The global environmental pressure group said its undercover investigation found that authorities do not properly check containers leaving Italian cities, as well as evidence that waste from the country kept at illegal factories in Malaysia has contaminated water and soil in surrounding villages.

“The [Italian] government cannot pretend that nothing is happening illegally – it must intervene,” said Giuseppe Ungherese, who heads Greenpeace Italy’s pollution campaign.

“We know that only a small number of containers leaving Italian ports are properly checked. A civilised country cannot close its eyes and dump the problem on a less developed nation – it’s like cleaning the house but hiding the dust under the carpet,” he said.

Greenpeace has submitted its findings to Italian prosecutors.

Italy, like other large European countries, does not have the procedures in place to handle plastic wastes, and as such exports them.

Under European Union laws, member states can only export recyclable plastic wastes while recycling companies must comply with environmental and technical standards.

Greenpeace’s investigation found that in the first nine months of 2019, some 2,880 tonnes of plastic were exported to Malaysia with nearly half of that going to illegal factories that had no capacity to deal with the plastics.

It said the unrecyclable plastic waste was then kept outside factories, burnt or buried in landfills.
The group said water and soil samples close to the heaps of discarded plastic showed “an alarming level of contamination”, with a spike in respiratory illnesses in nearby villages.

Malaysia has been a favourite destination for plastic wastes from developed countries, following China’s ban on their imports in January 2018.

Putrajaya has come down hard on illegal recycling factories importing plastic wastes, and recently returned 150 plastic-filled containers to the UK, France, US and Canada.

But Greenpeace said importers have worked around the restrictions, using brokers in Hong Kong to organise shipments to Malaysia.

“The shipment gets legitimately brokered through Hong Kong while the container from Italy goes straight to Malaysia. It could be that the Italian exporter, aware of the crackdown in Malaysia, is transferring the risk.

“They are simply doing the paperwork,” said Greenpeace journalist Pierdavide Pasotti, as quoted by The Guardian.