Waste Crime and the Global Transference of Hazardous Substances: A Southern Green Perspective
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Waste Crime and the Global Transference of Hazardous Substances: A Southern Green Perspective Reece Walters1 · Maria Angeles Fuentes Loureiro2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The production of global solid waste has reached an all-time high with over two billion tons discarded each year—much of it burned, illegally dumped at sea, or buried in unregulated landfills (The World Bank 2019). The United Nations Environment Assembly has declared the current waste problem a “global crisis” (Parker 2019), with estimates predicting that the present rate will worsen threefold by 2050 based on existing consumption and disposal rates (Ellis 2018). The international community has responded with expanding laws and regulations that seek to ensure that waste is disposed of in safe, sustainable and renewable ways. Such measures, however, have increased the costs of disposal and have inadvertently enlarged illegal markets in dumping and transference (European Commission 2019). This article examines the ways in which transnational corporations have avoided the rising costs of lawful disposal by shipping their waste to poor countries in the Global South—often with devastating social and environmental impacts. This article draws on world systems theory (Wallerstein 2004) and political ecology (Bedford et al. 2019; Forsyth 2008) in order to embellish discourses in green criminology and southern criminology (Brisman et al. 2018; Carrington et al. 2018; Goyes 2019) and to examine critically the contemporary social and environmental harms generated by the illegal transference of solid and hazardous waste.
Introduction The recent discovery of plastic bags at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the Pacific Ocean at seven miles (11 km) below the ocean’s surface, combined with current efforts to remove almost twelve tons of garbage from Mount Everest, provide stark reminders of how pervasive and far-reaching the problem of human-produced waste has become (Schmidt 2019; South and Walters 2020; Street 2019). The predicament of waste * Reece Walters [email protected] Maria Angeles Fuentes Loureiro [email protected] 1
Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, 75 Pigdons Road, Waurn Ponds, Geelong, VC, Australia
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Department of Public Law, University of Coruna, Elina Campus, 15071 Coruña, Spain
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disposal—especially that which is hazardous to human health and the environment—has become both a global norm and a growing crisis (Galey 2019; ISWA 2016). Emerging from this phenomenon is an identifiable pattern of exploitation—namely, the transference of waste from wealthy countries in the Global North to poorer developing countries in the Global South (Carrington et al. 2018; Kenyon 2018), which often involves “illegal companies, disposal methods, terrorist and organised criminal groups” (Lambrechts and Hector 2016: 251) According to the World Bank, more than two billion tons of waste are produced annually and this is expected
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