The Transboundary Trade of Hazardous Wastes,2000–2006

Introduction

The international trade and transport of hazardous wastes have increased substantially with economic globalization since the 1970s. ¹ The downside to this global trade is the contentious practice of industrialized countries and transnational companies disposing of hazardous wastes in low-income countries. ² Green observers refer to this practice as toxic colonialism and to these countries as pollution havens. ³ Others describe the human disasters caused by the illegal disposal of hazardous wastes at sea and in poor countries.^4,5 These events beg the question: “What international efforts exit to collect data and monitor the production and transboundary movement of hazardous wastes?”

The growth of hazardous-waste trade has occurred for several reasons. Legal efforts to control transboundary shipments of toxic wastes are relatively recent, having occurred after the late 1980s. Many of these agreements and regulations continue to suffer enforcement and other weaknesses that facilitate this trade. ⁶ A second reason for the increase is the escalation of disposal costs resulting from the alarm raised by environmental justice groups over the dangers posed by these toxic wastes to human health. Organized efforts of special interest groups such as Greenpeace and others have increased public and political awareness of exposure incidents and environmental threats created by these wastes. They argue for stricter pollution regulations, greater enforcement of environmental laws, and speedier remediation of contaminated areas. ⁷ Consequently, companies have been forced to find other places where: disposal costs are lower (e.g., $US100 to $US200 per ton in industrialized nations compared to $US2.50 and $US50 in low-income African countries); these costs are unaffected by public sentiment; and regulations are fewer and less restrictive for hazardous waste disposal. ⁸ The final reason for the increase in the international trade of hazardous waste is that many poorly industrialized countries often carry large debts and desperately seek income-producing trade. Low-income countries in Africa, the South Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America, and more recently in Eastern Europe and Asia contract for hazardous waste imports to generate revenue.^9,10 A downside to this apparently legitimate trade is that most of these countries lack the technical capacity for waste disposal and recycling. Some observers candidly note that economically motivated dumping, and sham and dirty recycling are actually involved. ¹¹

To address the previous question, we pursue two objectives in this article. First, we give an overview of the regulatory history of governmental efforts to establish global and regional collaborative networks to monitor the international trade of hazardous wastes. Next, we report the quantities of hazardous wastes transported under the auspices of two regulatory regimes. Although international differences exist in what is considered hazardous waste, we mean hazardous wastes to be toxic industrial wastes. ¹²

Sources of Hazardous Waste Data

We obtained data from the Basel Convention and the EPA's TRI to approximate the amount of hazardous wastes in the international mainstream. Convention data were applicable to codes Y1 through Y45 for toxic wastes during the period 2000 to 2006. We ranked all of the nations based on each of three criteria—amounts of hazardous wastes generated, exported, and imported during the period. We selected for reporting the top 15 nations of each ranking due to space limitations. We could not track specific hazardous waste pathways from origin to destination since this information was unavailable in our secondary dataset. We should note that the data are conservative measures because nations, particularly non-OECD countries, report their hazardous wastes sporadically. Also, addresses of facilities that export and import hazardous wastes were sometimes unknown, incomplete, erroneous, or inaccurate. ³⁰ Finally, the level of illegal transporting and dumping of these wastes is largely unknown. ³¹

Because the Convention does not report such data for the United States, we used data reported by the U.S. EPA's TRI program to determine the level of hazardous waste generated, exported, and imported by the United States.^32,33 TRI data for the U.S. protectorates/territories American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands are included. We aggregated the amounts of dry pounds of toxic chemicals reported annually by U.S. facilities and converted the amounts to metric tons (one MT = 2,204.62 pounds) to standardize the Basel and TRI data across the reporting period. Total amounts of transfers were identified for the United States as well as for its territories. Unlike the Basel data, the TRI reports the amounts of transfers that were processed by disposal, treatment, energy recovery, and recycling.

Discussion

As shown in Table 1, almost 763.7 million MTs of hazardous waste were generated from 2000 to 2006 by 79 of the 173 Basel Convention nations. Approximately six percent of these wastes (44.8 million MTs) was exported elsewhere for disposal or recycling by 93 countries, compared to about seven percent (50.6 million MTs) that was imported by 49 countries. Fifteen nations accounted for 82 percent of the hazardous waste generated (626.4 million MTs), 87 percent of the waste exports (38.7 million MTs), and 94 percent (47.8 million MTs) of the imports. The most consistent producers were Germany, China, Estonia, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Republic of Korea. The Convention had no waste generation data from Canada, Japan, or Mexico in the seven-year period. Among the top 15 exporting nations, the largest amounts of hazardous wastes were by the Netherlands, Belgium, Mexico, Italy, France, and Canada. Major importing nations were led by Germany, Italy, France, and Belgium. Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the Netherlands were major participants in both exporting and importing of hazardous wastes. It is also interesting to note the substantial differences between the amounts of exports and imports reported over all countries and for the top 15 nations. Among all reporting Convention nations, pounds of imported hazardous waste exceeded exported waste by 5.8 million MTs. For the top 15 nations, the amount of imports exceeded the amount of exported hazardous waste by 9.1 million MTs.

Finally, Table 1 also illustrates particular reporting weaknesses of the Basel Convention regime. In some cases, exorbitant amounts of reported generated or transported wastes were isolated, singular events (see Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and the Russian Federation) during the study period and did not represent a consistent pattern as shown among OCED member nations. Next, several nations did not report producing hazardous wastes or their reported claims were still under investigation by the Convention. While we assigned these nations a value of zero for the generated amounts in both circumstances, they did report amounts of exporting and/or importing hazardous wastes. This inconsistency could have contributed to the total amount of imported hazardous wastes exceeding the amount of exported wastes.

The international export of industrial toxic wastes from the United States is shown for four methods of processing in Table 2. Overall, the U.S. facilities reported that they released on and off site 15.6 MTs of toxic wastes and transferred 11.6 million MTs to other facilities. Almost 56 percent was transferred for recycling, 18 percent for energy recovery, 17 percent for disposal, and 8 percent for treatment. Approximately five percent (0.5 million MTs) of all U.S. transfers was exported to 31 nations and 6 U.S. protectorates. The lion's share of these exports went to Mexico (54.5%, mainly for recycling), Canada (26.8%, mainly for recycling), and to a lesser extent the Republic of Korea (8.3%), and Puerto Rico (5.9%). Approximately 83 percent of exported hazardous wastes was intended for recycling, 8 percent for energy recovery, another 6 percent for treatment, and almost 3 percent for disposal.

Although U.S. imports of hazardous waste from OECD and other countries were unknown, TRI reports of toxic waste exported to the United States by its protectorates were available. These amounts are presented in Table 3. Compared to other U.S. protectorates, Puerto Rico was the most active trader. It exported (162 thousand MTs) about five times more wastes than it received (33 thousand MTs).

Conclusion

The global transport of millions of pounds of hazardous wastes is environmentally significant and difficult to monitor. Although much of the generated hazardous wastes remain within the countries that produce them, critical issues exist in how they are monitored and what happens to them when they are transported elsewhere. The ability to monitor the extent and amount of international transport of hazardous wastes requires more consistency, comprehensiveness, and dependability. The Basel Convention and the PRTR are the only international monitoring regimes that currently exist. However, each regime is independent of the other and data from both sources are required to understand and at best to conservatively estimate the magnitude of the international hazardous waste trade. Almost 800 million metric tons of hazardous were produced from 2000 to 2006 by nations participating in these two regimes, the latter including the United States. Large amounts of these wastes remained in and were transported to OECD countries for processing. ³⁴ Differences observed in definitions of hazardous wastes, amounts of exported and imported tonnage among the top nations, and inaccuracies in the addresses of companies/facilities' that generate and process these wastes were just a few of the weaknesses observed in these monitoring systems. Such weaknesses lead us to ask, “How can international monitoring of these wastes be improved to eliminate the disposal of orphaned hazardous wastes in places ill-prepared to handle them?”

To improve global tracking of hazardous wastes, the two monitoring regimes should consider the following tasks, some indicated by the experiences and findings reported here, and others reported elsewhere in the hazardous waste literature. Their first task is to reach a geo-political consensus on what constitutes hazardous wastes and which toxic chemicals should the international community track more exhaustively from cradle to grave. While a general definition of hazardous wastes exists in the Basel Convention's Y-codes, elements (i.e., types of wastes considered hazardous) of that definition are exempted or are made exceptions by a member country. Furthermore, the actual numbers of toxic chemicals considered hazardous wastes that are monitored by the Basel and PRTR regimes varies widely from a few dozen to over 500 in the U.S. EPA's TRI. Secondly, the two current monitoring regimes need to more systematically collect and report data, especially regarding the validation of sources of waste generation, exportation, and importation at the company level. Both regimes have their prescribed reporting forms, but the accuracy and completeness of information provided by companies and countries are problems that affect the analytical and tracking utility of their data. The current state of the art is that the amount entering the international hazardous waste pipeline does not equal the amount rendered at its end. Finally, more collaboration among OECD and non-OECD nations is needed to police firms, such as multi-national corporations (MNCs), that generate and transport hazardous wastes. ³⁵ To limit monitoring and reporting to the national level ignores the roles of multinational corporations and other firms involved with hazardous wastes, especially if they are engaged in questionable recycling and disposal practices. ³⁶ The international regulatory community should more aggressively account for the annual amounts of generated, transported, and disposed of hazardous wastes and strengthen its enforcement and adjudication practices. In the absence of such effort, firms and other handlers of these wastes will continue to find ways to circumvent hazardous waste laws and regulations, falsify claims to transport wastes for recycling in low-income countries, and as observed in recent incidents such as Côte d'Ivoire, illegally dump wastes and employ multi-party shipping manifests that obscure ownership, leasing, and registration identification.

In closing, we do not want get lost in these data and ignore the dangers and risks associated with human and ecosystem exposures to even the smallest amounts of legally and illegally transported hazardous wastes. Information about their toxicity, lethality, and other threats are readily available (e.g., <http://toxics.usgs.gov/topics/faq/chemicals.html>). ³⁷ Unfortunately, globalized trade in these wastes exacerbates such risks in three ways. It commodifies hazardous waste through the creation of markets and profits. It promotes corporate attenuation and economic toleration of dangers caused by these wastes by externalizing their human and environmental impacts. ³⁸ Lastly, it contributes to, if not increases, the social marginalization of residents of low-income nations and communities. ³⁹ If international regulators and environmental justice advocates are to scrutinize more effectively the transboundary movement of toxic wastes, they must institute better surveillance protocols using real-time transnational electronic accountability of where these waste are located in the transport and disposal processes.