Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management

4 The Basel Convention and Hazardous Waste Management

4 The Basel Convention and Hazardous Waste Management This chapter analyzes chemicals policy and management issues related to hazardous wastes. Hazardous chemicals are released into the environment when hazardous wastes are inappropriately stored, transported, recycled, or destroyed. The hazardous waste issue has been on the international agenda for decades, accompanied by a string of high-profile cases of illegal dumping. In one of the most notorious examples, the cargo ship Khian Sea went to sea in 1986 in search of a disposal site for 14,000 metric tons of toxic incinerator ash (labeled as fertilizers), which originated from Philadelphia and contained high levels of lead and cadmium. The ship spent almost two years at sea in search of a place to discard its cargo. It sailed to five continents and changed its name twice, before dumping 4,000 tons of ash on a beach in Haiti and the remaining 10,000 tons at sea somewhere between the Suez Canal and Singapore (Krueger 1999, Jaffe 1988, Millman 1988). Many more current examples demonstrate the multitude of legal, political , and practical problems regarding hazardous waste transfers. For example, during the night of August 19, 2006, the Greek-owned and Panama-registered vessel Probo Koala, chartered by the Dutch-based company Trafigura, dumped near Abidjan 500 tons of “a fuming mix of petrochemicals and caustic soda”that originated from the Mediterranean region (Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical Series 2006; Environment News Service 2006). This illegal dumping caused several deaths and severe health effects in tens of thousands of nearby people. In response to this disaster, local civil servants were fired, and the Dutch firm agreed to pay $200 million in compensation to the Ivorian government amid allegations that the dumped waste was not cleaned up 64 Chapter 4 quickly enough, continuing to expose local residents to great risk (Bryant 2007). Specifically, this chapter examines the creation and implementation of the Basel Convention, which sets out to minimize the generation of hazardous wastes and to control and reduce their transboundary movement. The treaty targets the transport and disposal of chemicals when they fall under the treaty definition of a hazardous waste, or when they are present in other kinds of articles that meet this definition. The chapter highlights several issues associated with the formation of actor coalitions and policy diffusion that are of importance to the effectiveness of the Basel Convention and the chemicals regime: the incorporation of the PIC principle for managing trade and subsequent efforts to strengthen controls; the development of technical guidelines for waste management; the establishment and operation of regional centers supporting implementation and capacity building; and the creation of mechanisms for liability, monitoring, and compliance. The chapter begins with an analysis of global wastes issues and related human health and environmental concerns, followed by a discussion of the development of early, voluntary policy responses to managing the international trade in hazardous wastes and how these initiatives were linked with efforts to regulate the trade in hazardous chemicals. Next, the chapter examines actor coalitions and policy issues during the negotiations of the Basel Convention, which institutionalized a legal framework for addressing the generation and management of hazardous wastes. This is continued by an examination of the implementation of the Basel Convention , including how governance and actor linkages with other policy processes shape activities under the convention. The chapter ends with a few remarks on the long-term effectiveness of the Basel Convention and its role in multilevel governance under the chemicals regime. Global Waste Issues The generation of hazardous wastes has increased sharply since the 1970s, and it continues to grow. Estimates of actual waste levels differ extensively, however. This variation in estimates stems in part from the absence of a globally agreed-on definition of what is considered a waste, as well as what constitutes a hazardous waste (Kummer 1995). There are The Basel Convention and Hazardous Waste Management 65 also large data gaps about the generation of hazardous wastes in many countries (UNEP 2002b). UNEP estimates an annual global generation of 150 million metric tons (UNEP 2002c), but some experts put the figure as high as 500 million metric tons (Kummer 1995). Generally a waste is an unwanted by-product of industrial and household activity (O’Neill 2000). Under the Basel Convention, “wastes are substances or objects which are disposed or are intended to be disposed or are required to be disposed of by...