The great escape
Let’s think back to the post on the Khian Sea Waste Disposal Incident, and the creation of the Basel Convention international treaty to stop transboundary movement of e-waste. Hopefully, that’s helped to reduce e-waste exportation from developed to developing countries, right?
Wrong.
Even despite legislation such as the Basel Convention, the movement of e-waste from developed to developing nations continues even today. By exploiting legislative loopholes, countries have found “innovative” ways to bypass such regulations and continue shipping their e-waste to developing nations. For instance, one of the amendments to the Basel Convention permits the trade of second-hand or used electrical and electronic equipment (UEEE) or recycling materials. This was added with the intention of increasing access to technology for the underprivileged, but has however backfired.
The Basel Action Network (BAN) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to fight against toxic trade and prevent prevent pollution dumping in underprivileged areas (Basel Action Network, n.d.).
A group of researchers from MIT partnered with the BAN to test this legislative loophole (Carcamo, 2018). They planted hidden trackers in 17 cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors and disposed of the monitors in e-waste collection sites in Los Angeles, California. According to the researchers, 6 of the 17 monitors were smuggled to Asian countries like Malaysia and China. This highlights how countries have found ways to successfully get around international laws policing e-waste and avoid complying with them.
By exploiting the amendment in the Basel Convention, e-waste thus continues to be exported for disposal in countries outside its generation. According to a report by the UNODC (2013), an estimated 8 million tons of e-waste gets smuggled into China every year. The e-waste is channelled through places like Hong Kong, which is a free port and has become a central hub for e-waste trafficking. The BAN has successfully tracked shipments of CRTs which managed to evade customs control in Hong Kong and were stored in the New Territories area in Hong Kong, before eventually being transported across the border via trucks (UNODC, 2013).
It is apparent that legislation like the Basel Convention remains inadequate in preventing the trade of e-waste between developed and developing nations. While organisations like the BAN have spearheaded crackdowns on such illegal activities, this is clearly not enough to tackle the massive amount of e-waste that continues to be smuggled illegally across the world. It is time to re-evaluate whether the Basel Convention and other forms of related legislation should be updated and reviewed to address this issue.
References
Basel Action Network. (n.d.). About us. Retrieved 18 March 2022, from https://www.ban.org/about-us.
Carcamo, A. M. (2018). How to combat electronic waste trafficking? The path may be tracking. Yale Environment Review. Retrieved 18 March 2022, from https://environment-review.yale.edu/how-combat-electronic-waste-trafficking-path-may-be-tracking.
Purchase, D., Abbasi, G., Bisschop, L., Chatterjee, D., Ekberg, C., Ermolin, M., Fedotov, P., Garelick, H., Isimekhai, K., Kandile, N. G., Lundström, M., Matharu, A., Miller, B. W., Pineda, A., Popoola, O. E., Retegan, T., Ruedel, H., Serpe, A., Sheva, Y., . . . Wong, M. H. (2020). Global occurrence, chemical properties, and ecological impacts of e-wastes (IUPAC technical report). Pure and Applied Chemistry, 92(11), 1733-1767. https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2019-0502.
UNODC. (2013). Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment – East Asia and the Pacific. Retrieved 18 March 2022, from https://www.unodc.org/documents/toc/Reports/TOCTA-EA-Pacific/TOCTA_EAP_c09.pdf.
