Trading in the Plastic Waste

Many richer economies follow the trend of dumping their plastic waste to developing economies. To tackle this menace, Belgium based organisation Geminicorp collects tonnes of recyclable plastics from almost 24 countries to reprocess it at over 150 plants in 35 countries.

Founded in 1989 by chairman Surendra Patawari, Geminicorp Recycling collects hundreds of thousands of tonnes of recyclable plastics from locations across the globe, as well as recycling huge amounts of rubber, metal, and paper, including 50 million tyres, 1 billion plastic bottles and 1.5 million refrigerators.As well as helping to keep all this waste and surplus material in productive use.

Besides this the company is also active in social sector through a number of initiatives in India.These include providing free medical, educational, environmental and social care services to 12 villages in the state of Rajasthan, building two schools in India to provide free education for 400 underprivileged students a year, and planting and maintaining 100,000 trees in the Indian desert.

The current focus of the company is on tackling the increase in plastic waste due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a UN transboundary waste chief new international rules are in force to curb the “wild west” global trade in plastic, which has seen wealthy nations dump contaminated plastic waste onto poorer ones. It will result in a cleaner ocean within five years,

The news rules are agreed by more than 180 nations under an amendment to the Basel convention, which come into force on 1 January, aim to make the trade more transparent in order to allow developing nations such as Vietnam and Malaysia to refuse low-quality, difficult-to-recycle waste before it is even shipped.

At the moment, developing countries – many of which have recycling industries that take in shipments from other nations – cannot see whether a given shipment of plastic is actually recyclable or if it is too contaminated to use before it arrives.