Trading Hazards: the export of toxic waste to the Third World
By Karen Medica
Research and Policy Unit, World Vision Australia, 1995
Reviewed by Lisa Macdonald
Trading Hazards is the second monograph in an "Issues in Global Development" series which aims to provide information and encourage dialogue on the theme of "fighting poverty and empowering people to transform their worlds". This monograph documents and criticises the widespread practice among industrialised countries of "managing" hazardous waste disposal by exporting it to the Third World.
According to the report, the increase in hazardous waste exports since the 1970s is a direct result of an exponential increase in the cost of waste management in the First World. "The lack of a preventative approach to waste management has led to more and more hazardous wastes, while an increasingly concerned and knowledgeable public has led to fewer and fewer places to put them", says Medica.
Medica is World Vision's representative on the Commonwealth EPA Policy Reference Group, which is reviewing Australia's obligations under the Basel Convention. Initiated by the UN Environment Program in 1989, this convention came into force in May 1992 with the aim of controlling the disposal and international movement of hazardous wastes. Australia is one of 87 countries which have ratified the convention.
The Basel Convention acknowledges the threat to human health and the environment from the movement of hazardous waste, noting the limited capacity of Third World countries to deal with or dispose of these wastes in a safe manner. It also identifies waste minimisation as the most effective method of protecting human health and the environment.
As Medica points out, however, the convention is wide open to corruption and abuse. A major weakness, for example, is the inclusion of an article on "prior informed consent". During the negotiations on the treaty, the majority of governments made it clear that they wanted to impose a worldwide ban on hazardous waste trafficking, particularly from OECD to non-OECD countries. However, this proposal was vetoed, principally by the OECD countries, and replaced by a system whereby, so long as the importing and transit countries give their prior informed consent (PIC) to receive the waste, it can be relocated at will.
Economic need often pressures the poorer countries to accept hazardous waste despite concerns for human and environmental health. In fact, Medica documents that it is precisely because of lower environmental standards and less regulated health and safety conditions that Third World countries can accept waste cheaply.
With numerous poverty-stricken dumping grounds assured by the inequities of global capitalism, the PIC provisions in the treaty operate to relieve the waste generators and traders of any liability for damages in the receiving territory. Medica says: "The PIC system is ... an example of how industrialised countries protect the hazardous waste trade as a commercial activity [and] ... of how a legal instrument can be rendered ineffective by its failure to consider certain global economic and social realities".
An equally serious loophole in the treaty arises when hazardous wastes are defined as "recyclables"; exports of hazardous wastes destined for operations leading to resource recovery, recycling or reclamation are not subject to regulation. This loophole has propped up the international waste trade: Greenpeace estimates that more than 90% of waste trade schemes to Third World countries declare some form of further use or recycling.
In an attempt to close this loophole, the March 1994 annual meeting of parties to the convention decided to ban all trade in hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries, regardless of its end use, from December 1997.
That decision was opposed by Australia, among other OECD countries and, since adherence to the rules of the treaty is voluntary, full implementation of the ban is still far from assured.
This is particularly so, says Medica, because the costs to Australian industry of recycling its wastes in this country far exceed those of exporting them. Australia exports about $22 million worth of "recyclable" hazardous wastes to non-OECD countries per year.
Medica notes the concerns expressed by some non-government organisations that Australia may be trying to pressure non-OECD countries in the Asia Pacific region to enter into bilateral agreements to continue to accept Australian hazardous waste for recycling after 1997. (Australian government delegations visited India, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea and Malaysia in late 1994, ostensibly to discuss "a cooperative" approach to the question of hazardous wastes export.)
The culpability of Australian business and government in the dumping of toxic waste on our Third World neighbours is graphically documented in a chapter examining the recycling of Australian lead acid batteries in Indonesia and the Philippines, a trade arrangement for which Australia received $4.56 million in export revenue in 1993.
This case study reveals the massive disparity between the environmental and occupational health and safety standards of Australia's heavily regulated lead smelter industry and those of Indonesia and the Philippines. In describing the consequences of this disparity for lead workers in Indonesia and the Philippines, Medica cites a survey of Indonesian workers which revealed that the majority of those sampled had blood lead levels of 40 to 80 milligrams per litre — 10 to 20 times the levels considered a health threat by Australian regulations. She also documents horrendous effects on the natural environment and residents of the many areas in which battery recycling plants are located in both countries.
Medica concludes, "As almost any waste can be claimed to be of use to the poor, it is easy to characterise waste in terms of some form of recycling ... exporting hazardous wastes for recycling is often a sham which effectively enables industries in OECD countries to avoid the real liabilities of safe disposal by dumping it on poorer countries."
Quoting a 1990 report on the problem, she adds, "Economics dictates that wastes will always be dumped on those with the least political and economic power, as long as waste remains a commodity for the free market".