Explaining Transboundary Flows of Hazardous Waste in North America

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates transnational trade in hazardous waste among specific municipalities in North America. It analyzes the interplay of different regulatory regimes - those directed at maintaining free trade within the region and those aimed at environmental protection for vulnerable populations - in determining which locations export and import hazardous waste. Further, it seeks to understand how specific actors (regulators, policy-makers, waste managers) negotiate economic and environmental regulations in their daily decision-making around trading waste transnationally. This project will explain and inform decision-making around this trade by mapping the existing flows of hazardous waste among Canada, Mexico, and the United States and analyzing the conditions under which these flows concentrate hazardous waste in specific sites. A new dataset, as well as an interactive web mapping tool, will be made available to the public, regulators, policy makers, and researchers across disciplines. Additionally, this project offers significant conceptual innovation through focusing on how the transnational trade is conducted by and impacts subnational sites like cities and metropolitan areas. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation has recently called the transnational hazardous waste trade one of the top environmental concerns in North America. To help inform reasonable management of this trade, research findings will be disseminated to regulators in Canada, Mexico, and the United States beginning with The Office of the Inspector General at the EPA with whom the PI has agreed to share project results. More than one million tons of hazardous waste are traded among Canada, Mexico, and the United States each year. In addition to managing a significant proportion of their own waste, all three North American countries import significant amounts of hazardous waste. These facts are somewhat at odds with two predominant ways of theorizing the trade in hazardous waste: the "first-best world" of environmental economics and the "pollution haven hypothesis". Both of these approaches assume that the trade in waste is consistently from richer to poorer countries, an assumption that undergirds most policy-making around the hazardous waste trade. Given the failure of these theories to predict contemporary flows of hazardous waste in North America, this project seeks to explain and inform decision-making around hazardous waste trading among North American countries by asking: What are the existing flows of hazardous waste among Canada, Mexico, and the United States and to what degree and under what conditions do these flows concentrate hazardous waste in specific sites? To address these questions, this project will map the volume and directionality of trade transactions using interactive and web-based geographic visualization techniques, 2) analyze regulatory regimes in importing sites and 3) conduct case studies in selected sites.