Recycling efforts: A worker stacking bottles that have been pressed at the Ecosum NGO village recycling facilities in Khishig-Undur in Mongolia’s Bulgan province.
Khishig Undur: Mongolian herder Purev Batmunkh sighs as he picks through waste strewn across a field – the refuse of an unsightly and deadly waste pollution problem affecting swathes of the steppe.
His country is among the world’s top per capita producers of plastic waste, and without a centralised recycling programme, campaigners say some 90% of it ends up in landfills.
“Most people live in the moment. They don’t really think about the future and just throw their garbage,” Batmunkh said in the Khishig-Undur district of Mongolia’s northern Bulgan province.
“They don’t know how long this garbage will stay, for how many years.”
A worker sorting plastic bottles at the tML plastic bottle processing plant where bottles are processed to make recycled pet resin in Ulaanbaatar;
Illegal dumping is common and some of it then blows into pastoral lands, where it is eaten by livestock.
Batmunkh said one of his cows had been “drooling and could not really move”.
“A few days passed and it died,” he said.
“We gutted the cow and found that all the way from its neck to its intestines and bladder, there was a plastic raincoat inside it.”
Mongolia introduced a ban on single-use plastic bags in 2019.
But in the steppe, it appears to have had little effect.
In a nearby field, a mountain of multicoloured plastic waste, from fizzy drink bottles to tyres and shopping bags, lies festering just a few metres from where the horses graze.
A worker holding a handful of recycled pet resin at the same plant. — aFP
Zero-waste
Annual plastics production worldwide has more than doubled in 20 years to 460 million tonnes, and is on track to triple within four decades if left unchecked.
Only 9% is recycled, and according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, its contribution to global warming could more than double by 2060 – having accounted for 3.4% of global emissions in 2019.
But in rural Mongolia, some are trying to help.
Since 2018, local NGO Ecosoum has organised one of the area’s first recycling facilities – encouraging herders and others to pick up local waste and bring it to them for processing.
Partially funded by the European Union, it is seeking to turn Khishig-Undur into Mongolia’s first “zero-waste” district.
“These kinds of plastics are all over Mongolia,” Batkhuyag Naranbat, technical coordinator at the recycling facility, said, columns of processed bottles piled high behind him.
Playing their part: Naranbat arriving at the Ecosum NGO village recycling facilities after collecting waste that people have deposited in trash cans in Khishig-Undur, Bulgan province. For Naranbat, work starts bright and early, when he and his colleagues head out to collect waste from those who can’t bring it to the facility themselves;
“Livestock go out and eat these plastics and even die eating plastic,” he said.
“We need to stop.”
For Naranbat, work starts bright and early, when he and his colleagues head out to collect waste from those who can’t bring it to the facility themselves.
They then separate the plastics into what can be re-used and what can’t.
The plastic is then pressed into one-ton cubes, placed on a truck and sent to the capital Ulaanbaatar for processing.
People in the areas used to dump plastic in giant pits or burn it, Naranbat said.
“But when we learned about how this plastic pollution is detrimental, not only for the world but for our own country, we asked: ‘What have we done?’” he said.
Batmunkh looking at his cows and other animals with binoculars before going out to collect plastic and waste with his son to help decontaminate his village in Khishig-Undur. — AFP
“We are the ones who caused the problem, we should be the ones to solve the issue.”
Herder Batmunkh, who is 58, also decided to help, heading out on his horse every week to scour the steppe for rubbish to pick up and deliver to Ecosoum.
“While I’m herding, I’ll spot a bit of garbage and I’ll put it in the bag that I have,” he said.
His diligence hasn’t always made him friends.
“When I tell my neighbours to take care of the garbage, they mock me and say: ‘Batmunkh rambles on about nonsense,’” he said. “They don’t care.”
‘Large companies to blame’
While individual habits need to change, Naranbat said the companies that produce the plastic must be held accountable.
“They need to change and start using other forms of material, like aluminium – those things are recyclable,” he said.
A fourth and penultimate round of UN-led negotiations on a world-first pact to solve global plastic pollution wrapped up in Canada in April.
Talks are set to conclude in November in South Korea, though a proposed cap on plastic production did not make it into the draft text and remains a major sticking point.
But Batmunkh said he felt everyone needed to play a role in helping make Earth a better place.
“The things that separate us from animals is our rationality – that makes us human,” he said, with his young grandson, hanging on his every word, pulling on his arm.
“As humans who are living on this Earth, all of us need to bear the responsibility of caring for our planet.” — AFP
