Contesting toxics: struggles against hazardous waste

(REVIEW ESSAY) Modern industrial processes have produced goods and chemicals on an

unprecedented scale. Directly and indirectly, they and the increasingly

numerous consumers of those goods have also produced prodigious and ever

increasing quantities of waste, and much of that waste consists of novel

compounds whose toxicity has only recently been recognised. Disposing of

waste has become an ever greater problem. The simple expedient of burying it

in holes in the ground has become increasingly problematic, especially as the

hazards of doing so have become more apparent. And so alternative and

purportedly safer and more effective means of dealing with waste have been

developed, often involving shipping waste over considerable distances in order

that it may be processed on an industrial scale. Not surprisingly, in this era of

increasing globalisation, just as the flow of manufactured goods extends

beyond the boundaries of nation states, so too the flow of hazardous waste

crosses borders. Transnational problems invite transnational responses. At

intergovernmental level, there have been successful attempts to establish

globally effective regimes to prohibit or restrict the production and trade in

hazardous substances, but both within and beyond states there continue to be

issues of contention as communities resist the dumping of waste and the siting

of facilities to dispose of waste. Some of these local campaigns have become

epic struggles whose stories are scarcely credible tales of skulduggery that are

remarkably revealing about the distribution and exercise of power in the

modern world.