Fumes spewed from the machinery as workers — wearing only T-shirts, sandals and no masks — at a recycling factory in northern Malaysia manually sorted through mountains of plastic scrap.
The workers, mainly from Bangladesh, earned around $12 a day, sometimes toiling seven days a week.
The labour was “very cheap,” said one businessman, as he gave a tour to undercover CBC Marketplace journalists posing as plastics brokers from a fake Canadian company.
The factory was willing to buy the dirty plastic being offered — and said they would break the country’s strict importing laws to do it, advising the journalists to lie on the shipping container labels.