the continental United States for disposal, officials moved the herbicides to Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. In the 1980s, Johnston Atoll was slowly transformed into the site of the US military's first chemical munitions incineration facility. The military's use of the Atoll as a munitions waste site offers material and historical traces of the vast and continued global circulation of US military waste, how the military conceptualized the ‘destruction’ of such waste, and where it was deemed acceptable to house and carry out these attempts of waste removal. Drawing from primary sources including military scientific studies and correspondence, and situated within environmental justice and postcolonial science studies scholarship, I offer a reading of the Atoll as a place that was used to obscure, yet laid bare, several unattended histories and contemporalities of US empire.

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This article is about the rise and fall of ocean incineration, a method for the disposal of hazardous chemical waste that was initiated in the late 1960s, developed, tested, and perfected throughout the 1970s, commercialized in the 1980s, and eventually phased out from the 1990s onwards. Ocean incineration consisted in the offshore destruction of toxic liquid substances in specially designed ships outfitted with high-temperature combustion chambers and high stacks. When this technology broke through, it seemed like a panacea. It heralded the safe disposal of noxious compounds such as organochlorines and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were ubiquitous by-products of petrochemical industrial processes. It promised to minimize private companies’ externalities and ease environmental concerns. But it ultimately failed to provide an alternative to safely disposing of toxic waste. What does explain such a decline? This article answers this question by arguing that the demise of ocean incineration was due to the combination of locally oriented and transnationally driven protests, which emerged across the (North) Atlantic and exposed the dangerous and highly exploitative nature of such a practice.

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Increasing production and wealth in industrialized countries led to an increase in waste production, part of which was clearly harmful to human and non-human health. Out of several intergovernmental organizations that addressed related questions, the NATO Commission on Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) was the first to organize a specific project dedicated to the topic. Between 1973 and 1981, delegates from nine NATO countries studies aspects ranging from the organization and recommended procedures of waste management to landfills, transportation, various ways of disposal and chromium recycling. Thereby, the CCMS got to set the agenda for problematic wastes, effectively establishing ‘hazardous waste’ as a recognized category. It also framed the challenge as one of ‘disposal,’ discouraging systemic socio-economic reviews. Overall, this framing drew attention to the potential dangers of some forms of waste to human health and to the environment and the need for special protective measures, while normalizing and potentially diverting attention away from other forms of waste. At the same time, CCMS activities provided an important push towards international guidelines and regulations of hazardous waste management and trade.

2a:T470,

The dépôt of the Police Prefecture of Paris, in the heart of the city, was one of the most important places of anti-Jewish repression in France during the Occupation. It was the hub for the deportation of almost a third of the 38,500 deportees domiciled in Paris who were not arrested by the French police during the round-ups, but even more Jews passed through the dépôt without eventually being deported. These arrests were mostly based on the justification of offences committed by Jews against French laws and German orders. From mid-1942, the dépôt gradually evolved from a platform for sorting those arrested with a view to brin