"WASHINGTON — Americans like to think they are recycling their plastic takeout food containers, cutlery and flimsy grocery bags when they toss them into those green or blue bins. But, too often, that waste is shipped overseas, sometimes with the help of organized crime groups, where it litters cities, clogs waterways or is burned, filling the air with toxic chemicals.

A report published Monday by the independent Swiss research group Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, whose members include current and former law-enforcement officials, sheds new light on how this waste winds up in poorer countries that had agreed not to accept it.

Building on a previous investigation by Interpol, the new report maps the web of brokers, middlemen, legitimate recycling companies and organized crime groups that move millions of tons of discarded plastic from the United States, Europe and Australia to countries in Southeast Asia and Africa."

Anna M. Phillips reports for the Los Angeles Times November 8, 2021. [2]