Hazardous Waste Trade Research Articles

Towards a Non-Use Regime on Solar Geoengineering: Lessons from International Law and Governance

AbstractIn recent years, some scientists have called for research into and potential development of ‘solar geoengineering’ technologies as an option to counter global warming. Solar geoengineering refers to a set of speculative techniques to reflect some incoming sunlight back into space, for example, by continuously spraying reflective sulphur aerosols into the stratosphere over several generations. Because of the significant ecological, social, and political risks posed by such technologies, many scholars and civil society organizations have urged governments to take action to prohibit the development and deployment of solar geoengineering techniques. In this article we take such calls for a prohibitory or a non-use regime on solar geoengineering as a starting point to examine existing international law and governance precedents that could guide the development of such a regime. The precedents we examine include international prohibitory and restrictive regimes that impose bans or restrictions on chemical weapons, biological weapons, weather modification technologies, anti-personnel landmines, substances that deplete the ozone layer, trade in hazardous wastes, deep seabed mining, and mining in Antarctica. We also assess emerging norms and soft law in anticipatory governance of novel technologies, such as human cloning and gene editing. While there is no blueprint for a solar geoengineering non-use regime in international law, our analysis points to numerous specific elements on which governments could draw to constrain or impose an outright prohibition on the development of technologies for solar geoengineering, should they opt to do so.

‘Big Clean’, the ‘Death Ship’ and the Hazardous Waste Trade between West Germany and Turkey, 1987–1988

This article narrates the history of two high-profile West German-Turkish toxic waste scandals in 1988. It argues that they marked a watershed moment between two ‘waste regimes’. The first scandal showcased to the Turkish and West German publics how waste dealers and policy makers misleadingly packaged hazardous waste exports as a substitute for traditional forms of debt and as a vehicle for economic development. The opposition it fuelled hastened the demise of this waste regime by prompting the Turkish government to enact a ban on toxic waste imports. The second scandal revealed the new regime that emerged in its aftermath – one in which waste dealers and policy makers sought to evade new restrictions in the less visible margins of a changing regulatory and legal space.

A Spatial Dynamic Model for Export Intensity of Hazardous Industrial Waste: The Incentive Effect of Regional Environmental Policies

This paper analyses, in the context of the Environmental Kuznet Curve, the determinants of export intensity of hazardous industrial waste among Spanish regions, with particular attention to the influence of waste taxes and of environmental policies. This study is carried out for the first time in the literature with a spatial dynamic model, fixed effects and panel data for the 17 regions (Comunidades Autónomas) of Spain during the period 2007–2017. The results suggest there is a spatial-dynamic component to export intensity, and that both regional taxes on waste disposal and environmental policy stringency appear to encourage, albeit modestly, the rate of exported waste to other regions. The model also shows that the more regions recycle, and the greater the economies of scale arising from industrial agglomeration, the lower is the region’s waste export intensity, although increasing restrictions on the international trade in hazardous waste have intensified trading inside the country. Finally, the results suggest a non-linear relationship between growth and export intensity, although apparently we are still far from the absolute decoupling of the Environmental Kuznet Curve.

Care for the Environment and Environmental Crime Based on Theravada Buddhist Philosophy

From past to present, global compressions on human and environmental systems are more likely to increase than ever before in human history. With the science and technology advancement, we are living in the age of the global village that enables more convenient and brings us closer together. However, this also means that human being is suffering from global environmental crisis including the threat of war, economic crises, racial conflicts, environmental degradation, and environmental crime. This paper represents library-based work to date in Buddhist contemporary and useful perspectives and strategies on environmental protection and prevention in the backdrop of growing consumerism and capitalism influenced by western cultural in post-globalization era. Comparing to other countries, Thailand faces various environmental problems and some of them could become to environmental crime such as illegal wildlife trade; smuggling ozone-depleting substances; illicit trade in hazardous waste and pollution; illegal mining; illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing; illegal logging and associated trade in stolen timber. Since Thailand is one of largely Buddhist practical countries, measures to conserve the environment can draw on the principles and precepts of Lord Buddha’s teachings, known as Tripitaka. In Lord Buddha’s lifetime, environmental problems were not salient, but surprisingly, Lord Buddha recognised such problems because they are related to natural law. Accordingly, he established disciplinary rules for monks to live as models of not destroying the environment. The five precepts of Buddhism are the examples of the main principals in Buddhism which is regulations regarding the relation with environmental crime protection and humanity.

Undermining methodological nationalism: Cosmopolitan analysis and visualization of the North American hazardous waste trade

Drawing on a novel dataset of hazardous waste shipments among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, we seek to enhance dominant modes of understanding transnational trading and regulation at the scale of the nation-state. We argue that these, while valuable, are limited by methodological nationalism. This epistemological position identifies the nation-state as the most relevant unit of analysis in examining “transnational” phenomena. In the case of transboundary waste trading, tracking waste between nation-states has come at the expense of identification and analysis of specific sites within nations that receive hazardous materials or send them abroad, obscuring the ongoing proliferation of waste havens at a subnational level and related environmental justice concerns. Working against methodological nationalism entails an epistemological shift that we pursue in this article through a series of empirical, analytical, and representational practices. We propose three visualization tactics that undermine nation-centered imaginaries: (1) documenting waste havens within the understudied United States through identifying subnational sites importing hazardous waste for processing; (2) establishing connections through flow maps connecting importing and exporting localities transnationally trading specific hazardous wastes; and (3) analyzing the corporate networks dominating the transnational waste trade. We argue these tactics build toward an alternative conception of methodological cosmopolitanism that highlights alternative routes toward environmental justice.

Existing treaty could help manage plastic waste

More than 100 million metric tons of plastic waste could accumulate throughout the world in the next dozen years because of China’s restrictions on imports of postconsumer plastic waste, researchers estimate. And one way to help ensure that buildup of plastic waste is handled soundly is for countries to control international trade in this material under an existing treaty that governs trade in hazardous waste, they suggest (Sci. Adv. 2018, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat0131). A team from the University of Georgia, led by Jenna R. Jambeck, used United Nations trade data to calculate that 111 million metric tons of plastic waste could accumulate throughout the world by 2030 in the wake of China’s policy, which took effect Jan. 1. China and Hong Kong, which has served as an entry port for many plastic shipments to China, collectively have imported 72% of the world’s plastic waste since 1992, the researchers found. China’s move

Improving spatial decision making using interactive maps: An empirical study on interface complexity and decision complexity in the North American hazardous waste trade

Spatial decisions increasingly are made by both professional and citizen stakeholders using interactive maps, yet few empirically-derived guidelines exist for designing interactive maps that support complex reasoning and decision making across problem contexts. We address this gap through an online map study with 122 participants with varying expertise. The study required participants to assume two hypothetical scenarios in the North American hazardous waste trade, review geographic information on environmental justice impacts using a different interactive map for each scenario, and arrive at an optimal decision outcome. This study followed a 2 × 2 factorial design, varying interface complexity (the number of supported interaction operators) and decision complexity (the number of decision criteria) as the independent variables and controlling for participant expertise with the hazardous waste trade and other aspects of cartographic design. Our findings indicate that interface complexity, not decision complexity, influenced decision outcomes, with participants arriving at better decisions using the simpler interface. However, expertise was a moderating effect, with experts and non-experts using different interaction strategies to arrive at their decisions. The research contributes to cartography, geovisualization, spatial decision science, urban planning, and visual analytics as well as to scholarship on environmental justice, the geography of hazardous waste, and participatory mapping.

Hazardous Aesthetics: A “Merely Interesting” Toxic Tour of Waste Management Data

This illustrated essay attempts to respond to the slow violence of the hazardous waste trade. We introduce and analyze common representational styles of hazardous waste: greenwashing, ruin porn, environmental justice toxic tours, and Ngai’s concept of the merely interesting. We argue that the first two styles tend to reproduce the status quo, but that the latter two are potentially more disruptive. We then turn to a data set about the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America to argue for and produce alternative representations of this waste, literally drawing from the data and figuratively drawing inspiration from toxic tours and the merely interesting. Our intervention is thus visual as well as conceptual: We argue against status quo representations of hazardous waste and then discuss and produce alternatives based on a novel data set we created.

Global Electronic Waste, Third Party Certification Standards, and Resisting the Undoing of Environmental Justice Politics

This article provides a critical assessment of a shift in discourse and political actions taken by the Basel Action Network (BAN), the primary non-governmental organization involved in overseeing and regulating the international trade in hazardous wastes in general and electronic waste (e-waste) in particular. First, we review recent scholarship focused on changes in social movement tactics that more directly target corporate practices, specifically the rise of voluntary third party certification standards. In particular, we attend to early efforts of the global environmental justice movement to address the trade in hazardous wastes, including e-waste. Next, we discuss our research findings on the changes in discourse, strategy, and political demands of environmental justice activists engaged in e-waste recycling. These findings support other recent case studies that suggest that the development of voluntary third party certifications adopt neoliberal market logics and corporate governance practices. In a...

Undisciplining environmental justice research with visual storytelling

Environmental justice research has used maps to make visible the spatial correlations between hazardous waste disposal sites and poor and minority communities since the 1970s. No doubt, such visual evidence of marginalized communities disproportionately burdened with noxious facilities has been an important and powerful tool for activists, regulators, and educators. Despite the efficacy of such mappings in demonstrating unjust distributions of waste, critics argue that they do not capture the complicated processes behind this spatial phenomenon. In this paper, we discuss our pursuit of an “undisciplined” environmental justice project by using visualization, not solely as the traditional product of research, but also as a process for raising new lines of inquiry into the social and environmental dynamics at work in the landscape. To this end, we present one strategy we have used in our project to construct and creatively visualize a novel dataset on the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America. Specifically, we convened a one-day “Design Challenge” with geography students from several sub-disciplines. This event yielded new avenues for international environmental justice research on and visualization of the transnational waste trade, identified methods for and concerns about critical storytelling with large datasets, and highlighted the opportunities and challenges of using critical storytelling to undiscipline EJ research. The paper presents logistics leading up to the Design Challenge, key insights and critical discussion resulting from the day, and interviews conducted one year after the Design Challenge on enduring lessons from the process.

HazMatMapper: an online and interactive geographic visualization tool for exploring transnational flows of hazardous waste and environmental justice

ABSTRACTHazMatMapper is an online and interactive geographic visualization tool designed to facilitate exploration of transnational flows of hazardous waste in North America (http://geography.wisc.edu/hazardouswaste/map/). While conventional narratives suggest that wealthier countries such as Canada and the United States (US) export waste to poorer countries like Mexico, little is known about how waste trading may affect specific sites within any of the three countries. To move beyond anecdotal discussions and national aggregates, we assembled a novel geographic dataset describing transnational hazardous waste shipments from 2007 to 2012 through two Freedom of Information Act requests for documents held by the US Environmental Protection Agency. While not yet detailing all of the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America, HazMatMapper supports multiscale and site-specific visual exploration of US imports of hazardous waste from Canada and Mexico. It thus enables academic researchers, waste regulators, and the general public to generate hypotheses on regional clustering, transnational corporate structuring, and environmental justice concerns, as well as to understand the limitations of existing regulatory data collection itself. Here, we discuss the dataset and design process behind HazMatMapper and demonstrate its utility for understanding the transnational hazardous waste trade.

Improvements to enforcement of multilateral environmental agreements to control international shipments of chemicals and wastes.

Illegal trade in hazardous waste and harmful chemicals has caused severe damage on human health and the environment, and brought big challenges to countries to meet their commitments to related multilateral environmental agreements. Synergy-building, like organising law enforcement operations, is critical to address illegal trade in waste and chemicals, and further improve the effectiveness of environmental enforcement. This article discusses how and why law enforcement operations can help countries to implement chemical and waste-related multilateral environmental agreements in a more efficient and effective way. The research explores key barriers and factors for organising law enforcement operations, and recommends methods to improve law enforcement operations to address illegal trade in hazardous waste and harmful chemicals.

The Economics of the International Trade of Waste

International trade in hazardous and nonhazardous waste and scrap products has been growing at an exceptional rate the past two decades. This review presents current data on the magnitude and trends regarding this growth and discusses the recent literature as it pertains to the economic incentives and drivers of international waste trade. Differences in environmental policy, taxes, disposal fees, and transport costs are important determinants across countries. However, the illegal nature of many types of hazardous waste also means that organized crime may play a role in some countries. Gaps in our understanding regarding microeconomic incentives as they relate to upstream and downstream recyclers and to the social welfare implications for wages, environmental quality, and human health are also discussed.

From Waste to Resources? Interrogating ‘Race to the Bottom’ in the Global Environmental Governance of the Hazardous Waste Trade

The rise of global environmental governance regimes allegedly contradicts the process of an environmental “race to the bottom” (RTB) that results from capitalist globalization. We examine new developments in this area through a qualitative case study of the Basel Convention. Here, we find that new regulations in toxic wastes governance are in fact being co-created with industry actors and aim to accelerate the flow of toxic “resources” to less-developed countries. Further, these shifts are legitimized by a shift in discourse— from thinking of toxics materials as “wastes” to thinking of them as “resources”— that re-frames the toxic wastes trade as essential for sustainable economic development rather than as a manifestation of global environmental injustice, thereby undermining environmentalist claims. Our findings suggest that, despite an expansion of hazardous waste regulations, the RTB concept is still relevant in the context of global environmental governance. We conclude that a fruitful avenue for applying the RTB concept in this context is to go beyond a strict materialist interpretation of global politics to also consider the role of discourses and contesting ideologies in shaping global environmental policy debates.

Are we living in a post‐Basel world?

The Basel Convention (the Convention) is a key piece of law governing the international waste trade. The spirit of the Convention is to prohibit the dumping of hazardous waste from ‘developed’ countries to ‘developing’ countries. Yet, a careful consideration of the Convention suggests a problematic geographical imaginary at work in it. It imagines a bi‐modal world comprised of what it calls Annex VII countries (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Community (EC) and Lichtenstein) and non‐Annex VII countries (all other signatories) and seeks to prohibit the shipment of hazardous waste from the former to the latter. In effect, what this geographical imaginary attempts to institute is a world of trade in which all non‐Annex VII territories are equally vulnerable to hazardous waste dumping from Annex VII territories, but not vulnerable to such dumping amongst themselves. Yet, the non‐Annex VII grouping contains a hugely diverse set of countries, including the two largest non‐Annex VII economies, China and India. Drawing on textual analysis of Convention documents and trade data available for China and India, the paper engages with recent research into the growing role of ‘South–South’ trade to critically engage with the geographical imaginary of the Basel Convention. It suggests that as the global patterns of hazardous waste trade shift, the relevance of the Basel Convention's geographical imaginary declines.

Exporting harm, scavenging value: transnational circuits of e‐waste between Japan, China and beyond

Alternately cherished as a valuable resource and reviled as toxic and/or worthless detritus, depending on one's cultural vantage, e‐waste comprises the scratched, dented, tarnished flipside of the lucrative consumer electronics industry. This article focuses attention on flows of e‐waste from Japan to East Asia, scrutinising channels of production, consumption, reuse and conversion. First, the authors interpret the rhetoric of recycling and sustainability mobilised by Japanese interests to facilitate Asian trade in hazardous wastes, creating what detractors say is a pernicious form of ‘waste colonialism’. Next, the researchers scrutinise the discursively linked creation in Japan, since 2001, of a network of state‐of‐the‐art WEEE processing facilities, in particular Panasonic's flagship PETEC, which they studied in 2013. They then turn to the protean material flows and the makeshift configurations engendered by e‐waste itself – not only pollutant when scavenged but frequently lucrative and welcome in de‐manufacturing hotspots in China – and analyse the circulation of scavenged ‘resources’ in the researchers' fieldsite in the world's most notorious e‐waste processing node, in Guangdong Province, where the team conducted ethnographic fieldwork intermittently during 2012–13. China's grand initiative of converting to state‐controlled formal processing, with Panasonic's assistance, facilitates a cross‐cultural comparison of tensions between formal and informal conversion against the backdrop of the flawed Basel Convention regime, relevant to a range of societies. The paper argues that a relatively ‘neutral’ ethnographic approach to e‐waste furnishes significant insight into thorny issues surrounding reckonings of risk and value in varying contexts and responses from those actually immersed in the processing trade, yielding important policy perspective.

International Trade in Recyclable and Hazardous Waste in Asia edited by MichikazuKojima and EtsuyoMichida, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013, xii + 201 pp.

The Developing EconomiesVolume 52, Issue 3 p. 297-300 Book Review International Trade in Recyclable and Hazardous Waste in Asia edited by Michikazu Kojima and Etsuyo Michida, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013, xii + 201 pp. Ahmad Fariz Mohamed, Ahmad Fariz Mohamed Institute for the Environment and Development (LESTARI), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, MalaysiaSearch for more papers by this author Ahmad Fariz Mohamed, Ahmad Fariz Mohamed Institute for the Environment and Development (LESTARI), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, MalaysiaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 August 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/deve.12054Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume52, Issue3September 2014Pages 297-300 RelatedInformation

International transport of hazardous waste : legal and illegal trade in the context of professional ethics.

An example of illegal trade is presented in the context of hazardous waste movement across internaional borders. It highlights the fact that unethical conduct can have negative enviromental health consequences, especially for improverished countries. The example exposes how ethical principles are breached through illegal trade in hazardous waste, and points to the role that environmental epidemiology plays in the assessment of risk associated with trade in hazardous waste.

Capacity, not constraints: A theory of North-South regulatory cooperation

While neoliberal institutionalists argue that treaties facilitate collective action, many North-South regulatory treaties focus on largely national problems in developing countries. As such, these treaties present a puzzle: why a global treaty to address national regulatory problems? We argue that while activists in industrialized countries often promote regulatory treaties, these treaties garner political support among developing countries because they allow governments to enhance their national regulatory capacity. Developing countries are often not interested in banning practices such as trade in hazardous waste. Instead, developing countries want to increase their ability to control them. We test the argument against data on the global regime for hazardous waste trade. Contravening the conventional wisdom, we find that weak regulatory capacity is a powerful predictor of ratification of the Basel Convention, a treaty that does not ban hazardous waste trade but allows regulatory enhancement. By contrast, other treaties in the regime that do aim at banning hazardous waste trade receive little support among developing countries.

Hazardous Waste Management and Corporate Social Responsibility: Illegal Trade of Electrical and Electronic Waste

Taking electrical and electronic waste as its field of observation, this study investigates the illegal trade in hazardous waste from developed countries toward developing countries. Despite increased legislation, the problem of waste in developed countries, far from being treated upstream, is largely shifted downstream by exporting it to developing countries. The two interpretations we offer, economic and institutional, enable us to show how cost constraints on waste management in developed countries coupled with the shortcomings and nonapplication of the legislation lead to socially irresponsible behavior. We then go on to suggest that the involvement of stakeholders could be one way of stamping out practices of this kind.