This has culminated in calls for a total ban on waste exports, major improvements to a broken recycling system, as well as a significant reduction in plastic packaging use. In 1991 multiple developing nations in Africa met to discuss their dissatisfaction with the Basel Convention in regulating the dumping of hazardous waste into their countries, and designed a ban on the import of hazardous wastes into their countries called the Bamako Convention. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, usually known as the Basel Convention, is an international treaty that plays a crucial role in regulating the transnational movement of hazardous wastes. The Basel Convention was created in 1989 and attempts to regulate the hazardous waste trade, specifically to prevent the dumping of hazardous waste from more developed countries into less developed countries.

There was growing evidence of what Greenpeace labelled “toxic colonialism” or “waste colonialism” . A British company, Thor Chemicals, transported mercury waste from the United States and Europe to South Africa. It was incinerated near what was then a “homeland” for Blacks during the Apartheid era (O’Neill, forthcoming).

T.V. Reed, Professor of English and American Studies at Washington State University, argues that the correlation between historical colonialism and toxic colonialism is based on perceptions of indigenous land as ‘waste’. He argues that Western cultures have deemed indigenous land as “underdeveloped” and “empty”, and that the people inhabiting it are therefore less “civilized”. Using the historical premises of colonialism, toxic colonialism reproduces these same arguments by defining Global South land as expendable for Western wastes.

When the exporting country has reason to believe that the particular wastes will not be handled in an environmentally sound manner. In the 1980s, waste generators faced higher costs of legal disposal in developed countries due to tightening regulatory regimes. Add in the ability for ships to operate under a flag of convenience (a business practice when a ship’s owners register a merchant ship in a country other than their own), and conditions were ripe for less scrupulous waste disposal companies to make the waste disappear… by any means. The lower unit value stimulated export demand in countries other than China, but was not sufficient enough to offset the decreased demand in Trung Quốc. Also, these new markets started restricting the imports of waste as well and tightening contaminant standards. The U.S. generation of plastic waste has increased tremendously since 1960 as shown in Table 1.

Even though the Basel Convention’s parties adopted a “provisional” set of guidelines in 2017 to help countries safely manage e-waste and understand the risks, countries still disagree on what is waste and what is a product destined for recycling or reuse. 1Domestic treatment says that like-products cannot be discriminated by a policy favoring the domestic good at the cost of the imported substitute. Companies and/or to conduct evaluations of the customers’ waste stream in order to recommend cost efficient means of waste disposal or other changes. Solid waste management is a universal issue affecting every single person in the world. Used electronics travel murky routes populated by numerous recyclers and brokers working in an unregulated market, devoid of government certification programs. These companies incur tremendous overhead expenses—to recycle a single monitor in the United States, for instance, can cost up to $15.

In 2018, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc slashed monthly trash import quotas by 90 percent and announced that his government would stop issuing licenses to import waste. In 2018, Thailand banned imports of electronic waste, which is often highly toxic, and announced a goal to end imports of plastic waste by 2021. These decisions followed public pressure to crack down on imports of contaminated trash. Tensions flared between the Philippines and Canada last year over approximately 2,700 tons of mislabeled Canadian waste.

The production of more dry-recyclable waste could be considered one reason developed nations are more likely to export their waste. wastetrade is easy to see why waste trade has become so prevalent if waste production is considered with the legislative hurdles in developed nations which have more robust legal frameworks for managing waste and the economic advantage offered to developing countries by importing solid waste. In the wake of UNEA 5.2, as global leaders work towards an international legally binding agreement to end plastic pollution, the issue of plastic waste trade is largely ignored.

This upsurge in hazardous waste particularly endangers developing countries that are destinations for waste exports via the global waste trade. As an alternative to managing waste in-country, developed nations have tended to export their waste to developing countries across Asia and Africa. The global waste trade was valued at $98.3 billion to importing countries from 1988 to 2016.