Hazardous waste management is a global issue. The international waste
trade emerged as a problem for the international community in the late
1970s and early 1980s. High disposal costs and more stringent regulations
in some countries, lower transportation costs, and the rise of freer trade
facilitated shipments of hazardous wastes across national borders for
disposal elsewhere. Available data on waste transfers are rarely exact.
It is, however, commonly accepted that about 10% of the 300-500 million
tons of hazardous wastes generated annually worldwide is shipped abroad.
Of this, roughly 80% is shipped between rich industrialized nations, members
of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Far
more controversially, significant quantities of wastes from the world’s
richer nations have been shipped to countries in Africa, Asia, and the
Caribbean and, increasingly, to East Central Europe. Several well-publicized
cases of waste ships in the late 1980s—such as the Khian Sea, which
left nearly 4,000 tons of toxic ash from Philadelphia on the beaches of
Haiti—led the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) to sponsor
the Basel Convention, signed in 1989 and instituted in May 1992.
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