China has become the world’s largest producer of household garbage. The country has produced a lot of junk in packaging, old electronics, newspaper, bottles, etc. ‘Beijing officials warned in June that all of the city’s landfills would run out of space within five years.’

Japan has little spaces for practically everything. For its trash, it has no more space left. ‘Japan has virtually no space for new landfill sites and so ends up burning nearly 50 million tons of solid garbage each year, leading to dioxin emissions six to seven times higher than in Europe.’

One solution that big economies have been depending on is incinerating their trash, which is all the worse for global warming. Some experts believe, though, that ‘the incinerators take up less real estate, they can do double duty by generating electricity, and they reduce the amount of planet-warming methane that’s emitted by trash decaying in landfills.’ These arguments may make no sense to developing countries that host foreign-owned incinerators.

China has been burning its garbage in highly toxic incinerators that emit mercury and dioxins, all detrimental to the health of living things. But most of China’s incinerators are actually not located in China, but rather ‘all the way across the Pacific.’ Thus, the modern day dilemma of having no space left for a country’s trash has given birth to the phenomenon of dumping garbage abroad. Japanese waste exports to Thailand have grown from 54 tons a year to 350,000. Ironically, China had also been a dumping ground of foreign waste for many years.

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Via The New Republic