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Today, it is estimated that nearly 3 million tons of hazardous waste from the United States and other industrialized nations cross international borders each year. Much of this waste is being shipped from wealthy nations in Europe, the United States, and Japan to poor nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. This is what scholars call "environmental inequality" and it is a global problem.

Four factors explain this shift of toxic burdens to the global South. First is the exponential increase in the production of hazardous waste and the emergence of more stringent environmental regulations in northern nations. These changes increased the costs of waste treatment and disposal in the global North, which are magnitudes greater than in most southern nations.

Similarly, the typical legal apparatus found in industrialized nations is much more burdensome when compared to the lax regulatory regimes in many nations in the South, which allow for dumping at a fraction of the cost. This is due partly to a comparatively more influential environmental movement sector in industrialized nations, which contributed to building regulatory structures that provide a minimal level of oversight over polluting firms. The unintended consequence of this environmentalist success in the North is to provide an incentive for the worst polluters to seek disposal sites beyond national borders.

A second factor pushing hazardous waste beyond northern borders is the widespread need for fiscal relief among southern nations. This need--rooted in a long history of colonialism and contemporary loan/debt arrangements between southern and northern nations--often leads government officials in the South to accept financial compensation in exchange for permission to dump chemical wastes in their borders. Many observers have described these transactions as economically efficient, while others prefer the term garbage imperialism.

The third driving force behind the international export of hazardous materials is the seemingly inexorable power of economic globalization, which has a logic that dictates that industries must cut costs and increase profits or simply fail. Economic globalization allows and requires firms to access global consumer and commercial markets and labor forces, increase automation, and improve efficiencies in a 24- hour economy that is more interdependent than ever. The same logic applies to those industries that manage the hazardous wastes that market economies produce: they must access markets and buyers where the prices allow for increasing profits and reduced costs. This means those wastes will be traded and dumped in nations and regions where, as a result of unstable states and vulnerable economies, pricing will be more profitable to waste management firms and brokers.

The fourth reason for the global waste trade is a racist and classist culture and ideology within global North communities and institutions that view toxic dumping on poor communities of color as perfectly acceptable. This ideology is best exemplified in an infamous internal World Bank memo authored by Lawrence Summers, then chief economist and vice president of the World Bank, in which he argued that the World Bank should encourage the migration of polluting industries to poor nations because such a practice would be economically efficient.

In 1989, the world's nations came together via the United Nations and created the Basel Convention to regulate the international trade in toxic wastes. A few years later, they reconvened to pass an amendment-- called the Basel Ban--that bans the flow of hazardous waste from rich to poor nations.

German social theorist Ulrich Beck offers a productive way to think about toxic wastes in the late modern era. He argues that we live in a risk society--a stage in human evolution marked by a fundamental transformation in the relationship between society and the environment where we witness an exponential increase in the production and use of hazardous chemical substances. These practices elevate the level of social and physical risk to scales never before imagined. Ecological risks are deeply embedded in society and are extremely harmful, yet frequently are difficult to measure.

Beck argues that the politics of the distribution of environmental degradation favor more powerful communities over others. Thus advanced capitalism creates wealth for some and imposes risks on others, at least in the short term. In the long run, the problem of widespread global ecological harm, however, ends up returning to impact its creators in a boomerang effect.

That is, the risks of modernity eventually haunt those who originally produced them. This generalization of risks unlimited in time or space is experienced by all persons, all groups, across the divides of social class and ethnicity. One example is the spread of health problems that result from exposure to pesticide residues. The risk society thesis puts forward the position that modernity is a fundamentally anti-ecological endeavor.

If toxic waste is an ordinary by-product of industrialization, then this raises serious questions about the way we define and achieve progress within human societies. Toxic waste is therefore part of a much broader problem rooted in the proliferation of toxic jobs, toxic industries, and toxic communities that constitute the risk society.

References:

1) Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

2) Clapp, Jennifer. 2001. Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

3) Melosi, Martin, 2001. Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy and the Environment. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

4) Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2001. Environmental Outlook. Brussels, Belgium: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

5) Raffensperger, Carolyn and Joel Tickner. 1999. Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle. Washington, DC: Island.

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