Historic Waste Trade Reports now Online
"Legendary" campaign featured in new book, The Toxic Ship
A few decades have passed since a few of us on the Material Research team were in a groundbreaking campaign to end the global trade in toxic waste.
Recently, environmental historian Simone Müller embarked on a deep dive into our project and one of its most prominent investigations. The result is The Toxic Ship: The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade, which the University of Washington Press published today. Müller tracks the emergence of Greenpeace’s global campaign against toxic waste exports in the 1980s, which ended with a global ban on this trade in 1994.
Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, says this is “an absolutely necessary book. Müller's crackling prose and careful storytelling reveal how near-infinite wastes unto a finite planet leads to spatial, social, and economical consequences.”
In celebration of Müller’s remarkable study, today we posted several reports from the Waste Trade campaign on ResearchGate. (Jim Vallette, Connie Murtagh, and Verónica Odriozola worked together at the time at Greenpeace; we reunited in 2019 to help found our low-profit company, Material Research L3C. Our work continues to prevent the global proliferation of toxic industries.)
The reports on ResearchGate are text-searchable, open access, downloadable, and online for the first time. They include:
Burnt Offerings (1987) and Burnt Offerings 2 (1988), co-authored by Pat Costner. These two reports alerted the world to the city of Philadelphia’s attempts to dump its incinerator ash on countries near and far. The Toxic Ship follows the most famous of these attempts: the journey of the Khian Sea, which nearly circled the globe in search of a destination for the ash. Burnt Offerings began Greenpeace’s documentation of the global waste trade. “This horrific voyage inspired Greenpeace's legendary Toxic Trade Campaign that resulted in a UN convention banning the export of hazardous waste from the world's richest countries to the global South,” notes Annie Leonard, who led the U.S. waste trade campaign.
BBC World Service’s Mike Lanchin speaks to Kenny Bruno, a Greenpeace campaigner who helped tracked the Khian Sea. Kenny describes the decades-long battle to get the ash sent back to the United States. Witness History: The Ship that Dumped Americas Waste (2018).
Various issues of the Waste Trade Update. This was our newsletter about the latest waste trade schemes and politics. Volume 2, Issue 1 (1988), reveals that the Khian Sea’s cargo of ash had disappeared somewhere in the Indian Ocean region. Volume 5, Issue 1 (1992) publishes a leaked internal World Bank memo by then-chief economist Lawrence Summers. He introduced notorious neoliberal notions that framed ensuing decades of globalization. Note: LDCs are, in World Bank lingo, the “least developed countries.”
The Greenpeace Waste Trade Inventory (5th and final edition, 1990). This 420-page opus details waste trade schemes from around the world. The cover debuted Keith Haring’s iconic logo for our campaign. Available in English and Spanish: El Comercio International de Desechos: Un Inventario de Greenpeace.
Credits
We are forever grateful to the campaigners of yesterday and today for their efforts to expose and prevent toxic colonization.
Greenpeace Waste Trade campaigners, 1987 to 1994, include:
Tani Marilena Adams*, John Arends, Graciela Arquez, Peter Bahouth, Uta Bellion, Andreas von Bernstorff, Paula Biocca, Fernando Bejarano, Paul Bogart, Ingo Bokermann, Stephen Botha, Kenny Bruno, Regina Bueno, Lisa Bunin, Phyllis Campbell, Andre Carothers, Madeleine Cobbing, Derrick Cogburn, Yves Corriveau, Lafcadio Cortesi*, Pat Costner, Charlie Cray, Mario Damato, Cam Duncan, Simon Divecha, Mario Epelman, Rune Eriksen, Roberto Ferrigno, Lisa Finaldi, Cathy Fogel, Anita Fokkema, Marcelo Furtado, Erwin Garzona, Stéphane Gingras, Jed Greer, Sebia Hawkins*, Yamara Hernandez, Janus Hillgaard, Lesley Hunter, Mark Huxham, Topsy Jewell, Paul Johnston, Alexei Kabyka, Katia Kanas, Ernst Klatte, Matts Knopp, Renate Krause, Steve Kretzmann, Iza Kruszewska, Wahid Labidi, Ann Leonard, Susan Leubuscher, Jackie Lilly, Marijane Lisboa, Juantxo Lopez de Uralde, Elizabeth Loudon, Sandra Marquardt, Mark McLellan, Marcy Mersky, Stephanie Mills, Antonin Mucha, Connie Murtagh, Nick Morgan, Pierre-Emmanuel Neurahr, Njoki Njehu, Verónica Odriozola, Stelios Psomas, Jim Puckett, Kerry Rankine, Dave Rapaport, Jorgo Riis, Jan Rispens, Ron Robinson, Kim Roos, Sonia Rossi, Latifa Satterlee, Herbert Schaupp, Åsa Skillius, Nabil Sirrat, Heather Spalding, Kevin Stairs, Ruth Stringer, Lesley Stone, Radan Svercek, Oganes Targulian, Lynn Thorp, Beverley Thorpe, Katerine Totten, Kay Treakle*, Julia True, Jim Vallette, Mattias Voigt, Sabina Voogt, Stefan Weber*, Daphne Wysham
*Deceased
Apologies for omissions and errors (please let us know by email: admin [at] materialresearch dot org). There are hundreds, thousands, more people, in Greenpeace and beyond - community leaders, journalists, trade unionists, customs and environmental officials, scientists, diplomats - with whom we worked around the world against this foul trade. We are grateful.
Thanks also to Red Delelegne and Forrest Bittner Chambless for scanning these documents!
For the latest waste trade information, follow the Basel Action Network.