Waste Crime and the Global Transference of Hazardous Substances: A Southern Green Perspective

The production of global solid waste has reached an all-time high with over two billion tons discarded each year-much of it burned, illegally dumped at sea, or buried in unregulated landfills (The World Bank2019). The United Nations Environment Assembly has declared the current waste problem a global crisis (Parker2019), with estimates predicting that the present rate will worsen threefold by 2050 based on existing consumption and disposal rates (Ellis2018). The international community has responded with expanding laws and regulations that seek to ensure that waste is disposed of in safe, sustainable and renewable ways. Such measures, however, have increased the costs of disposal and have inadvertently enlarged illegal markets in dumping and transference (European Commission2019). This article examines the ways in which transnational corporations have avoided the rising costs of lawful disposal by shipping their waste to poor countries in the Global South-often with devastating social and environmental impacts. This article draws on world systems theory (Wallerstein2004) and political ecology (Bedford et al.2019; Forsyth2008) in order to embellish discourses in green criminology and southern criminology (Brisman et al.2018; Carrington et al.2018; Goyes2019) and to examine critically the contemporary social and environmental harms generated by the illegal transference of solid and hazardous waste.