Did you think recycling was good? well no!

UK Waste Ends Up In China

Updated: 16:32, Tuesday January 09, 2007

Peter Pottier is one of millions of Britons who faithfully recycle their rubbish for the good of the environment.

UK Waste Ends Up In China

So he was horrified to discover a plastic-covered letter he had carefully recycled at his Sevenoaks home had ended up in a dump in a small town in China.

If you've been carefully separating your plastic for recycling, there's a good chance that it's also ended up half way around the world in Lianjiao, in the dozens of recycling yards that line the town's streets, writes Sky News' Asia producer Holly Williams.

The workers here earn around £50 a month, shredding waste plastic apart, and then melting it down into small chips to be used again. For the poor farmers who labour in the town it's a much-needed living. The problem is, they also take home a toxic dose of pollution.

Peter Pottier

In Lianjiao's recycling plants they melt plastic down into molten lumps. It gives off fumes that can cause lung disease. Smoke stacks bellow clouds of chemicals that hang above the town. Poisonous waste pours directly into rivers, turning them to a stagnant black sludge. Entire families live amongst the filth.

We visited yard after yard filled with rubbish from across Europe. We watched a container truck unloading household waste from France. Another yard specialised in German plastic.

Next door we found a container-load of household rubbish just off the boat from Britain. Baled and compressed by the companies that ship it here, it was stacked to the ceilings. Workers sifted through shopping bags from Tesco and Asda. We saw Sainsbury's milk bottles, packaging from Cadbury's chocolate, and plastic wrapping from pet food.

Lianjiao is truly a globalised rubbish dump, and the workers here - though often illiterate - seem to have a profound grasp of economics.

Pollution in Lianjiao

"You don't do this work anymore because in your country you're rich," said Chen Xiaomei, a rubbish scavenger in her 40s. "We're poor, so we still do it."

The factory bosses in Lianjiao weren't as friendly as their workers. We were repeatedly roughed up. In virtually every yard we visited the bosses pushed us out their doors, often threatening to call the police. They're worried that if the world finds out about this festering town they'll stop shipping their rubbish here.

Back in the UK I managed to track down Mr Pottier - the resident of a quaint cottage in a quiet street in Sevenoaks. A young father of two, and an avid recycler, Peter Pottier was disturbed to hear that his best environmental efforts ended up harming others half way across the world.

He viewed our pictures of his mail, and clearly remembered that it was a piece of junk mail with plastic wrapping that he had deliberately separated for recycling by his local council.

Sainsbury's packaging in China

"I'm lost for words," he told me. "We do our bit to make sure that we separate the recycling. I wasn't expecting that it would end up being sorted out by individuals without even gloves, breathing toxic air."

Plastic waste is now one of Britain's biggest exports to China. Container ships arrive in Britain from China loaded with consumer goods. Many of them then go back packed full of British waste. It's a trade that's completely legal. The government even accredits companies to export this country's rubbish to the Far East.

But it doesn't have to be this way. British waste could be recycled safely at home.

Leigh Atley runs a plastic recycling plant in the Cotswolds, built to the highest environmental standards. He's losing millions of pounds in potential income - as well as the possibility of expanding his business and providing more jobs - because he can't compete with Chinese waste dumps.

"We need to have our own infrastructure in this country capable of recycling everything that we are producing every year," he told me. "And we are producing more and more."

But for now it's simply cheaper to ship our problem to China. And it's the people of Lianjiao who are suffering the consequences.