When Treaties Work: The Basel Convention on Hazardous Wastes

A treaty inspired by a scandal

Imagine a world in which companies could secretly export toxic waste and dump it in unsuspecting communities. Until the 1992 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, there were no rules governing the international movement of toxic waste. Today, this convention ensures that such waste cannot be sent to unsuspecting recipients, particularly in the Global South.

What makes this treaty so interesting to me is that it was inspired by an environmental scandal in the late 1980s, when an Italian company dumped toxic waste in the Nigerian town of Koko. The discovery of the waste sparked international outrage and led to stricter global regulations, including the Basel Convention.

Joining me today to explain the impact of the Basel Convention is one of the world’s foremost experts on environmental treaties, Maria Ivanova. She is the director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University and a professor of public policy.

We kick off by discussing how this scandal led to a treaty on the international movement of hazardous waste, followed by a longer conversation about its lasting impact on the world today.

This episode is produced in partnership with Lex International Fund, a philanthropic fund dedicated to strengthening international law to solve global challenges. It is part of a series that demonstrates the impact of treaties on state behavior, which we are calling "When Treaties Work."

The episode is freely available across all podcast listening platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, to kick off, can I just have you explain the Koko incident? What was the Koko incident?

Maria Ivanova: The Koko incident was the beginning of regulation of hazardous chemicals and waste. And Koko is the name of a fishing village in Nigeria that was the site of illegal disposal of hazardous waste in the late 1980s. In 1988, the Nigerian newspaper, The Daily Times, published reports about over 2000 drums and sacks and containers of hazardous waste that was coming from Italy. And this was the result of Nigerian students in Italy, in Pisa, that learned about this illegal disposal of Italian hazardous waste into their country in Nigeria. And so they alerted the press, and the press began looking into this, including The Guardian. And there were a number of articles, but also really vivid cartoons about developed countries dumping hazardous waste illegally in Nigeria.

And that was the PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, which are very toxic substances, and asbestos. The village of Koko had become the storage site of thousands of drums of this. And then they were sitting in the sun and poisoning the water, the air, the health of the people of Koko. And so that incident caused an international scandal and the Nigerian government compelled the government of Italy to take back the waste. And that waste spent many months at sea, no port would accept that toxic waste barge. And that became the catalyst for a new international treaty on the transboundary movements of hazardous waste.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, it seems like this one incident in Nigeria exposed a broader global issue of one country illegally dumping toxic materials and toxic waste in another country. Do you have a sense of how widespread was this problem prior to the Basel Convention?

Maria Ivanova: We don’t know how widespread that was because you have to have people to bring that to the fore. It was really interesting that it was these Nigerian students in Italy who brought the issue up to the international community. It was not the communities in Nigeria bringing this up to the international community. And so that dynamic is quite fascinating. So, we don’t know how widespread it was because maybe the local communities that were suffering did not bring the issues forward. But it certainly was not a one-off incident. It was happening across various countries in various companies.

Mark Leon Goldberg: I guess it’s really interesting to me that a single incident could be the catalyst for an international treaty. That’s not something you see very often.

Maria Ivanova: Correct. So, it probably generated a lot of attention among various communities, and they would say, “Yes, we recognize that.” And this coincides with the increased regulation in Europe of hazardous waste and fees on hazardous materials, their disposal. And the acronym that we often use in international environmental governance or even in local environmental governance, NIMBY — not in my backyard. We use it now as almost a noun. This is not a NIMBY, this is a NIMBY problem. Not in my backyard, meaning I don’t want something disposed in my vicinity, that hazardous waste.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, how did this go from an international incident, international outrage of the Koko incident to an international treaty? What’s that story?

Maria Ivanova: The UN Environment Program. UNEP was the one that launched the process, an intergovernmental process to regulate toxic waste and the trade of toxic waste. So UNEP had started that in the 1980s. They had a process that resulted in the so-called Cairo Guidelines on the Environmental Sound Management of Hazardous Waste. So, this was a process already within the UN. And then you have this incident and it really accelerates the movement to an international treaty. UNEP was the space, the institution that brought the scientists together, but also the governments under the leadership of Mostafa Tolba, who said, “We have to come to an international agreement.”

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Mostafa Tolba, it should be noted, was a long-serving head of the United Nations Environmental Program.

Maria Ivanova: And the example of the negotiation and the signing of the Basel Convention is a really vivid example of Tolba’s leadership. I talk about it in the book that I have written about UNEP, the untold story of how heavy-handed he was because the negotiations were so intense. Governments had to go and negotiate pretty much 24/7 for several days. And Tolba was hospitalized as a result of this pressure. And after being discharged, he returned immediately to the conference. This was while governments were negotiating. He put his suit on over his striped pajamas, pulled down the leg of the pajamas over his shoes so that the government delegates could see it, and he made an emotional plea. He said, “I had to get out of my sick bed to come and convince you to come to a close.” And so the Basel Convention was then adopted in 1989.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And so what does it say? What’s in the Basel Convention? What does it compel of governments and its signatories.

Maria Ivanova: So, the Basel Convention regulates the trade of hazardous substances. It compels governments to tell each other what is being traded. And the initial vision was to ban the trade of hazardous substances from the north to the south. And this is why the convention was so contentious because developed countries said when developing countries don’t have the capacity to process their hazardous waste, trade has to happen. And the trade, meaning the movement, has to take place from the developing world to the developed world, where the hazardous waste can be processed successfully. UNEP was really important in that space because they said, “Let’s not ban the movement, but let’s allow it from developing countries to develop when the capacity is very low.”

Mark Leon Goldberg: Essentially, it bans wealthier countries in the global north from transporting, dumping hazardous waste to countries of the global south, but creates a process and a mechanism for countries of the global south to send their hazardous waste north.

Maria Ivanova: That’s right.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And what has been its impact since then?

Maria Ivanova: The impact of the Basel Convention has been quite significant because it has created the expectation that hazardous waste will not be moved around without prior informed consent, without the knowledge of the receiving party. So, that was the Koko incident, right? That the waste from Italy was moved illegally to Nigeria without the knowledge of the recipient communities. So, the impact has been to increase the awareness of the global public about the negative impacts of waste, various forms of industrial waste. And it has also impacted the waste movements of non-hazardous substances. That is, for example, plastic. And the Basel Convention has an amendment now that regulates the trade in plastic waste. If you remember, the United States used to export a lot of its recycling, so to say, to China. And, at certain point, China said, “Well no, we are not going to accept your waste for recycling here,” and turned around the ships that were carrying plastic waste for recycling.

That changed the entire dynamic in terms of plastic. And it has elevated the issue of plastic pollution to the point where governments now are negotiating a new international treaty on plastic pollution.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, it’s interesting, you could draw a straight line between the Basel Convention, which was adopted decades ago, and negotiations today around a potential treaty on plastics.

Maria Ivanova: In a sense, all of the treaties are connected to each other. You could see the causal connections because of the increased awareness among the global public of what it means to suffer from environmental pollution and the negative environmental impacts of any issue.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, the Basel Convention, it has a massive number of countries that have ratified it. The United States is a signatory but has not ratified the Basel Convention. What has been the political debate inside the United States? It’s hard in general to pass treaties in the Senate. And what impact has the U.S.’s non-ratification had on the effectiveness of this treaty, if anything?

Maria Ivanova: It’s a good question because the United States is often a signatory to a convention but not a party to the convention. Which means it has negotiated it, it has signed it, but it has not ratified it. That means it has not been approved by the Senate. And that is because 60% majority of the Senate is required. And the political reality in the United States has been such that difficulties among various political constituencies have prevented global conventions from being ratified. For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity is also not one that the United States has ratified. It’s now the only country that has not ratified it, even though it’s a signatory.

And that’s true of the Basel Convention that the U.S. has signed but is not a party. It’s also true of another convention on chemicals, and that is the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. The fact that the U.S. has not ratified does not mean that these conventions are not effective and that they have not determined state behavior. The United States participates in them. The United States also funds the activities of these conventions.

Mark Leon Goldberg: For now.

Maria Ivanova: For now. So, yes, to date it has.

Mark Leon Goldberg: To date [laughs].

Maria Ivanova: But these conventions set expectations also of multinational companies. And multinational companies that may be headquartered in the United States operate in jurisdictions around the world, they have to comply with these international regulations.

Mark Leon Goldberg: One of the great resources that you and your team has produced for years is the Environmental Conventions Index, which basically takes a number of environmental treaties and assesses government’s compliance against them using certain metrics that you and your team have created over the years.

Maria Ivanova: I really appreciate that. It’s available online, it’s free. The point is for governments to be able to see what they have done in terms of implementing their international obligations under the various treaties and compare themselves to what they have done over time. So, they can compare themselves to themselves or they can compare themselves to their neighbors or to other peers. China has performed quite well across various conventions. On the Basel Convention, its score is 4.43 out of 5, which ranks it number 27 out of 187 parties to the convention. That’s a pretty good score. China ranks also number 7 out of 47 countries in Asia.

Mark Leon Goldberg: The reason I wanted to plug your index is that, big picture, treaties in general and this treaty in particular, they don’t enforce themselves. They rely on governments to implement them. And so a key question always around treaties is, yes, they could be like negotiated on paper, but are they actually implemented in real life? And what’s your take on the actual implementation of the Basel Convention? Are countries fulfilling their obligations by and large?

Maria Ivanova: By and large, yes. However, Mark, until we created the Environmental Conventions index, which was years ago, and this was the result of a PhD dissertation while I was on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Natalia Escobar-Pemberthy of Colombia carried this work in a team setting. But we did an extraordinary amount of work measuring to what extent countries that are parties to these conventions actually implement the obligations that they take on. And what we discovered was a very counterintuitive but positive story. Often, you hear that developing countries will not be able to implement the conventions. Developed countries would and are expected to implement them.

And we see that GDP is not necessarily the explanatory variable. And in the Basel Convention, the top countries in the world are Bulgaria, Serbia, Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua. These are not countries with the highest GDPs.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, can I ask you what explains that to you? Other than the fact that you’re Bulgarian, why is Bulgaria, for example, the world’s leader in compliance with this particular treaty?

Maria Ivanova: Well, yes, when we ran the numbers, I thought, I can’t present this. I am a Bulgarian and people will think we’ve rigged it. And then we presented this to the secretariat at the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Convention, and they said, “Oh yes, you are right. Bulgaria is doing really well. We know the people who are there, they report often, they do what they’re supposed to do, and Bulgaria is implementing its obligations.” Why that is the case is a question we actually can’t answer yet because our index can tell you to what extent do countries do what they’re supposed to do, but it doesn’t answer the why. The why requires us to go and do research and ask people and engage with them so that they can tell their story. It also would enable us to name and acclaim, to say, “Look how Nicaragua is doing, how Argentina is doing. Can you tell your story? Can you explain to the world why?” And that would allow others to follow in their footsteps. That is what will inspire rather than a name and shame tactic.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting the point you make that GDP is not correlated with the implementation of this treaty, which is interesting to me because this treaty is just like highly technical, right? It’s like how to transport waste. And you would think that wealthier countries would have that technical expertise, but they seemingly don’t have that or don’t have it in any greater or lesser variety or capacity than poorer countries.

Maria Ivanova: You are right in the Stockholm Convention, which is much more technical, GDP is more correlated with the compliance, with performance, with implementation. In the Basel Convention, we see less of a correlation. This is why the question of why is very important. And it’s really interesting to create case studies to allow countries to tell their stories because that would allow for learning from peer countries. For example, it would be much more palatable and interesting and acceptable for Ethiopia to learn from Rwanda rather than from Switzerland.

Mark Leon Goldberg: One thing, having studied these issues and report on these issues for so long, is that treaties like the Basel Convention, they start off doing one thing, then things are added on to them, and you mentioned plastics earlier, so that their impact actually grows over time. It’s not really static. And I know one issue that’s percolating and has been for a long time is on e-waste, the waste of electronics. To what extent does the Basel Convention deal with the problem of e-waste dumping?

Maria Ivanova: E-waste is an issue that is growing in importance more and more as we produce more and more electronics and their lifespan is shorter and shorter. And the Basel Convention does categorize it as both hazardous or non-hazardous waste depending on what the e-waste is because in some e-waste, there are toxic materials such as mercury, lead, or other substances. It’s a highly technical issue, but we see more and more countries developing the capabilities to process e-waste. I work in Rwanda quite a bit. Rwanda has created, has built a state-of-the-art e-waste plant in Africa. And Rwanda also is a leader in the plastics convention. It was Rwanda and Peru who put forward the resolution to address plastic pollution.

So, you see that the countries that are leaders in some environmental issues are also becoming leaders in others. And so, Rwanda’s e-waste plant is a clear case of leadership, as is Rwanda’s leadership on the plastics agreement.

Mark Leon Goldberg: That’s interesting. Again, we keep coming back to this idea that the Basel Convention sort of helped lay some groundwork for this ongoing plastics treaty. Again, showing just general iteration of environmental treaties over time.

Maria Ivanova: Exactly.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Here we are talking decades, 30 years, more than 30 years after the Basel Convention, how has the world changed because of it?

Maria Ivanova: The Basel Convention has enabled us to see the linkages among various issues, whether it is hazardous waste or non-hazardous waste, or the movement of these various substances around the world. As you pointed out, Mark, countries are seeing the interconnections among issues and taking leadership in creating these new multilateral environmental agreements. What I would love to see is that the global public become more aware. We witnessed or the world has seen the impact of images that led to the recognition of the Koko incident. There were very powerful cartoons in the media. We saw the power of images in the plastics space when we saw turtles with straws in their nose that mobilized a global public.

And I would like to see a global public that is more aware and more active in connecting the dots among various environmental issues and actually taking action on addressing them both at the local and at the international level.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Maria, as always, I love learning from you. Thank you so much for your time.

Maria Ivanova: Thank you.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me, Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And, of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive. Thank you!