International Trade In Hazardous Wastes

This book discusses the need for a regulated and informed forum for international trade in hazardous waste. The authors argue that with careful planning, health and ecological risks can be minimized and net economic benefits realized fairly. The book examines the key parameters that should be considered by potential trading nations to ensure an optimally safe and mutually beneficial partnership. The authors provide comprehensive coverage of the political, environmental, industrial and economic issues involved in this complex and increasingly controversial practice.

In recent years, international trade in toxic waste and hazardous technologies by firms in rich industrialized countries has emerged as a routine practice. Many poor countries have accepted these deadly imports but are ill equipped to manage the materials safely. For more than a decade, environmentalists and the governments of developing countries have lobbied intensively and generated public outcry in an attempt to halt hazardous transfers from Northern industrialized nations to the Third World, but the practice continues.In her insightful and important book, Jennifer Clapp addresses this alarming problem. Clapp describes the responses of those engaged in hazard transfer to international regulations, and in particular to the 1989 adoption of the Basel Convention. She pinpoints a key weakness of the regulations—because hazard transfer is dynamic, efforts to stop one form of toxic export prompt new forms to emerge. For instance, laws intended to ban the disposal of toxic wastes in the Third World led corporations to ship these byproducts to poor countries for "recycling." And, Clapp warns, current efforts to prohibit this "recycling movement" may accelerate a new business endeavor: the relocation to poor countries of entire industries that generate toxic wastes.Clapp concludes that the dynamic nature of hazard transfer results from increasingly fluid global trade and investment relations in the context of a highly unequal world, and from the leading role played by multinational corporations and environmental NGOs. Governments, she maintains, have for too long failed to capture the initiative and have instead only reacted to these opposing forces.

The authors analyzes the development and operation of the Basel convention on the control of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes, and its interrelationship with the multilateral trading system.

Little is known about the volume of international recycling in Asia, the problems caused and the struggle to properly manage the trade. This pathbreaking book addresses this gap in the literature, and provides a comprehensive overview of the internatio

When most people think of hazardous waste trading, they think of egregious dumping by U.S. and European firms on poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. But over 80 percent of the waste trade takes place between industrialized nations and is legal by domestic and international standards. In Waste Trading among Rich Nations, Kate O'Neill asks why some industrialized nations voluntarily import such wastes in the absence of pressing economic need. She focuses on Britain as an importer and Germany as an exporter and also looks at France, Australia, and Japan. According to O'Neill, most important in determining whether an industrialized democracy imports waste are two aspects of its regulatory system. The first is the structure of the regulatory process—how powers and responsibilities are allocated among different agencies and levels of government—and the structure of the hazardous waste disposal industry. The second is what O'Neill calls the "style" of environmental regulation, in particular access to the policy process and mode of implementation. Hazardous waste management is in crisis in most industrialized countries and is becoming increasingly controversial in international negotiations. O'Neill not only examines waste trading empirically but also develops a theoretical model of comparative regulation that can be used to establish links between domestic and international environmental politics.

The international trade in hazardous and radioactive waste to developing countries with inadequate infrastructure and lenient environmental laws has grown during recent decades and has been the target of public opposition in both developed and developing countries. This book contains a comprehensive analysis of the pertinent international legislation, as well as a comparative analysis of the European and the United States legislation and policies.

In 1989, environmental concerns led to the adoption of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes & their Disposal. This publication outlines some of the facts about the international hazardous waste trade, addressing the issue in the context of sustainable industrial activity in all countries. It also discusses the Basel Convention & looks at some aspects of the reconciliation of environmental & trade objectives in the regulation of the international hazardous waste trade.