As President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal war on drugs has garnered global headlines, a separate wave of violence in the Philippines has gone largely unnoticed: the killing of more than 100 environmental activists and land defenders. Many of the dead were protesting environmental destruction on their ancestral domains.

Much of the world’s waste used to wind up in China and Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Vietnam. But recently, they have cracked down on imports of waste and recyclables. Derek Kellenberg explains how this may force the world’s major producers to finally reckon with the true social costs of waste.