Myanmar's complicated relationship with plastic

Hey readers, this week we spoke with people in Myanmar about the country's complicated relationship with plastic...

Around the world, the movement to reduce single-use plastic is growing. But Myanmar, like many other places, is grappling with two competing needs: the need to tackle ever-mounting plastic pollution and the need to find genuine alternatives so people don’t suffer from the loss of benefits plastics have allowed. As Myanmar's experience shows, solving the plastic pollution problem requires much more than just banning single-use plastics.

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Cheers, Laura and Kyla

Myanmar Shows Why Fixing The Plastic Crisis Is So Darn Complicated

YANGON, Myanmar ― Golden earrings swing from San San Thwin’s ears as she serves customers in her grocery store in Mingalun village, 90 miles from Myanmar’s commercial capital Yangon. This is what she has done almost every day for 30 years, but there has been a striking change in recent times: Every item for sale, with the exception of the eggs at the entrance, now comes packaged in plastic.

“It didn’t used to be like this,” says the 56-year-old. “We used to sell homemade snacks and cakes. But as the country developed, all goods got imported and came wrapped ― plastic just boomed 10 years ago.”

The sparsely furnished shop is now crammed with cakes in colorful parcels, biscuits in plastic boxes, sachets of coffee displayed on a rug. On the shelves, piled up to the ceiling, are medicines and soft drinks in plastic bottles. For San San Thwin, this new plastic world is mostly positive. “We can buy more goods now, because they last longer, so we sell more,” she says. “We wouldn’t go back if it meant less profit.”

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Plastic is a relatively recent phenomenon in Myanmar, which opened up its economy in 2011 after five decades of military dictatorship. Rapid economic growth has meant an influx of single-use plastic items like shopping bags, water bottles, food packets, plastic sachets and menstrual pads.

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These items have ushered in benefits from being able to preserve food longer in a country that experiences extreme weather conditions, to allowing products to be sold in smaller sachets, making them affordable to those on low incomes. Plastic has also satisfied the craving for modernity and progress after decades of isolation.

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But these products have also launched Myanmar ― which lacks the infrastructure to cope with this tidal wave of plastic ― into a waste crisis.

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