After months of scrutiny, the Philippines has closed its doors to electronic waste from the United States, ending, for now, a stream of shipments that environmental groups have tracked since March 2025. This move marks the clearest government response yet to controversy over suspected U.S. e-waste shipments entering the Philippines via the Subic Bay freeport, with environmental groups questioning whether cargoes were being properly screened and regulated. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) told Mongabay on Oct. 12 the restriction is not a new U.S.-specific ban. Instead, it said, the policy, which was publicly announced on Sept. 22, will see customs officials enforcing existing rules under the Basel Convention. The convention, an international treaty governing cross-border waste shipments, prohibits e-waste imports from the five countries that are not parties to the treaty — including the United States. Michael Drake Matias, who heads the DENR’s Environmental Management Bureau, said customs has stopped allowing waste shipments from all nonparty countries to be unloaded at Philippine ports. Aerial photo obtained by the Basel Action Network on April 27, 2026 of the discarded electronics piling up outside of Jack Electronics, one of the recovery facilities northeast of Subic Bay. Photo credit: Basel Action Network, 2026. Customs-free zones? It remains unclear whether the reinforced restriction resolves a broader enforcement problem created by a 2025 Manila court ruling that disrupted normal pre-shipment controls in the Subic Bay freeport. The case began in 2024, when the customs bureau held shipments belonging to three recycling companies…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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