The International Trade In Toxic Waste: A Selected Bibliography Of Sources
Deanna L. Lewis <lewis@winthrop.edu> and Ron Chepesiuk <chepesukr@winthrop.edu>
Dacus Library, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC 29733, USA. TEL: 803-323-2131.
Call it a toxic memorial, a monument to loose laws and fast money. This monument, tons of municipal
incinerator ash from Philadelphia, lies on a rural Haitian beach where it was dumped one night in 1986 by a
barge called the Khian Sea.
The ship had entered the port with a permit to unload fertilizer. Fertilizer? Hardly! This cargo contained
some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet--dioxins and furan and laced with heavy metals such as lead,
cadmium, mercury and arsenic. As workers began heaping the ash only yards from the incoming waves, one
crewman even stuffed his mouth with a handful of the flaky black cargo to prove its harmless nature. Nearly
one fourth of the 13,000 plus tons of waste had been unloaded from the barge before the Haitian
government intervened and ordered the ash reloaded onto the barge. But the Khian Sea disappeared under
the cover of darkness, leaving approximately 3,000 tons of toxic ash on Haiti's beach.
The Khian Sea returned to Philadelphia with the remainder of its deadly cargo. The ship spent the next two
years vainly seeking a dumping ground; it crossed the Atlantic, sailed around the coast of West Africa,
through the Mediterranean, down the Suez Canal and into the Indian Ocean. When it finally pulled into the
Singapore harbor it had a new name (the Pelicano), a new owner, and an empty hull.
No one is willing to take responsibility for this scandal. The city of Philadelphia blames the middleman who
blames the barge owner. The owner claims the ash was still on board when the barge was sold. The tangled
case went to court; finally in 1993, two executives of Coastal Carriers, operators of the Khian Sea, received
modest fines and prison sentences for dumping in the ocean without a permit. The legal battle is not over
yet. But how much longer will the ash sit on the beach, and who will remove it?
While the Khian Sea incident is one of the most notorious episodes of the international toxic waste trade, it
is by no means an isolated incident. In Koko, Nigeria, 3,800 tons of highly poisonous waste, including
potentially lethal polychlorinated byphenyls (PCBs), were found in drums at an open site; they were dumped
by a local businessman who forged his cargo papers and bribed Koko port officials. An American chemical
company sold 3,000 tons of fertilizer to the Bangladesh government, but 1,000 tons of ash from copper
smelting furnaces was mixed into the fertilizer before it was shipped. U.S. officials verified that this altered
fertilizer contained dangerous levels of lead and cadmium. In another case, several hundred mysterious
barrels washed up onto the Turkish shore. When curious locals opened some of the barrels, they suffered
from nausea and skin rashes. A few barrels even exploded. In fact, countless barrels of trouble have rolled
down the economic slope to a number of poor, less developed countries: black South Africa, the former East
Germany, China, Romania, Poland, Thailand, the Ukraine, and others.
The lure of foreign currency available in the international waste trade can be awfully tempting to cash-poor
developing countries. In Papua New Guinea, for example, the government of the province of Oro negotiated
a deal with a California firm to build a $38 million detoxification plant to process 600,000 metric tons of toxic
waste a month. The deal, had it gone through, would have generated an income approximately six times the
annual provincial budget.
Unfortunately, the importing countries, enticed by the prospects of multimillion dollar boosts to their
economies, often make these deals with little understanding of the health and environmental dangers
involved. Most developing countries have neither the technical expertise nor adequate facilities for safely
recycling or disposing of wastes.
Greenpeace observers have documented dozens of Third World recycling facilities which would not meet
safety or environmental standards in the industrialized world. The substandard, even primitive, facilities
contribute to the improper handling of hazardous wastes in these countries. In addition, many employees at
these facilities lack adequate protective equipment. As a result, recycling-industry workers develop a variety
of health problems. Laborers who melt down car batteries develop lead poisoning. Employees are exposed to
cancer-causing dioxins and other toxic chemicals which are created when electronics industry wastes are
burned. Workers are not protected from the toxic fumes created by the open burning of polyvinyl chlorides
(PVCs). Other problems include mercury poisoning, increased rates of birth defects and miscarriages, kidney
disease, cancer, and even death.
But the risks do not stop there. The air, water, and soil pollution that results from improper recycling
ventures endanger the whole community. Equally as bad, much of the hazardous wastes which are exported
to Third World countries ends up in their landfills where it creates the same ecological problems created by
landfills in industrialized countries.
Eager to avoid negative publicity as well as to circumvent laws against the dumping of toxic wastes, many
companies disguise their deadly exports with benign labels. Greenpeace estimates that 86% to 90% of all
hazardous waste shipments destined for developing countries are purported to be materials for recycling,
reuse, recovery, or humanitarian uses. These creative schemes have included selling waste materials as a
source of fuel, shipping contaminated soil to be used as fill dirt for road construction, billing plastic wastes
as raw materials for the construction industry, passing off aluminum waste as feed for livestock, and tagging
waste from a metals processing plant as micronutrients for soil enhancement (i.e. fertilizer).
The importing countries are discovering that toxic wastes by another name still don't smell any sweeter.
Indonesia was importing foreign plastics for recycling, but in 1992, after discovering that 40% of the
imported material was not recyclable and that approximately 10% of it was actually toxic, the government
banned any further importation of plastic waste.
It is ironic that stricter environmental protection in the West is contributing to the build up of dangerous
wastes in the Third World. The export of hazardous wastes from the highly industrialized Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries to lesser developed non-OECD nations has grown
dramatically in the last twenty-five years. Greenpeace estimates that in the twenty years before 1989
approximately 3.6 million tons of hazardous wastes were exported, but as much as 6662.6 million tons were
shipped in only five years between 1989 and 1993.
Some measures have been taken to stem this toxic tide. By 1993, 105 countries had banned toxic waste
imports. A number of regional agreements have been adopted or are under consideration. CARICOM, an
association of 13 Caribbean nations, and the Economic Community of Western African States (ECWAS) have
each approved regional bans on the importation of hazardous wastes. In 1991, the Organization of African
Unity (OAU) adopted one of the world's strongest statements against the toxic waste trade, the Bamako Convention on the Ban of the Import Into Africa and the Control ... of Hazardous Wastes Within Africa. In
the Mediterranean area, the terms of the Barcelona Convention, which would also ban hazardous waste
imports, is being completed. The Asian Waste Trade Coalition, an informal association of more than one
hundred Asian environmental and humanitarian organizations, is being formed to arrest the flow of
hazardous wastes into Asia.
The most significant international agreement, however, is the Basel Convention on the Control of the
Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and Their Disposal. This treaty, referred to as the Basel
Convention or the Basel Pact, provided the world with the first clear set of principles for controlling the
international trade in toxic waste. The UN sponsored this treaty which was adopted by 35 countries in 1989;
by March 1994, 65 nations had ratified the pact. (The U.S. has signed but not ratified the treaty; therefore,
it may send a nonvoting representative to each full Conference of the Parties of the Basel Convention.)
Critics of the Basel Convention blasted its weak stance against the toxic waste trade. The Convention asked,
rather than required, industrialized nations to cease shipping hazardous wastes to less developed countries.
In addition, wastes which were exported for recycling were excluded from even this modest request. No
wonder so many recycling schemes were devised by Western companies. Finally in March 1994, the second
Conference of the Parties of the Basel Convention adopted a full ban on all hazardous waste trade to
developing countries--a move applauded by Greenpeace and other environmental groups. This ban doesn't
take effect until December 31, 1997, however.
It is little wonder that the Third World has leveled charges of "toxic terrorism" and "garbage imperialism"
against the highly industrialized world. As one African official phrased it, the Third World fears that it is
being changed from "the industrialized world's backyard to its outhouse."
This selected bibliography has been compiled to aid researchers interested in studying this important
environmental problem. The bibliography covers the period from 1980 to 1993 and includes monographs,
journal articles, videos, dissertations, and United Nations and U.S. Government documents. It is arranged
by type of document, and within types, it is generally arranged alphabetically by the documents' author.
MONOGRAPHS
Costner, Pat. 1989. Waste Traders Target the Marshall Islands: A Greenpeace Report on Admiralty Pacific's
Proposal to Dispose of US Municipal Garbage in the Marshall Islands. Washington, D.C.: Greenpeace.
Danaher, Kevin. 1989. Toxic waste dumping in the third world. In Un-greening the Third World: Food,
Ecology and Power. London: Institute of Race Relations.
Greenpeace. [n.d.] Open Borders, Broken Promises: Privatization and Foreign Investment: Protecting the
Environment Through Contractual Clauses. London: Greenpeace UK.
[n.d.] Pacific Waste Invasion! The Many Schemes of Consolidated Environmental, Inc. Washington, D.C.
Greenpeace.
[n.d.] The Proposed Likiep RRS: Resource Recovery on Toxic Dumping. San Francisco, CA: Greenpeace.
....etc
