Cleaning up plastic waste

Nothing but waste: A recycling centre employee showing compressed blocks of plastics in Hillsboro, Oregon. For decades, shipping containers have been loaded with American waste and dispatched to China for recycling until the recent ban. — AFP

KUALA LUMPUR: When Seah Kian Hoe was just 10 years old, he would jump on the back of his parent’s small truck during school holidays and help them collect scrap, going door-to-door around neighbourhoods in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor.

Taking their haul back to the family yard, they would spend hours separating the glass bottles, aluminium cans, discarded newspapers and metal.