At 70 years of age, Sumina works long days in harsh conditions.
In her village of Wirobiting, Indonesia, she sorts waste that has been imported from overseas for recycling.
"I'm happy because if there wasn't any work I wouldn't earn any money. I must pay to rent a home and help my community," she tells SBS News.
But there's a lot to sort through. A ring of discarded plastic encircles an entire rice field in Wirobiting.
Local environmentalists say the plastic comes to Indonesia inside shipments of paper and cardboard.
The shipments are bought and imported from overseas by local paper mills, which then discard the unwanted plastic.
Scattered throughout the waist-high piles is plastic packaging showing the brand names of Australian supermarkets and products.
East Java has become a hub of global paper and cardboard recycling since on the import of low-value, contaminated waste from developed nations in 2018.
Australia has exported more than 750,000 tonnes of paper and cardboard in the last financial year, with nearly a third of that going to Indonesia.
Indonesia imports about 3 million tonnes of wastepaper annually, including from Australia. Source: SBS News / Aaron Fernandes
"So much cardboard comes into Australia, so much plastic comes into Australia," O'Farrell says.
"To get circular material flows happening … we need to be returning those materials back into the global markets they came out of [and] to where the manufacturers who need those materials are, [so that we] ensure that they're coming back to Australia as recycled content products and packaging."
But environmentalists in East Java say the industry is damaging the environment and want the trade to stop entirely.
They've staged regular protests outside Australian diplomatic offices in Indonesia this year.
Daru Setyorini runs the Indonesian-based Ecoton Foundation and is calling for a ban on waste exports to Indonesia. Source: SBS News / Aaron Fernandes
"The paper mills import wastepaper from many countries, from developed countries like US, Australia and Europe. Every year, Indonesia imports about three million tonnes of wastepaper," Setyorini says.
"But it's not really clean. It can contain up to 10 per cent of contaminants, especially plastic scrap."
'It's not clean'
Sumina is among thousands of informal workers who have turned from traditional farming to scrape a living by sorting waste.
Once the paper factories drop off the plastic, she searches for hard pieces that can be sold to plastic recycling companies.
Other plastic is burned in local factories' cement kilns as a cheap source of fuel.
Sumina sorts through a pile of plastic waste in her village. Source: SBS News / Aaron Fernandes
"The risks … can be everything from the leakage of litter to the washing of plastics resulting in microplastics being washed into waterways," explains Dr Monique Retamal from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney.
"You also have the residual that ultimately has no value being burnt in an open, uncontrolled way, and that has a lot of toxic fumes.
All of these things can be hazardous both to local environments as well as the health of workers and communities.
While the waste industry provides an income to many locals in East Java, there is growing concern about the health impacts.
"Children here can't go outside during the morning because [of] the pollution from the village next to us," one local man tells SBS News.
"The smoke blows to the east [and] the situation for children is not good, so they must stay in the home."
Children in Wirobiting are being exposed to potentially hazardous toxins from imported waste. Source: SBS News / Aaron Fernandes
The organisation says informally processed plastic is polluting local villages.
"That's why we want all the developed [countries to] have more capacity to [recycle]," Setyorini says.
If they say it can be recycled, then they should recycle in their own country. They should not send [it] to other countries for recycling.
Indonesian environmentalists say the country has a significant waste problem of its own and doesn’t need to import Australia’s recovered waste.
At the centre of its domestic waste problems is a lack of sorting. Fewer than one in five households separate their waste, meaning everything from food to plastic, metal and clothing are all dumped in increasingly overcapacity landfills.
“Every country should take responsibility to manage their own waste," Setyorini says.
"Because in Indonesia, we already have our own problem with waste. Actually, if the waste picker [wants] to do waste collection, they can just go to collect their own waste in their own village. There [is] already plenty of waste they can collect."
Calls to strengthen Australian recycling
Since July, Australian exports of wastepaper and cardboard have been subject to tighter regulations.
Australia's waste industry peak body rejects claims it is sending contaminated shipments overseas but says it does want to see more recycling done in Australia.
Industry experts say the federal government's planned circular economy framework should be in force by the end of this year. Source: SBS News / Aaron Fernandes
"However, I would also say to Australians, what we would dearly love for you to do is buy products made from Australian recycled materials in Australia, so that we can grow our own remanufacturing basis and not have to rely on global remanufacturing to deal with the materials that we are consuming."
To do that, the industry says the federal government needs to do more to encourage the reuse of recycled material in Australia.
"We have a commitment by this current environment minister that there'll be a circular economy framework out by the end of the year," Sloan says.
That's great, but there is so much action that needs to be done and should have been done by now.
The federal government is reviewing the effectiveness of export regulations and domestic recycling in a Senate inquiry due to report back later this year.
The Minister for the Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek, told SBS News that in partnership with the states and territories and industry, the federal government is spending $1 billion on over 130 projects that will almost double recycling capacity in Australia.
