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Of course, the discards weren’t always processed or used in a way that conforms to health, safety, and environmental standards found in many developed countries

Of course, the discards weren’t always processed or used in a way that conforms to health, safety, and environmental standards found in many developed countries. But it’s difficult to argue that somebody is dumping something on a poor country when a person in the poor country is paying for the stuff. If someone is engaging in environmentally destructive production in a third world country using materials from the first world, one might say the "externalities" of first world production are being imported to that third world nation. This is similar to way rare earth production shifted to China when other industrialized nations regulated it's environmental impact. Which is to say the arguments here seem like a collection of double talk. "Denying agency" is the sort of complaint that can justify all sort of claims. Edit: just broadly, a big part of the article is about exploding the story that the first world dumps its trash on the third world. He dramatizes the view, denigrates the view, gives some details intended to debunk the view but doesn't really say what happen instead. "It gets bought" doesn't seem like enough detail, to say the least. Plastic scraps go to Malaysia - are burned, actually recycled, what? If one is exploding other's myths, it seems like an alternative story would be merited.

notahacker 8y ago
This. I mean, it's difficult to argue somebody isn't dumping something on a poor country when that poor country legislates to ban it for health and safety reasons (and some exports continue with falsified manifests...). And as highly sophisticated as the operation might be to export car batteries to villages in developing countries where they can set up cottage industries re-smelting them for their lead, I'm not persuaded by the idea the organizations running the exports deserve more agency than kids dying of lead poisoning, and I'm entirely unconvinced by the author's argument that it's emotional attachment to cars we've assumed are going to be dismantled for scrap domestically that makes us queasy about the whole thing. A lot of the time the waste is being exported in ships that would otherwise be empty, and the exporters are evading expensive legal disposal costs and massive taxes (a lot of organised unlawful dumping takes place closer to home of course, but there are costs and risks of doing that at scale too). And whilst I'm all in favour of taking a nuanced view of low income countries trying to make money from recycling, I also refuse to believe that someone who has written two books on the global waste trade over two decades of research has never heard of any incidents which don't fit his narrative of waste exports invarably being legitimately purchased by informed customers (really? he hasn't heard of the Khian Sea?)

notahacker 8y ago

This. I mean, it's difficult to argue somebody isn't dumping something on a poor country when that poor country legislates to ban it for health and safety reasons (and some exports continue with falsified manifests...). And as highly sophisticated as the operation might be to export car batteries to villages in developing countries where they can set up cottage industries re-smelting them for their lead, I'm not persuaded by the idea the organizations running the exports deserve more agency than kids dying of lead poisoning, and I'm entirely unconvinced by the author's argument that it's emotional attachment to cars we've assumed are going to be dismantled for scrap domestically that makes us queasy about the whole thing. A lot of the time the waste is being exported in ships that would otherwise be empty, and the exporters are evading expensive legal disposal costs and massive taxes (a lot of organised unlawful dumping takes place closer to home of course, but there are costs and risks of doing that at scale too). And whilst I'm all in favour of taking a nuanced view of low income countries trying to make money from recycling, I also refuse to believe that someone who has written two books on the global waste trade over two decades of research has never heard of any incidents which don't fit his narrative of waste exports invarably being legitimately purchased by informed customers (really? he hasn't heard of the Khian Sea?)