Several OECD countries have made waste management an element of their international cooperation. Korea, for example, supported an incinerator project in China, a landfill in Cambodia and work on municipal waste and disused mines in Mongolia; Between 2007 and 2015, Korea also supported waste management planning in 11 developing countries. The Basel Convention establishes standards for transboundary movements of hazardous wastes, solid wastes and urban incinerable ash, including notification and written confirmation from the country of destination prior to export. As of December 2015, 183 states and the European Union are parties to the convention. The United States is a signatory to the Basel Convention, but is not yet a party to the Convention. The United States has separate agreements for the import and export of hazardous wastes with Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Malaysia and the Philippines. International cooperation on illegal trade in waste (Japan). Although the United States is not currently a party to the Basel Convention, the Treaty still applies to U.S. importers and exporters.
Parties to the Basel Convention cannot exchange Basel waste with non-parties if there is no predetermined agreement between countries. (ii) data on previously authorised waste, which shall include the name and code of the waste, the type of recovery operation used, the nature of the technology used, the validity of the prior authorisation and the quantity of waste in question. This result means that, although all OECD countries must obtain permission from destination countries before shipping hazardous plastic waste, there will be no OECD-specific controls for the shipment of non-hazardous plastic waste between Member States. Instead, OECD countries reserve the right to set requirements for such shipments in accordance with national and international law. While each OECD country can decide on the controls to be applied to shipments of non-hazardous plastic waste, they have committed to inform the OECD Secretariat of their decisions and the list of controls applied will be made public to ensure transparency. Non-hazardous plastic waste includes both simple polymer waste for which recycling leaves little residue and mixed plastic waste that produces by-products that must be disposed of properly during recycling. OECD members held a series of meetings between July 2019 and July 2020 to discuss whether and how the rules on plastic waste transported between Member States were amended in May 2019 with regard to plastic wastes under the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, which governs the international movement of waste, can be updated. The 187-member Basel Convention, in force since 1992, establishes controls for shipments of waste intended to protect human health and the environment. The changes agreed in 2019 will enter into force in January 2021 and could lead to a further decrease in global trade in plastic waste. OECD rules allow member states to act in an environmentally friendly and economically efficient way for waste destined for recycling.
Waste treatment in countries with an advantage in terms of sorting or recycling costs can help increase global recycling rates and strengthen secondary markets for plastics. OECD rules also provide a framework for trade in waste from OECD members that are not parties to the Basel Convention, such as the United States. About 2 percent of the estimated 360 million tons of plastic waste produced each year worldwide is exported for processing, according to UN trade data. The total volume of plastic waste traded declined after China introduced import restrictions in early 2018, but deliveries have shifted to alternative targets that are not always well equipped to deal with the by-products of plastic recycling. . . .