The article in the url below describes the global trade in trash – specifically, “toxic industrial waste”:
“In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen. Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again ... became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. … By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America.”
The bargain that was struck to facilitate the trade had questionable moral undertones:
“In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as ‘garbage imperialism.’”
The backlash that resulted formed the impetus to negotiate the Basel Convention:
“Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries.”
The article argues that, in spite of Basel, nothing much has changed in terms of the movement of waste. What has changed, however, is the stated motivation for that trade:
“The situation now is, in many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation.”
Framing the movement of trash as an effort to recycle it allows the exporting economies to get around Basel. And that might even be ok, if it was true. Unfortunately, much of what we think we have ‘recycled’ is still being processed or, worse, is simply discarded:
“We might at the very least be honest with ourselves about what we are doing. We ship our waste to the other side of the planet not only because we produce far too much of it but also because we insist on an environment exorcised of our own material footprints. Everything you’ve ever thrown away in your life: There’s a good chance a lot of it is still out there, somewhere, be it headphones torched for their copper wiring in Ghana or a sliver of a Solo Cup bobbing across the Pacific Ocean.”
Take care
David
David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Sustainable Value Creation (6e)
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Everything You’ve Ever Thrown Away Is Likely Still Out There
By Alexander Clapp
February 16, 2025
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
SR7
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/opinion/trash-recycling-global-waste-trade.html
