Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Introduction: Environmental Injustice
Beyond Borders
Julian Agyeman and JoAnn Carmin
As we upgrade at an ever faster rate, campaigners are calling for action to prevent
toxic, electronic or “e” waste being dumped on poor countries. The United
Nations believes we generate between 20m and 50m tonnes of e-waste around
the world each year. Agbobloshie dump site in Ghana's capital, Accra, is a com-
puter graveyard. But PCs are not given a decent, safe burial—they are dumped
on this expanding, toxic treasure trove. Many of the well-known brands are
there: Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Philips, Canon, Hewlett Packard. Labels give
away the fact that many lived their useful lives in the UK: “Richmond upon
Thames College,” “Southampton City Council,” “Kent County Council,” are
just a few.
—“Computers Pile Up in Ghana Dump” 2008
The deepening of globalization is fundamentally reshaping, and perhaps
even redrawing, the environmental justice terrain. Over the past thirty
years, many infl uential texts on environmental justice, especially those
from the United States, have revealed heroic struggles. These have taken
place from Warren County, North Carolina, to Kettleman City, Califor-
nia, and from Altgeld Gardens, Chicago, to Dudley Street, Boston, as
low-income and minority communities have mobilized to fi ght off
unwanted land uses or gain access to appropriate and adequate public
goods and services. While inequalities like these and countless others
become visible at the local level as communities seek to “speak for them-
selves,” an often-overlooked scalar dynamic is that many of the perpetra-
tors of injustices are situated in distant locations.
As the example at the outset of this chapter suggests, when European
educational and government institutions use and then dispose of their
computers, these computers often turn up in waste sites in countries
such as Ghana. This is happening despite the 1989 Basel Convention
on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and the Euro-
pean Union's (EU) 2002 Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (RoHS)
