Rich Nations’ Plastic Waste Is Burned for Fuel Abroad, Creating Grave Health Risks – Mother Jones

This article was originally published as part of the Undark series “What I Left Out.” In this installment, journalist Beth Gardiner shares a story that didn’t make it into her recent book, Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tropodo is a pretty village of narrow streets and brightly colored houses, set amid lush green fields in the eastern part of Java, Indonesia’s most populous island. Tall chimneys puffing streams of black smoke jut up behind many of its homes, but they’re only noticeable from a distance, so they hardly mar the town’s rustic feel.

While most of my reporting has focused on where plastic comes from—the oil and petrochemical companies that are pushing ever more of it into our lives—I’ve come to Tropodo to see where some of the hundreds of millions of tons produced every year end up.

About 12 percent of plastic waste is burned globally, according to a landmark study based on data through 2015. Even when done in incinerators equipped with air scrubbers and filters, such burning is linked to higher rates of premature birth, congenital abnormalities including heart and neural tube defects, and may increase cancer risk for those living nearby, studies have found.

But when plastics—which a Nature study last year found can contain any of more than 16,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which may pose health concerns—are burned in low-tech furnaces lacking any pollution-reduction technology, the dangers are far greater.

That’s exactly what happens in Tropodo, a tofu production center where informal backyard factories use plastic as a fuel for making the soy-based staple.

Muhammad Gufron, a solidly built man with a wispy moustache, is the owner of a local tofu factory. He greets me in front of a mint green house, and a moment later I’m following him down a long alleyway, past laundry hanging in the sun, into a building whose brick walls have big gaps that give it an open-air feel.

Gufron, who’s in a powder blue T-shirt, navy shorts, and sandals, starts the tour of his factory by pointing me toward several small rooms where shredded plastic, faded to near-colorlessness, is heaped against walls and stuffed into sacks. All around this region, I’ve seen waste sorters spreading plastic in the sun, to dry it for use as fuel. I hadn’t really understood the need for that, but as Gufron leads me toward his furnace, it begins to make more sense.

Intense heat is coming off the blaze inside the black metal cylinder, and when he stuffs a batch of scrap in with a wooden stick, it crackles audibly. The steam this fire helps generate is used in the production process.

After a few minutes in Gufron’s factory, I already feel a headache building behind my eyes, and as we move from the boiler room toward the tofu production area, the smoke is so thick I pull a mask out of my bag and put it on, despite the stifling heat.

There are about two dozen people working here, and with water sloshing around the concrete floor, many wear high rubber boots. Gufron shows me the machine that grinds soybeans into powder, then combines it with water to create a thick white sludge. Workers stir big vats of that mixture, and I watch as a man in a white tank top uses a metal pan to skim foam off the top, then dumps it onto the floor.

Eventually, the paste is scooped into wooden draining racks lined with thin mesh. They’re stacked in piles, and liquid drips from them, leaving something recognizable as tofu, which women slice into chunks with metal grids.

Gufron leads me back up the alley, and we take seats on dark wooden chairs in his living room, where the pungent smell of plastic smoke drifts in through open double doors along with the bright sunshine. Speaking Indonesian, he tells me through a translator that Tropodo has been a tofu hub since the 1960s, and the village’s producers now process more than 30 tons of soybeans a day. He’s in his 50s and has owned this business—it’s called DY, his daughters’ initials—since 2007. Most of his customers, he tells me, are in nearby Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, where he sells to markets as well as individuals.

His parents were tofu-makers too, and when he was a boy, their factory burned rice husks. But they began using plastic in the 1980s, so when he started his own company, he did too. He later switched to wood, but when his wood supplier closed, he went back to plastic. “It’s good, and cheap,” he tells me. All Tropodo’s tofu factories burn plastic, he says, and he doesn’t see any problem with it.

Much of the plastic Gufron and factory owners like him use is waste from overseas—packaging tossed away in places such as the United States, Europe, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. He buys it from local sorters who purchase it from paper recycling companies. Plastic scrap is often mixed in with the bundles of waste paper those companies import, and they must remove it before processing the paper. Indonesian regulations limit such contamination to 2 percent of any shipment, and while the industry insists violations are rare, Daru Setyorini, the environmentalist and researcher who has accompanied me to Tropodo, says that in reality, the amount of plastic can far exceed that limit.

Gufron steps out for a minute and returns with two big bags of fried tofu chunks, little red chilis mixed in. Setyorini appears to tuck in happily, but I’m wary, so I just have one, although the salty squares are tasty. My restraint may be silly, since I’ve already eaten plenty of local tofu.

Unsurprisingly, such burning introduces toxins into the food chain. Setyorini’s research and advocacy group, Ecoton, or Ecological Observation and Wetlands Conservation, has found microplastic fibers, filaments, and fragments in Tropodo tofu, although the group has not yet analyzed their chemical composition.

Along with several partner organizations, Ecoton has also tested eggs from chickens foraging in Tropodo’s plastic ash-strewn soil. Ash from plastic burning can contain dioxins and heavy metals, the Annals of Global Health reported in 2024. In Tropodo’s eggs, Ecoton and its collaborators found dangerous chemicals including PCBs—banned globally in the 2000s because they are believed to cause cancer and problems with the immune, nervous, reproductive, and endocrine systems—and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as PFAS or forever chemicals, which are linked to conditions including reduced fertility, high cholesterol, and cancer.

The researchers also found the second-highest dioxin level ever detected in an egg in Asia; the highest was in Vietnam, at a former US military base tainted by historic use of the defoliant Agent Orange, where a 10-year cleanup project began in 2019.

An adult eating an egg like the one found in Tropodo would exceed Europe’s acceptable maximum intake of chlorinated dioxins—chemicals linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and hormonal changes—by 70 times, the groups reported. The eggs also contained short-chain chlorinated paraffins and polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are both used as flame retardants in plastic and are linked to hormonal disruption, developmental and neurological damage, and cancer.

Chickens wander everywhere in Indonesian villages, and Tropodo is far from the only place where they peck through toxic ash. Many rural areas lack garbage collection, so households there often burn their waste. The faint whiff of that smoke hangs everywhere, and I often see hens munching their way through the blackened remains of such fires.

The threat goes far beyond Indonesia, of course, to everywhere plastic is burned out in the open. In Accra, Ghana, for example, researchers testing eggs near one of the world’s largest electronic waste scrapyards, where workers burn plastic culled from discarded devices, found chlorinated dioxin levels more than three times Tropodo’s very dangerous levels.

Burning plastic can also put a cocktail of dangerous chemicals into the air, including dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chlorinated furans, and hydrogen cyanide. That may be why, when a team publishing in the journal Environment International tested the Ghanaian e-waste workers’ blood, they found dioxins there too.

In Tropodo, Ecoton measured levels of the tiny airborne particulates known as PM2.5—which are linked to a huge range of health problems including heart attacks, strokes, many kinds of cancer, diabetes, and dementia—at more than 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter. That’s nearly 20 times Indonesia’s legal limit, and 30 times the stricter American 24-hour standard. It’s a hint of why the Annals of Global Health review called open burning of plastic “an urgent global health issue.”

There are surely a host of dangerous pollutants in the plumes of black smoke billowing from ramshackle sheds that line the roads in Tamansari, about 385 miles west of Tropodo, outside the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

The sheds house informal limestone kilns, and when I step out of a car in front of one, it takes me a few minutes to understand what’s happening. Men working in pairs haul loads of stone on white tarps they lift by hand or hang from poles slung over their shoulders. They dump the rock into a deep, brick-sided pit, or use a rope-and-pulley setup to lower it to a worker at the bottom.

There are several pits, and smoke pours out of the one furthest back from the road. Later, I would watch the video I made over and over, shocked anew each time by the thickness of the smoke, and how rapidly it rolls from the pit. The men in the foreground pay no attention to the foul plume as they hoist load after load of stone.

One of the workers, a man named Amin, whose T-shirt and long shorts are covered in dust, takes a break to speak to me. The limestone, he says in Indonesian, is quarried locally and fired here into lime, a powdery substance used to make cement.

Humans have been baking limestone for millennia, both for construction materials and to reduce the acidity of agricultural fields. When Amin’s crew has filled a pit with rocks, it’s covered and then heated from below for two days and nights. Amin, who’s in his 50s (like many Indonesians, he has only one name), tells me he’s worked here for 25 years, although he’s only hired for short gigs, as part of a team of men, each of whom gets about $6 for 10 hours.

He’s seen colleagues suffer broken bones or become permanently disabled by falling stone. Even without injuries, “it’s a very hard job,” he says, “but I need it.” The smoke bothers him, sometimes making it hard to breathe, and it doesn’t help that similar kilns pollute the air near his home.

As he goes back to work, I pick my way around the side of the kiln and down a steep hill littered with plastic debris, along with two young women from the Nexus3 Foundation, a Bali-based research and advocacy group. I see now how the stone is heated. Beneath each pit, a fire roars inside a big furnace, and at the hatch of the ones currently burning, a man tosses in plastic or shoves it with a long pole.

The plastic is piled all around, and includes diapers, stacked-up tires and pieces of brightly colored foam. Eventually, we drive a few minutes to another kiln, where a pit has just finished cooling, and the stone has turned white and crumbly, some already disintegrated into to powder. Men shovel it into baskets their colleagues haul up to ground level.

Kilns like these are informal businesses, unregistered and unregulated by government officials. But while the conditions in Tamansari were shocking, I was even more stunned to learn later that such small-scale operations are far from the only ones burning plastic to produce lime for cement.

In fact, what I saw by the side of an Indonesian road was one tiny piece of a major global push—by huge multinational companies and many governments—to fuel cement production with discarded plastic. Industry representatives portray it as a green win-win that gets rid of waste while shrinking the climate footprint of a process that would otherwise be powered by coal or petroleum coke.

In part because of that fossil fuel use, cement-making accounts for about 8 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions—as well as air pollution that often sickens those living near plants. So it’s certainly a sector crying out for a green overhaul. But with its toxic emissions, and a hefty climate hit to boot, plastic burning brings plenty of harms of its own.

To be sure, industrial-scale kilns are subject to regulations on air quality, ash disposal, and worker safety, and are undoubtedly far better run than the informal ones I saw. But while advocates for plastic’s use as a fuel claim the kilns’ high temperatures burn off toxic gases, environmentalists note that cement-making is a notoriously dirty industry, where standards are lax, and often poorly enforced. Electrifying furnaces, ideally with renewable power, is a far better answer, they say.

Another worry is that the industry’s appetite for energy will help lock us into a future of ever-growing plastic production by creating a market for cheap trash.

Stuffing waste into cement kilns isn’t a new idea. American and European producers started doing it in the 1970s and ‘80s as a way to save money during a global energy crunch.

As the volume of plastic trash has skyrocketed in recent years, it’s accounted for a growing share of kilns’ consumption. It’s hard to know exactly how much plastic cement makers burn, since industry figures often group it under the broad heading of “alternative fuel,” a category that also includes discarded clothes, tires, wood, paper, and other garbage. A 2021 Reuters investigation reported “alternative fuel” accounted for about half the cement industry’s fuel use in Europe, and 15 percent in the United States.

One form that energy takes is “refuse-derived fuel,” or RDF, a mixture of packaging, other plastic waste, scrap wood, and paper that often ends up in cement kilns. More than $5.4 billion of RDF—upwards of 45 percent of which is consumed by the cement industry—is sold every year, and that market’s value is expected to double in a decade, one analysis estimated. “Governments are promoting actions to reduce the amount of materials being sent to landfills, and we are one solution,” the global sustainability director of a cement company told Grist.

The relentless push for new ways to make garbage go up in smoke is a natural outgrowth of industry’s long-standing effort to frame plastic pollution as nothing more than a waste management problem.

But that view only holds up if one disregards burning’s impact on the climate, air quality, soil, and human health—not to mention the harms wrought by unchecked production. Activists like to say incineration just moves the landfill from the ground to the sky. That sounds apt.