International Trade In Recyclable And Hazardous Waste In Asia

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

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.

During the last century international trade has become indispensable for many economies. This is not only the case for trade in primary raw materials and consumer products but also for secondary (recyclable) materials. With the rapid growth of the recycling sector worldwide, trade in recyclables increased tremendously. It is striking that most of this trade flows from developed to developing countries. This book addresses the main causes of this typical trade pattern and investigates its economic and environmental effects by carrying out case studies on waste paper imports in India, waste plastics imports in China, and used-tyre trade in Europe. The book concludes by recommending policies that are aimed at preventing negative economic and environmental effects potentially resulting from trade in recyclables. The book offers new ideas to researchers who are involved in international trade, material flows, and waste management, and provides new insights for decision-makers who are interested in WTO and the Basel Convention.

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 Basel Conventions adoption of Decision II/I2 provides for a global ban on the North-South trade in recyclable wastes from the end of 1997. Taking the used lead battery market as a case study, this paper provides an analytical framework for examining the global and regional implications of the ban now in place. It shows that, when considering standard economic welfare the acceptance of Decision II/I2 necessarily reduces global welfare. However, when environmental externalities are taken into account, the global welfare results are less clear. Global welfare is enhanced if and only if the environmental welfare gains in the South more than offset the standard gains from trade loss in the South plus the combined standard and environmental welfare losses in the North. The paper concludes by arguing, firstly, that the ban on North-South trade should be removed and secondly, recycling waste importing countries should be able to determine their individual solutions to national environmental externalities based not on a globally enforced ban, but rather on their national economic challenges, environmental conditions, resource endowments and social preferences.

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.

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.