Round 1: First Wold rips Third World of raw materials. Round 2: First World buries Third World in trash.

Someone brought up the issue of garbage shipped internationally in my Gender, Justice, and Sustainability class. I didn't have a clue of anything related to the topic, so I did a quick online research and here is what I have found.

There are apparently some situations of legal shipping of trash from Europe to developing countries to be recycled by authorized companies that are capable and accountable. However, there are also millions of tons of trash shipped illegally, to non-authorized recipient companies that just burn it or put it on landfills. This stuff has been going on for a while, as developed countries run out of space and options for the immense amounts of trash they produce. However, it became a huge industry when Europe passed regulations that all trash must be recycled or disposes of in a safe way, most dumping in landfills has been prohibited, and safe incineration is expensive and heavily taxed. That became an expensive responsibility for European companies, so they have opted to ship it abroad instead. Thus, in Europe, paper, plastic, metal, and electronics can be exported for recycling abroad. The U.S. has no such laws, so trash can be exported anywhere to whomever regardless of what they will do with it, since we have no regulations within our borders that mandate recycling and safe disposal anyway.

However, there are also international regulations outlawing the exportation of toxic wastes. According to a NY times article on the topic , titled "Smuggling Europe Wastes to Poor Countries" by Elisabeth Rosental (very interseting by the way: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/science/earth/27waste.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1) ports are constantly stopping such illegal cargos. In the case of legal exporting-recycling, I found an example of a woman who founded a company based on creating packaging material in China by recycling U.S. cardboard from Los Angeles. (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003544422_zhang280.html). It has made her very rich. It's a good example of capitalism. I guess some money and jobs are flowing back to China because of this. However, there is also the matter of the energy spent in transporting the cardboard, which monetarily speaking is obviously low enough to still allow for a profit. Nonetheless, I have been reading Vandana Shiva’s work, and learnt to look at the bigger picture and include costs that our market economy does not take into account (such as soil depletion, air and water pollution, sustainability, and the energy spent in creating input materials or substance). Thus, I must point out that we should also acknowledge that long distance transportation would be one less environmental cost if the waste was recycled in situ.

A good example to look at for the transportation issue is the fact that trash is currently shipped from Hawaii (where they have apparently run out of space for landfills) to Washington State, to a Seattle based company (http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2009/09/hawaii_trash_headed_for_northw.html). So, instead of trying to produce less trash to start with, to package less, to use biodegradable materials, to use, and to find viable ways of recycling and incinerating locally, Hawaii ships trash to the U.S. West Coast, and the U.S. West Coast ships trash to China. It would seem to me the only ones that truly benefit from that are the cargo companies and the oil giants who fuel them up. Oh, and the shareholders of the companies involved! That is after all much of the way in which economic “capital” has been created in the past centuries: by moving goods around the world. Raw materials were retrieved from developing countries, shipped to industrialized countries where they were transformed into products, which were shipped by to the original country and other regions of the world for a profit. Money was the fictional profit created by this processes. However, it doesn’t take much to see that it is not sustainable, especially when it depends on irreplaceable natural resources. “Growth” will continue and some will become richer and richer at the expense of others’ poverty only for long enough for us to drawn in our trash and man-made contaminating non0degradable chemicals, and deplete the natural resource upon which humanity and all other living beings depend on.

Going back to the cases in which Third World individuals and companies find an opportunity to capitalize on other countries’ trash, the truth is for every case of legal somewhat positive trash entrepreneurship, there seems to be many more cases of unregulated dumping of millions of tons of trash from U.S. and Europe into landfills in other countries, from dirty pipes to old computers to household trash. Construction debris and other wastes containing asbestos, mercury, and other toxic agents are dismantled by people, sometimes children, at high risk for their help, in Third World countries, where it is often burnt or left to rot, polluting air, soil, and water (Rosental’s article in the NY Times cited above). If that is not imperialism, I don’t what you’d call it.

European and American companies are tempted to export their waste, legally or illegally, because it is “cheaper” than dispensing of it appropriately according to their own regulations. Also, Third World countries may see an opportunity for profit by buying waste and recycling it into new material to be sold, or by charging fees for “taking care” of other countries’ wastes – even if that means contaminating and putting the health of their people at risk. This is a perfect example of what Vandana Shiva repeats over and over in her books: the potential or real economic benefits of these situations are fictional, they only exist from the point of view of a capitalist system, they only hold true if we choose to look exclusively at the monetary income and costs. The truth is, if we, as humans and citizens of the planet, allow for waste to be disposed of in polluting ways in Third World countries, then the regulations against it in Europe have done nothing to help the overall health of our planet. Furthermore, Third World countries continue to carry the heaviest responsibility for the wrongdoing of developed countries, to be abused and exploited, to carry with the consequences of the trash produced by the few who are well off. Ultimately humanity and planet Earth are paying a much higher cost by exporting trash than by recycling it and safely disposing of it locally. While the latter option might be more expensive money wise, exporting trash adds the pollution of long-distance transportation, furthers the disproportions of developed vs developing world relations – and ultimately pollutes the air, the water, and the soil we all share just as much, or worse.