Environmental Injustice: The (Unaddressed) Case of Toxic Waste Disposal in the Global South

‘The ability to manufacture and export toxic substances banned from use domestically is one, albeit large, element of how States have institutionalized externalities through discriminatory national laws and an outdated system of global governance for chemicals and wastes’, writes the former Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, Baskut Tuncak (Special Rapporteur), in a recent report on the implications of hazardous waste on human rights and the environment.1 For many years, states of the Global North have been exporting highly hazardous substances and wastes, whose use they have strictly prohibited under their own laws for health and environmental reasons, to countries in the Global South.2 The Special Rapporteur condemns the practice of the transboundary movement of hazardous waste as profoundly discriminatory and as another manifestation of ‘environmental injustice’.3