The Nature Protection Service (Seprona) of the Civil Guard is investigating eight people for the alleged illegal trafficking of plastic waste, within an operation coordinated by Europol, in which 141 inspections have been carried out on managers of this waste in Spain.
The operation, which has been carried out in various provinces of our country during 2021 and 2022, began due to the alarming increase in recent years in the illegal trafficking of plastic waste, which stands out among environmental crimes linked to organized crime in Europe. These criminal organizations engage in these crimes for various reasons: associated penalties, difficulty of control, and a wide margin of profit.
During the operational phase, inspections were carried out on managers of plastic waste or in containers belonging to them and prepared for export. For example, in the province of León, “a company has been identified that is clandestinely storing a large amount of plastic waste from other autonomous communities with the aim of eventually abandoning it or setting it on fire,” according to the Civil Guard in a report. release.
In the Port of Barcelona, ​​40 tons of plastic waste have been intervened and a company and its two managers are being investigated for the illegal transfer of 43,220 kg of plastic waste. According to the Seprona investigation, another company also located in Barcelona would have transferred a total of 222,682 kg of material declared as plastic to France, when in reality it was plastic waste.
In Jaén, another company was dedicated to extracting plastic waste from vehicles at the end of their useful life to later send them illegally, camouflaged as raw material. It would have sent 900 tons to Thailand, 98 to Hong Kong, 312 to Malaysia and 2,302 to Morocco. Within the Plastic operation, operations have also been carried out in other countries.
Seprona lieutenant Héctor Santed explains that illegal trafficking has increased since China decided to ban the import of this waste in 2018. Before, the Asian country took advantage of the containers in which it brought plastic products to Spain and Europe to return them with waste of this nature, with which the import cost was cheaper.
After the ban, the traffic was diverted to countries like Malaysia or Vietnam, which also imposed restrictions. Now, some treatment companies in Spain had not provided sufficient capacity to take on the waste, so they dispose of it illegally, put it in containers and take it to Southeast Asian countries after declaring it as raw material.
