposed a strict ban on the import of 24 kinds of solid waste along with the provision of 0.5 percent contamination standard, up from the earlier standard of 1.5 percent for imported plastics and fiber waste.

Earlier in 2008, China made it compulsory for retailers to charge for the plastic bags, and also imposed restrictions on the usage of 0.025 millimeters plastic bags in order to significantly reduce this rampant form of litter.

Notably, China was the largest importer of waste material, accounting for almost half of the world's imports of waste paper, metals, and scrap plastic until 2017.

In 2016, China imported 1.42 million tons of plastic from the United States alone. However, as a result of the increased scrutiny of the imported recyclable material, the recovered plastic shipments to China in 2018 reduced by 99.1 percent in comparison to the shipments in 2017.

Moving ahead, despite having enough resources to reduce the waste generation and increase recycling capacity, developed nations such as the U.S. have been irresponsibly shipping their hazardous trash to other nations.

However, China's move to ban the imports of toxic waste has provided a wake-up call to these nations. Nevertheless, instead of improving, they started diverting their waste to the other nations across Southeast Asia. Therefore, the latest move by the UN to restrict this diversion is a welcome move and is expected to go a long way in improving the waste management practices of the developed nations.

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