Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Hello, and welcome to Trendlines, a podcast on international affairs by World Politics Review. I am Peter Dirie. 0:16 At first glance, when you throw something into your bin at home, it seems to be a quite local affair. 0:22 But depending on the waste in question, the contents of your bin can literally end up halfway around the world, in Turkey, Vietnam or Ghana. 0:31 Millions of tons of hazardous waste are exported across national borders each month, and a lot of it is going from industrialized nations with high environmental standards to developing countries that lack these safeguards. 0:45 But in recent years, consciousness of this trade and its adverse impact on people and the environment has grown. 0:51 Some exporting and importing countries have legislated to limit or even outright ban the movement of plastic and e-waste across borders. Time to take stock on how the war on waste is going. 1:02 For that, I'm joined today by Kate O'Neill. 1:05 Kate is a professor at the University of California Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, where she specializes in researching wastes and the circular economy and global environmental governance. 1:18 Kate, welcome to Trendlines. Thanks, Peter, for having me on. Excellent. So when we are talking about the global waste trade and its negative effects, what are the types of waste that we should be most concerned about? 1:35 How much of that is crossing national borders? And why is it something that needs to be treated differently from other goods that, uh, uh, get traded between nations? That's a, a great set of questions. 1:49 Uh, first of all, I've been studying the waste trade for, uh, over 20 years, and one of the things that's really changed is a shift from our very early concern about what we would-- first comes to mind when you think about hazardous waste, which would be barrels of toxic sludge, shiploads full of toxic ash. 2:10 All of those kinds of wastes used to be shipped around the world in the 1970s and '80s and became a real focal point for international action, and I think one that was very clearly understood and one that really had very few, uh, direct economic benefits for anybody involved. 2:30 These days, our perspective on hazardous or dangerous waste that cross borders has very much changed, and now we focus on, I think, what are essentially we see as consumer goods. 2:42 We see plastics, we see, uh, single-use plastics, for instance. 2:46 We see electronic wastes, iPhones, um, appliances, et cetera, paper, textiles, even used cars quite visibly crossing borders from the place where they were bought and used to a place essentially of disposal, but really not always. 3:06 These goods have afterlives, and quite often they are being, uh, recycled, refurbished by people in the country which is receiving them. 3:17 But quite often that's being done under dangerous conditions for labor and the environment, and also quite often these substances can be, these, these goods can be merely dumped. Now, it is very different from, 3:32 uh, regular goods that we trade across borders. It's partly because I think when people are getting rid of waste, they're paying someone else to take it away. 3:42 They're not, they're not, it's not being bought directly from them. And I think for those of us who are, say, in California and generating this waste, we just wanna get rid of it. 3:52 We're not very interested in who buys it, where it goes, and I think that creates an out-of-sight, out-of-mind perspective that really, that is, is not so helpful when thinking about how to control where our wastes go. 4:07 And w-what do we know about the magnitude of this phenomenon? So are there any reliable figures or estimates how much of different types of waste are, are traded, uh, globally? Uh, [laughs] short answer is no. 4:20 It's a very, very hard trade to quantify. Actually, with, with respect to some kinds of scrap, and that would include plastic to a great level, we actually do have trade data from UN Comtrade. 4:34 I don't have exact numbers at my fingertips, but over the first 20 years or so of the century, China accepted around 42% of the world's plastic recycling waste. And proportionately 4:51 of the amount of plastic waste we send for recycling, that is really a lot. 4:56 Overall, in terms of plastic waste, it's actually fairly small, but its significance lies in the fact that it is traded across borders, and we need to know, um, and often change what's, how it's dealt with or really understand how it's dealt with across those borders. 5:14 Again, for electronic waste, the estimates vary a very great deal. The high estimates that you hear are not based on very accurate data. It's more on observational, but it's still a not insignificant amount. 5:29 I- I'm sorry that that is very, [laughs] very imprecise, but it is, it's one of the things that really can plague this particular field. 5:38 Is, is all of this trade kind of aboveboard, or is, is part of the problem with getting actual numbers also that, that some of this is happening illegally or is, is not declared in the, in the right ways or in, going through the proper channels, so to speak? 5:54 Um, a lot of it is illegal. The, the plastic, uh, that China was taking in, not illegal. Those were aboveboard most part, for the most part. I'm not s-- and smuggling certainly exists. 6:06 But plastic waste, until China really, uh, cracked down on, were legal, and I think that's something that people don't always recognize when it comes to thinking about the waste trade, that it's not always illegal. 6:18 However, more and more countries are banning the imports of plastic waste. 6:22 Many countries have banned the imports of hazardous waste a long time ago, and many countries have ostensibly banned the import of electronic wastes. 6:32 Now, it is very-- it's not always easy to, um, implement or enforce these rules, and there are many ways to get around it. 6:41 For example, with electronics, used electronics or e-waste were often labeled for charity or for recycling, and that makes them not subject to international laws and often, um, not subject to domestic laws either. 6:57 So it's, it's a gray area. But I think ultimately what it comes down to is public perceptions of taking on this risk and the fact that most communities, 7:13 not all, but a lot of communities are, are opposed to this and feel like they have very little control over what's entering their communities. So I think all of us produce waste kind of by necessity. 7:26 We all know kind of in what circumstances in our lives this happens and how we, how we go about disposing of this waste that, that is of, of course, quite different from country to country or from situation to situation. 7:37 But that end of the journey is something that we can, I think, all quite, quite well identify with or, or know, know a bit about. On the other end, you said this, this is a bit out of sight, out of mind. 7:50 So my question would be, who are the people and who are the communities that receive this waste if it is exported? What is that situation looking like? 8:02 Well, I think first thing is that the economies, the countries that these mostly go to, especially e-wastes, plastic wastes, are not the poorest of countries. Uh, these are countries that have their emerging economies. 8:17 They do not have lots of land to just dump things. They're not just exploiting the cheapest labor. So I think that's a clue that there are businesses involved. However, 8:28 having said that, what happens on the ground really does vary. 8:32 So sometimes, and some people would argue more often than not, these wastes are going to communities of repairers and, and communities of sometimes they're called waste pickers or refurbishers. 8:45 And they tend to be in, uh, what's called the informal waste management sector, which in fact, generally speaking, not always around the trade, there are around twenty million people in the world employed in the informal waste sector, collecting, refurbishing, disposing of, selling on wastes of all different kinds, and primarily, uh, but not exclusively in the Global South. 9:10 So those are the communities that are typically receiving this waste for recycling. And sometimes they are sort of thriving communities where they have markets for the goods they are selling. 9:22 They have some conditions under w- under safety, but quite often they're not, and quite often we don't really have a way of checking to see how, 9:32 how the, the substance is impacting, the waste is impacting their communities. Now, when it comes to plastics, there was, uh, a really good documentary that came out of China called Plastic China. 9:45 The director is Wang Jiulang, who is known for some fairly subversive documentaries on waste and other environmental problems in China. 9:53 And his documentary was really revealed how plastics were being dealt with in China, regardless of whether or not they were used and recycled once they had entered the country. 10:05 But the fact that they were being taken apart often by family workers in small, like, family-run scrap yards where everybody lived, and this documentary very clearly showed a lot of plastic with West like, like magazine wrappers with Western addresses and all of these kinds of plastics that showed they came from overseas, and the fact that, uh, these were having very serious health impacts on the people who were dismantling and reprocessing these on a very small scale. 10:31 So that's what you see kind of replicated around the world in these communities. 10:36 It's something in between the sort of desolate wastelands of people roaming through smoke and burning plastic, but it's also not the kind of refurbishing, repairing workshops that are formally managed that have health and safety requirements that would kind of be the ideal in this situation. 10:56 Obviously, if, if businesses are involved, if, if there's some form of industry or industriousness involved, then the-- there's obviously people earning their living doing this kind of work. 11:10 So the monetary motivation is, is very clear. But what I'd be interested in is to what extent are these communities at risk from this work, from this kind of work? And to what extent are they aware of that risk? 11:25 And how are they trying to mitigate this? And, and where would they need support to manage this kind of, of, of risk that comes along with, with working with waste? 11:35 Yes, these communities are well aware of the risks that are posed, I think, to their health from, say, inhalation of small particles, of being exposed to, in e-waste we, we talk about the way that plastic shells or covers are being burnt and, of computers and being burnt and, um, sending off dioxins. 11:56 There's lots of ways in which human health can be directly, um, impacted. 12:01 And also the residue, the final residue from these dismantled wastes will often leach into groundwater or into environments affecting what, what the communities eat and what they can grow, all sorts of impacts. So 12:17 those are there. The people are aware of them. There's been- 12:23 Significant mobilization around waste globally, and that actually, I think the civil society aspect of this with the growth of NGOs, watchdog organizations, but also organizations of waste pickers themselves, have been quite instrumental in highlighting the risks posed by waste and suggesting ways to deal with them. 12:49 And these NGOs, uh, often reach out transnationally to, uh, similar NGOs or supportive NGOs in other parts of the world. 12:58 GAIA, which used to be the Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives, which now frames itself as a zero waste organization globally, has very strong connections with waste picker organizations globally and has been very active around the trade. 13:14 And so you have these models of organization where, where you have and often, uh, quite powerfully placed civil society actors within those countries. 13:23 So it's not just reaching overseas, but say, reaching to the, uh, influential NGOs in the country concerned, that you have quite powerful representation of waste groups, of waste worker groups and communities. 13:38 This does not always, uh, result in direct action, but I-- it's been-- One thing about waste is it's really galvanizing. People know about it. They care about it. 13:48 It's something that they feel very clearly, uh, that they need to support activism against its har- most harmful impact. So, 13:58 uh, yeah, there, there's a thriving global civil society around, around waste and waste pickers that is, uh, quite fascinating to, uh, study and observe. 14:08 So what has the government reaction to, to this phenomenon looked like? I, I think a couple of countries have, at least for some time, more or less banned the import of, of waste. You mentioned China. 14:22 I think Turkey had a ban for at least a, a few years. 14:26 If the governments are aware of the communities that, uh, depend on waste imports to, to earn their livelihood, w-what is the motivation to outright ban this kind of trade? Mm-hmm. 14:39 And apart from outright bans, what other legal mechanisms do governments employ to regulate the export of, or import of, of waste? 14:48 And what has the, the track record of these measures been in, in managing this, this trade and the, uh, the adverse impacts of it? Let's see. So national measures to stop the waste trade have almost never worked. 15:00 Certainly outright bans have cut waste imports, but it's never actually stopped it. 15:09 The economic interests are too powerful, and often, I hate to say it, but maybe it's possible that some government officials receive a little bit of payment for importing the waste, shocking as-- or allowing the waste in, shocking as that might sound. 15:25 I, I started my career studying the UK's imports of hazardous waste, and the UK government in the early 1990s attempted to ban those imports and failed. 15:35 So if a country like the UK can't do it, then it's really hard for other countries to do it. But they do impose bans. 15:41 Turkey, I think, actually does currently have a, a, an import ban on plastic scrap, but ironically, it's now one of the world's largest importers of [chuckles] that scrap. 15:53 Plastic scrap is still well and truly moving around the world in much lower quantities. China actually can quite effectively close off its markets. 16:01 It did that for e-waste, although I can add that although it might not-- it might look good, it doesn't mean that China's stopped processing plastic waste. It now has plenty of its own. 16:12 So there's kind of been a substitution effect, but that's a little by the by. So I think national legislation is really important, and it can send a message. 16:22 It's most easily, uh, regulated at points of entry to a country that's an importer or points of exit from exporting countries, and that depends on a lot of, uh, different capacity. 16:37 So that suggests to me that bans are not the right way to go, and perhaps the better direction to take is, well, considering that wastes are likely to continue to cross borders in different ways or forms, and in fact, in many instances, that's the only way they will ever be recycled and reused because, say, in the United States, we have outsourced our manufacturing as well as our recycling capacity. 17:06 So really, if we stopped exporting, nothing would get recycled. Eh, which is, you know, we might have another set of impacts up the line in terms of product design, but those, those are fairly far off. 17:18 But so I think a lot of people are thinking more, "Well, how do we create, uh, say, a fair trade system in scrap?" And that's quite an inventive way to think about this. 17:30 Others are thinking, "Well, how do we stop producing waste, particularly plastics, in the first place?" 17:37 And then in terms of international law, we've seen, uh, some interestingly sort of unexpected developments around plastics and the plastic trade over the past couple of years. 17:48 And to talk specifically about plastics and not other kinds of, of waste for a while, because what also the global community has been incredibly aware of the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans and its impact on ocean wildlife, and also the way that plastics have infiltrated the food chain from the very base of the food chain up to the highest level predators, which would include human beings. 18:14 And so we are finding plastics throughout human bodies as well as in the depths of the oceans. There are a number of different options. One was, well, let's have a new treaty on plastics. 18:23 Another was, well, how do we kind of incorporate plastics into- The Law of the Sea and the different rules and regulations under that. 18:32 But what in fact happened was that plastics were incorporated into a treaty called the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and Their Disposal. 18:44 The Basel Convention is one of those international environmental treaties that was, it was first signed in, in 1989, and its goal to control or manage 18:57 the hazardous waste trade was soon superseded by a goal to ban the waste trade from northern countries to southern countries. But it's never been seen as, as very effective. 19:08 In some ways it's been a little bit on the shelf as far as global environmental agreements go. It took a long while to implement that ban. It came into effect a couple of years back. 19:18 Uh, but it suddenly became what a lot of activist organizations and also supportive countries, Norway being the lead one, started to realize was the venue to tackle 19:32 transboundary movements, the trade in plastics, and a way to designate plastics as a form of hazardous waste. 19:41 So in late 2019, the, what's called the Norway Amendment or the Plastics Amendment was adopted by the parties to the Basel Convention, and this has the effect of essentially controlling the movement, managing the movement of plastic waste, requiring very stringent sort of import permission rules and, uh, prior informed consent of many different kinds of plastic. 20:08 And in particular, bans plastic waste that could be, that is contaminated with hazardous chemicals. 20:16 So this has been a really interesting and very high profile and, uh, you know, slightly problematic way to control the plastics scrap trade, but certainly really inventive and really high profile on the part of, of activists and the countries that support that. 20:34 Interesting. So I, I'm based in Germany. We just got a new governing coalition that includes the Green Party. 20:40 There is a lot of activity and, and urgency around the topic of climate change, which, and more and more explicitly includes the question of waste management and plastics- Mm-hmm... in particular. Mm-hmm. 20:50 And I'm, I'm asking myself a bit, the topic of recycling has now been advocated for and, and there's been been pressure around being built of, to do more recycling for, for decades now, basically. 21:02 And now with, with the issue of climate change, there's kind of a new urgency around this. So waste should either be reused, recycled, it can be transformed into energy through in- incineration. Why is waste 21:18 still, uh, something that we export and not completely use within our own societies because it's, it benefits us in, in some way? 21:29 And is that something that you see coming up in the future as, as, as throwing something away becomes more and more, uh, literally wasteful process? Yeah. 21:40 Waste, I think not many people realize the direct connections that you just brought up between waste and climate change. 21:47 That a lot of different kinds of waste from biological waste clearly produces methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas, and that might be food waste or, um, farm waste. 21:57 Uh, but at the same time, plastics, not obvious contributors to climate change, certainly can as being sort of part of, of giving off gases in its rate end of life process, but more importantly in terms of its production. 22:11 It's being produced by the petrochemicals industry, in other words, the fossil fuel industry, so intrinsically 22:18 its, its production and use, and particularly throwing it away and increasing its production and use and channeling it into single-use disposable foodware and other items, is an incredible contributor to climate change, and I think that's something that people are finally taking on board. 22:36 Uh, so how countries should think about recycling as part of this process is, is, I believe, important because it enables the reuse of many items. 22:48 And here I'm thinking, you know, fixable items like furniture or other things that are thrown away that, that we can repair and reuse. 22:56 With respect to plastics, it's a lot harder because you try and recycle it, and it will only be effectively recycled if there's a buyer for that recycled product, the pellets or whatever comes out of the plastic recycling process. 23:11 So no matter how much we encourage households to recycle, unless something happens to it and it's actually bought and turned into something else, no one's gonna bother doing it. 23:21 The companies that buy it that have to reprocess it are gonna be like, "No, we have to throw it away. In fact, we have to pay tipping fees to do that." We really can't just increase recycling. 23:31 I mean, this is something that we hear calling wish cycling on the part of consumers that like, "Oh, this might be recycled. Let me put it into the recycling bin." 23:40 And that's actually the opposite of what they should be doing if they are in doubt. They should be throwing it away in case they contaminate a whole load of recycling. That's a little bit by the by. Um, 23:51 as far as the trade goes, I think that I'm really glad people are more aware of it, and I, I have a German example from the '70s and '80s when indeed I think the Green Party was coming into power. 24:05 But West Germany, before unification, had a deal with East Germany where it would just simply dump its hazardous waste over into a landfill called Schoenberg in East Germany, and subsequently became directly responsible for its cleanup. 24:19 But so even sometimes an environmentally friendly country can sweep these, these toxic behaviors under the rug. In other words, out of sight, out of mind. Let's just get rid of the waste and put it over the borders. 24:32 So I'm, I'm glad that's ended, although I think a lot of countries in Europe are still exporting plastic scrap. 24:39 But I think the biggest thing that countries, especially in Europe, because, uh, Europeans, uh, the EU is so much more advanced in terms of the rules that it can make and the environmental principles that it has, has 24:53 got incredibly powerful legislation for simply reducing single-use plastics. 24:58 Everything from straws to damaged fishnets, um, in the ocean that are very much a huge proportion of, of ocean plastics, especially in terms of weight. 25:10 And I think that's where areas like Europe, Germany, other EU members, even the UK, if it can do this, should be pushing towards designing plastics out 25:21 of the economy circulation, and also similar measures for electronics to make sure that we are starting to push back on this whole idea of planned obsolescence, that we need to be able to repair and continue to use our electronics well beyond the time they are allotted by their, their, their producers these days. 25:43 You know, like, couple of years or every two, three years, you have to buy a new laptop because it won't update, that sort of thing. 25:49 And so I, I think that's where in Europe the focal point has to be, is recycling is good. 25:54 It should continue, but it should only be one of several tools, uh, one of which is building markets for recycled, um, products, but the other is really trying to build a more circular economy that produces less waste, and to very much cut back on our reliance on plastics, most easily on single-use plastics. 26:15 And is that approach also something that's feasible on a more global level and cou- could be structured in a way to take into account both the interests of, of the producers of the waste, but also of those communities who live off processing the waste? 26:33 I think it's difficult but possible. I, I, as I said, I think a lot of people care about the issue of waste. 26:40 Uh, I do believe that making waste workers visible and their communities visible and their livelihoods visible is important to stop 26:50 what some of the trends that have been happening, which have been for governments or, um, transnational companies employed by governments or allowed by governments to go in and, and sweep people off these landfills or trash areas, these urban mines, as they're called, in order to either extract those resources themselves, for example, valuable metals out of e-waste and, and retain all the profit for themselves, or indeed to do things like cap a landfill, uh, to get offset credits by storing or burning the methane within that. 27:24 So there's a lot of ways in which we need to really highlight both the need to reduce these very damaging wastes, at the same time protecting the livelihood and protecting the people who collect it and use it, because otherwise it's gonna pile up. 27:40 Now, you've got then the p- problem of plastic still very much features into that because, as we know, the single-use plastics that we used can't easily be reused or recycled. 27:51 So we've got to figure out what's going into that stream. 27:55 If we start thinking about our telephones or our cars, I, I use electronics as an easier example, not of things we're throwing away, but things we're passing on to the next stage of their lives, then that necessitates, uh, some concern about how easily they, and safely they can be repaired or reused for the next person who is buying them and using them. 28:20 Kate O'Neill, thank you so much for joining me today. All right. Thank you very much. And thank you, dear listener. If you found this conversation interesting, you would probably enjoy more of Trendlines. 28:30 You can subscribe in any podcast app of your choice, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you can of course listen to old episodes and find our show notes on worldpoliticsreview.com/podcast. 28:43 My guest today was Kate O'Neill. My name is Peter Durie, and I am the producer and editor of Trendlines, and we are published by World Politics Review. Have a great week, and until next time on Trendlines. 28:54 [upbeat music]
