S-E Asia plastics recyclers gearing up to benefit from China's ban

Kuala Lumpur

WHEN Seah Kian Hoe was just 10 years old, he would jump on the back of his parent's small truck during school holidays and help them collect scrap, going door-to-door around neighbourhoods in Malaysia's southern state of Johor.

Taking their haul back to the family yard, they would spend hours separating the glass bottles, aluminium cans, discarded newspapers and metal.

Mr Seah now employs 350 people to help him run Heng Hiap Industries, one of Malaysia's top five plastic recycling businesses which processes about 40,000 tonnes of waste per year from both domestic and overseas suppliers.

"Thirty five years ago, it was just scavenging - a very different era compared to now," Mr Seah told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "I wanted to get into the recycling business and do it differently." Heng Hiap Industries is just one of the South-east Asian plastics recycling companies ge…