Waste Wars, Alexander Clapp’s new book, is about such businesses. In the 1980s, waste became a national export across much of the global North. Since then, firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South. At first, the focus of this business was hazardous waste like asbestos or paint sludge. In countries like the US it cost as much as $250 per tonne to bury hazardous waste domestically at a time when the price of burying it in many African countries was less than $3 per tonne. Even after shipping costs, American companies could save around $200 per tonne by sending their waste overseas. In 1991, a leaked memorandum on trade liberalisation sent by Larry Summers, then chief economist at the World Bank, stated that ‘the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.’
In fact, so much money could be saved by exporting toxic waste that rich countries and firms based in them could, and did, pay developing countries to take it. Developing countries accepted these bribes because their economies were in a parlous state and they had mounting debts; as Clapp puts it, they faced a choice between ‘poison or poverty’. In a perverse way, these deals were tools of economic development. By 1988, the estimated dollar value of the toxic waste flowing from the global North to the global South exceeded the value of the parallel flow of developmental aid.