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Hello, I'm Tina Dehealy.

This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio for all the space to ask one big question about one big story.

Today, why is Malaysia sending our rubbish back?

Now that we've all woken up to the tyranny of plastic, there's a good chance you feel a little bit virtuous,

smug for sorting out your rubbish for recycling and ditching plastic straws.

Well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but in a new BBC documentary airing next week,

Hugh Fernie Whitting Store found bags upon bags of our carefully sorted trash piled up in a landfill.

Flora margarine tubs from Essex and Sainsbury's banks from Milton Keynes

lie festering in a jungle in Malaysia more than six and a half thousand miles away.

The UK is the sixth biggest exporter of plastic waste in the world.

Every year we ship 105,000 tons of the stuff to Malaysia for them to deal with.

What the citizen of the UK believe that they send for recycling

is actually dumped in our country.

Yobe Yin, the Malaysian Environment Minister, had a message for us this week.

If the ship to Malaysia, we will return it back without mercy.

Malaysians, like any other developing countries, have a right to clean air, clean water, sustainable resources, and clean environment to live in, just like citizens of development.

So why are Malaysia sending it back and why can't it just be recycled?

Comedian Phil Wang grew up in Malaysia and he's seen the Heefernly Whittingstall film.

We waited through rubbish all the time but rubbish has been part of the Malaysia landscape

for decades.

How much rubbish are we talking about did you grow up around?

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