Cities - Environmental Transformations - page 113

as a result of the growing power of municipal
governments who are able to more tightly regulate
environmental degradation through laws and
planning restrictions (see Whitehead, 2009).
Another explanation could be that as urban eco-
nomic wealth increases a new, affluent urban
middle class emerges that starts to demand im-
provements in the environmental relations of
the city. A third explanation suggests that at cer-
tain levels of economic growth, cities are able to
invest a significant amount of resources into
technological solutions to the causes of environ-
mental pollution (including more efficient energy
generation systems, modern mass transit systems,
better fuel efficiencies in motor vehicles and the
building of waste treatment plants) (Weale, 2001).
A final explanation suggests that as they develop,
cities become adept at outsourcing polluting
industrial activities, which characterized their early
phases of development, to lower cost locations in
other parts of the world (for an overview of these
theories see Marcotullio, 2007).
This final point leads us into a discussion of the
second curve depicted in Figure 6.3. This curve
(labelled 'Global Scale') depicts the increasing
contribution that cities appear to make to global
forms of environmental degradation as their
wealth increases. These globally scaled forms
of environmental degradation can take many
different forms. The most obvious form these
take are the rising levels of carbon dioxide that
are emitted from cities and contribute to changes
in the nature of the global climate system (see
Chapter 3) . As cities grow and develop what
Kunstler (1994) has called the auto-suburb, their
greenhouse gas emissions tend to rise as a result
of increases in automobile usage and average
car journey lengths. But the increasing carbon
footprint of cities is not only a product of the
greenhouses gases that are emitted from their
commuter suburbs. As post-industrial cities see an
increasing amount of the products that they
depend upon manufactured elsewhere, we tend
to see rising levels of embedded carbon dioxide
emissions associated with such urban centres.

Embedded carbon dioxide emissions reflect the
carbon dioxide releases associated with the
products that are produced in one place but
consumed in another. To these ends, a significant
portion of the carbon dioxide emissions associated
with a post-industrial city's consumption needs
is actually emitted in distant, low-cost production
centres. These, often overlooked, emissions do,
however, reflect an important aspect of the
global environmental relations of many cities (see
Chapter 1 for a broader discussion of notions of
relational space).
The carbon footprint of cities reflects one way
in which urban centres contribute to transforming
the operation of global environmental systems.
Other forms of globally scaled environmental
degradation associated with urbanization tend
to be less about the changing of global environ-
mental systems and more about the global spread
of environmentally damaging substances. A con-
troversial example of globalized environmental
pollution is evident in the practices of toxic
colonialism (see Harvey, 1996). Toxic colonialism
is a term that is used to refer to the transport
and disposal of hazardous waste products in less
economically developed countries. The toxic sub-
stances involved in this process include, among
other things, nuclear waste, dioxins, poisonous
metals, persistent organic pollutants and sanitary
waste, which can all have harmful effects on both
ecological systems and human health (FAO, 1999;
Bernstorff and Stairs, 2000). The trade in toxic
substances has recently taken a new turn with
the rise of e-waste being transported to less eco-
nomically developed countries. E-waste can take
many different forms including unwanted mobile
phones, video games consoles, TV sets and com-
puters (see Koné, 2010 ) . Recent estimates indi-
cate that approximately 500 shipping containers
of unwanted e-waste (the equivalent of around
100,000 computers and 44,000 televisions) is
transported to Nigeria every month ( Ghana
Business News , 2009). The socio-ecological prob-
lems associated with this e-waste trade emerge
when the products are disassembled for recycling.