Her message to New Zealand is powerful: “Please keep your rubbish to yourself..Please recycle all your waste in your country.”
Malaysian activist Pua Lay Peng has dedicated her life to the fight against plastic pollution after experiencing its increasing devastation in her community, and the health of her people.
“My community has 30,000 population and it is a very small town. We stay very close…We know each other. Every year people die of cancer or become cancer patients…Mostly it’s lung cancer and it is happening at a young age,” says Peng.
Lay Peng told Greenpeace Aotearoa that respiratory issues including asthma in her country are worsening over time putting immense pressure on the older generation in her community.
It was revealed recently that between January 2018 and March 2021, New Zealand exported 98,000 tonnes of plastic waste offshore. More than 46,000 tonnes of this was shipped to Malaysia and Thailand. Even through a pandemic, these communities are also dealing with New Zealand’s waste being incinerated at illegal, plastic ‘recycling’ factories next door to their schools and homes.
Lay Peng last visited New Zealand in 2018 and shared with us her experience of living amongst the plastic dumps and factories.
She spoke with Greenpeace Aotearoa in more depth via zoom recently; we will share her story in its entirety later this month.
But the issues don’t stop there. Plastic pollution including scattered dump sites are impacting wildlife ecosystems. She recalls birds are no longer present in the community, bee populations have disappeared, fishing stocks are depleted, and a decline in tree health is evident.
“I can see the consequences because dumping sites and burning sites – the microplastic residue leaches out to our rivers and it is causing a lot of the fish..to disappear.”
Lay Peng routinely investigates locations of recycling factories. She does this at night, under the blanket of darkness with a torch light in hand. These factories are being built with such frequency that they are suffocating land space in her community.
“A paper recycling factory they have proposed to build beside a school. Can you imagine this – 50 metre away from a school. The factory will process about 2 million tonnes of waste paper per year. They will have an incinerator to burn a thousand tonnes per day; they have a coal plant, a power plant to burn a thousand tonnes of this. And it will be right next to a school and a residential area.”
Lay Peng is urging all New Zealanders to support a ban on all plastic waste exports so that her country and community can stop drowning in our plastic waste.
Sign on now to call for a ban on plastic waste exports from New Zealand
