interviews
Waste Is A Human Rights Issue
by Baskut Tuncak
January 18, 2019
Baskut Tuncak is the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and toxics, and a Senior Researcher at Raoul Wallenberg Institute.
What does your role at the UN entail?
The position I have, as Special Rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council is one of an independent, outside voice, providing information and analysis free of political interference. The position was created almost 25 years ago by the former UN Commission on Human Rights to look at the human rights dimension of the issue of waste, in particular transboundary shipments of waste. Large volumes of waste were, and still continue to be, shipped to developing countries and disposed of in ways that are producing grave impacts on human rights.
The Human Rights Council expanded the scope of the mandate in 2011 to look not only at the issue of waste but also to look at the entire life cycle of hazardous substances waste. It vastly expanded the scope of the mandate and changed the title to explicitly include hazardous substances and waste. So, the full life cycle of consumption and production, and the pollution and contamination that results. Everything from the natural resources we extract to produce various chemicals, materials and energy, to emissions of energy generation, to toxics in the workplace and consumer products, and of course all forms of waste.
Basically what I do for the Human Rights Council, and I've had this position since 2014, is report to them every September on current issues and the UN General Assembly in October. I'm given a broad latitude in how I choose to report. I can focus on a particular set of rights, or even a particular right, a particular issue, whether it's environmental or occupational, or both. I present that report every year. Also, I present reports on visits to various countries to evaluate what different governments are doing in terms of protecting human rights from exposure to toxics.
As Special Rapporteurs we also have a mandate to send letters of allegation to national governments, businesses and other actors who are implicated in cases of alleged human rights violations and abuses relating to our mandate. In my case, these are cases of people who are harmed by exposure to toxic chemicals and wastes, poisoned in essence. It's a process by which we send a letter of allegation and then engage in a conversation with the relevant actors to understand the situation better. That can lead to public expressions or views on the case publicly, or actions by other authorities to end the violations, prevent future recurrence and provide remedies for those whose rights have been violated.
Big job.
It is. It is a pro-bono position. The UN Human Rights Council has Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and 5 member teams in Working Groups, the so-called “Special Procedures”. None of us are paid. We do this on a voluntary basis and we are given very limited, if any, financial support in terms of what we need to do to gather the information in order to prepare and present the reports. We're entitled to resources to travel to Geneva and New York to present reports or to undertake the country visits but outside of that, there are very little resources available to us. It's a big job, global in scope, and it's made more challenging by the financial constraints.
How often are you filing allegations?
It depends. Last year we sent quite a few letters of allegation. I would say on average we probably send six to eight per year. Sometimes we do that individually, and sometimes we do it in conjunction with other Special Rapporteurs.
These letters of allegation are publicly available after 60 days, although they're more difficult to find than I think they should be. They usually are the precursor to Special Rapporteurs expressing a view publicly, through a media statement or otherwise.
As an example, would the water crisis in Flint be something you’d write an allegation for?
Absolutely. That's exactly one that we did send. I don't know if you are asking that just by coincidence or because you saw it, but I did send a letter of allegation to the US about the water contamination in Flint, Michigan. That letter focused quite a bit the situation in Flint but also the broader context about minorities and their disproportionate exposure to toxic contaminants in the US. I sent that letter in January of 2016, if I'm not mistaken.
I should mention that the US has opposed this mandate since its inception, saying that the issue of toxic pollution is not a human rights issue. It has consistently voted against the extension of the mandate and was the only country to vote against the renewal of this mandate during the last renewal in 2017.
Are governments legally required to respond?
Legally, no, they are not. There's no requirement on a government to respond. In the case of the US, the US was quite responsive historically. They've been one of the better countries in terms of responding, at least sending a response to the letters that have been sent. However, sometimes substantively less than we would hope to have in order to have a meaningful conversation and understand the situation. But regardless, the US has stopped responding to letters of allegation from Special Rapporteurs, including myself. The most recent letter they did not respond to involved the terrible manner in which hazardous military waste has been disposed by the US armed forces in Puerto Rico. I think the lack of responsiveness to letters of allegations reflects the highly regrettable disengagement from the US from the Human Rights Council and from various other international processes.
There's a history of developed countries using developing countries as a dumping ground. Has that changed at all in the time since you've been working in this role? China's recycling ban has forced some change, but I wonder if you've seen real effort since you've held this position?
The reason the mandate was created in the mid-90s is because the Basel Convention, which is the treaty established in the 1980s to try to deal with the problem of waste being dumped in developing countries, and was viewed by a large number of developing countries, especially those in Africa, as grossly inadequate. Within the framework of the Basel Convention, there have been numerous efforts, many concerted efforts, to ban the export of hazardous waste to developing countries, the so-called “Ban Amendment” being the most notable. This amendment would prohibit the shipment of certain hazardous wastes from OECD members to non-OECD members for disposal, recycling or recovery. However the Ban Amendment has not been ratified by enough countries to enter into force.
The recent changes in China regarding waste imports have certainly forced changes, but there are concerns that the waste is not being recycled or disposed of properly in the countries that have taken up the slack.
The issue of China's waste import restrictions and where those plastics are now heading, largely in other countries in Asia, and how they're being disposed of is very much an open question and one that we need to answer quickly.
Waste movements can be traced, but unfortunately much of it lacks transparency regarding where it goes and how it is disposed, recycled or otherwise dealt with. Illegal movements remain a serious concern, as these things by definition not traceable, measured with the same unsatisfactory methods by which the drug trade is assessed. You can only gauge how well you're doing based on how much you're actually confiscating before it becomes a problem, and that's not a very reliable metric. It's in some ways like the drug trade, and unsurprisingly you do see organized criminal activities involved. Interpol has been working to tackle this problem. Certain states have been able to improve their work with customs agents and border controls to try to ensure that waste shipments are leaving for destinations where they'll be disposed of in dangerous manners, potentially dangerous manners. But let’s not forget that some large corporations are also implicated in scandalous cases of illegal waste dumping in Africa, such as the infamous case of the Probo Koala and Trafigura. There's still a lot of waste leaving countries without sufficient understanding where it’s going or how it will be disposed.
If the US were to decide to take full responsibility for their waste, what are the practical solutions?
In an ideal scenario, countries would manage their wastes within their borders, helping to advance sustainability and reducing the intensity with which we consume raw materials. The reality is, however, that we have legitimized the export of waste, building a global waste economy externalizing the health and environmental hazards of wastes to countries with weaker governance structures, corrupt regimes, or otherwise vulnerable, exploitable populations. Most people are unaware of where their waste goes, that the mountains of trash collapse and kill communities in developing countries, that toxic substances in waste contaminate water and food and circulates around the globe. We need systems in place to ensure a safe, circular economy is developed, including the ability trace what goes into materials that become waste and where the waste goes.
Who should be responsible for tracking the waste?
Governments have a duty to protect human rights and must ensure that the actions of companies within their jurisdiction are not resulting human rights impacts, at home or abroad. The relevant authority can vary from government to government.
However, businesses that produce products that become waste have a responsibility to build traceability systems to track their waste and ensure that human rights abuses do not result. Governments must compel businesses to do this. The limited implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on business and human rights after 8 years for the implications of toxic substances and wastes clearly points to the need for governments to obligate businesses to conduct such due diligence through legally-binding obligations, rather that the simply an expectation. That said, the fact that many Governments are not compelling companies to conduct human rights due diligence for the risk of toxic exposures by children, consumers, workers and others, does not absolve companies from their responsibility.
Circular Economies come up in nearly every interview we’ve done this month. Can you break down what it means to you in theory, but also what it looks like in practice?
To me, a circular economy is one in which we have essentially a closed loop. Where the inputs and the outputs from the consumption and production cycle are limited. And so, when, say, a consumer product reaches the end of its lifespan, the materials that are contained in there would be recovered and then re-used in some fashion to feed back in, creating a cycle where we don't have the raw materials extracted at the rate that they are. Like I said, ideally it would be one where we're using the raw materials that we already have, the waste that we already have, but to get to that point it's a very long-term, aspirational and ambitious vision, I'd imagine, and one that requires a very holistic life cycle approach, one that includes eliminating toxic chemicals in products, in particular those that are persistent and toxic. To me, that's what a circular economy is. It's putting those systems in place so that we can reduce our reliance on raw materials, creating healthy, sustainable economies and living within planetary boundaries.
Are you optimistic?
The idea of drastically reducing the extraction of non-renewable natural resources altogether, of oil and gas and metals, and minerals, and others, from energy to consumer products – we're not there yet. In fact, we're probably a long ways away from it unless we have the right leaders in industry, government, and the accumulated financial equity and wealth is redirected to the long-term sustainability of our planet and the human race. However, leaders in industry, government and philanthropy are all finally beginning to see the increasing toxification of our planet as one of major concern, distinct but indivisible from the impacts of climate change. This gives me optimism.
However, to have the entire global economy flip a switch and operate in a circular fashion, I'm not too optimistic. It will probably take time, requiring long-term committment on tha part of all, especially those proving the financial support to usher change. That said, there are huge gains to be had in the short term, particularly in the way that we're senselessly producing materials designed to be thrown away. Everything from single-use plastics to ultra cheap clothing material that's largely synthetic and with limited life spans. Yes, for certain consumer products segments, I am optimistic. But I also see risks. For example, if we move away from petrochemicals and move back toward the use of natural fibers for clothing, what I am afraid we will see is an increased reliance on pesticides, fertilizers and other agrochemical pollutants, which will then likely also have a negative and environmental and human health impact.
So, I am optimistic and think it's the right direction to go in but I think it's going to take a lot of effort and care to avoid unintended consequences.
Yeah, not without some collateral consequences, I'm sure.
I'm trying my best to be sure that these potential collateral impacts are taken into account. For sure.
When you look at the breakdown of plastic waste, packaging is a huge portion of the problem. Amazon Prime has completely changed e-commerce. Do you look at, write about, or research the way that these companies should be responsible for their packaging systems?
Well, we could. There have been some efforts in terms of particular waste segments such as electronic waste and medical waste.
Any waste issue involving companies is fair game.
These companies like those that you're talking about are part of the massive e-commerce economy and creating a huge, huge problem for us in terms of the way that the products are packaged and how they arrive. The other day I ordered a microwave from a company and it arrived in at least three cardboard boxes that were nested inside each other like a Russian doll. It seemed to me highly inefficient and unnecessary. On top of all the styrofoam and the plastic in there, everything amounted to an enormous pile of waste that the retailer didn't have to deal with.
There needs to be attention to the way the economy is changing including through e-commerce and the waste implications.
What are some pieces of research you've worked on, or you work with, that need more attention?
One of the biggest and underrecognized issues in my view, when it comes to toxic exposures, is the exposure of children during critical periods of development to a complex mixture of toxic chemicals and pollutants, including waste. So much our health throughout our lives depends on what we are not exposed to as children. Children continue to be born pre-polluted exposed to dozens if not hundreds of different toxic chemicals and pollutants - that we are looking for. We don’t understand the implications of this as well as well should. We don’t have the information necessary on developmental effects of pre- and post-natal exposures to various toxic substances that children may be exposed. And we are procrastinating in understanding the implications of what exposure to a cocktail of substances during childhood can mean. Governments continue to rely on assessments of individual substances for health risk, but the reality is that the mixture of substances we are exposed to can interact and collectively produce grave adverse health outcomes that are not predicted by risk assessments of individual substances. We're deceiving ourselves and future generations if we continue to remain ignorant to the health risks of ongoing widespread exposure of children to toxic chemicals and pollutants and fail to do everything in our power to prevent childhood exposure.
Where can we find some of the UN work you described as difficult to find?
I have a website that also has these letters of allegation and the reports to the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly. The UN keeps websites for each mandate with their reports, and a database at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights where you can search by various mandates for the letters of allegation.
Public awareness of the reports and letters by Special Rapporteurs is unfortunately very limited. The UN needs to do more to make the work of Special Procedures visible. But, of course, there may be some invisible forces that keep that from happening, and from my mandate still not being referred to as focused on toxic waste, despite the changes made in 2011.
interviews
Anti-Colonial Science & The Ubiquity of Plastic
by Max Liboiron
January 9, 2019
This interview with Dr. Max Liboiron was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place December 4, 2018.
I'm Dr. Max Liboiron. I often introduce myself in Michif. So, I say, Taanishi. Max Liboiron dishinihkaashoon. Lac la biche, Treaty 6, d’oshchiin. Mtis naasyoon, niiya ni. Which means my name is Max Liboiron. I'm from Northern Alberta, treaty six territory, where I'm part of Mtis Nation, and I now live and work in Newfoundland and Labrador in Northeastern Canada.
I'm an environmental scientist and we do anti-colonial, feminist science – which means we draw a lot from the insights of the social sciences and also different traditional teachings and law, to inform our scientific practices. So that they are anti-colonial. So they are feminist. So that they do deal with questions of equity, questions of justice, questions of humility, and do work in a good way, as opposed to just an efficient way or a fact-y way.
Science, and research in general, has long played a role in colonial entitlement to land, both in proving that people deserve to be dispossessed in being the reason for research – we need to research tropical diseases so we can better settle in this tropical place, not our environment. Or, how do we patent different botanies? A lot of those legacies have stayed in science and aren't usually noticed anymore.
They used to be fairly contested, especially when science was trying to move into new places or when race was being scientized. But now people seem to have forgotten about that legacy. So our task at CLEAR, my lab, is to first of all recognize how science is already colonial, and then number two, work very hard to do the practices of science in ways that do not reproduce entitlement to land or universalism, which is actually just self portraiture of Europeans usually. The idea of mastery over nature, or that nature is a resource for use.
Courtesy of: Bojan Furst.
Every moment of science has these sort of legacies. There's lots and lots and lots of room for doing anti-colonial science and feminist science. Those are different things, but they're related in that they both find that science isn't neutral. It is deeply political.
Courtesy of: Max Liboiron. Plastics wrapped around a squid beak found in a Northern Fulmar. 2015
The presentation of your research, visually, is patient, subtle, pretty – completely different from the majority of images I see related to plastics research. Can you talk about the work you’re doing right now?
I'll start with the premise of that, which is that we, I think, look at plastic very differently than a lot of the dominant discourses. Like you said, a lot of the dominant discourse about plastic is that plastic is inherently bad, and it's a bastard child of industrialization, and it needs to be eradicated, and illegalized, and banned, and exorcized.
But also plastic is our kin, it's our relation. It's from ancestors – organic ancestors from a long time ago. And if you neglect your relations to that, then you're bad kin. Even when plastic is misbehaving, which means it's being bad kin, you can still do good kinship with bad kin. And you know this. You have an asshole uncle somewhere. He might be bad kin but you still call him on his birthday, or bail him out of jail depending on what kind of bad kin he is. The same thing is true of plastics. I spend a lot of time with plastics. I do a lot of care work for plastics. I make sure that they are cleaned properly and I look at them a long time, and when I look at them, and I look at them in aggregate, I learn things about where they've been, and how they might have got there, and what their journeys might have been like, and where they might be going, because they're going to go for a long time.
We hang out together a lot, and they have a lot to teach us. Trying to ostracize them as the only sort of relation you can get, misses a lot of teachings that they have for us and also a lot of the respect. Because they are made of the earth. They've been pulverized in various ways so that they're not very earthy anymore, but you still have to respect that.
There's a tension with that in that the research that I do is mostly ingestion studies. Animals that have eaten plastics. Mostly what we focus on are animals that people, especially in Newfoundland & Labrador, use for food, depend on for food. For cultural sustenance, for nutritional sustenance, for economic sustenance. So the contamination of that food web is a form of colonialism. It's based on the idea that land is pollutable in the first place, that it is an okay place to put wastes. And magically, not magically, it's through different power structures, those tend to accumulate in rural, Indigenous, northern communities, which are never the places that benefit from plastic production. Almost never, but pretty much never.
At the moment, we’re doing some ducks, cod, seal, some geese. We get them mostly from hunters and fishers. We have a rule in the lab, all of our samples have to be eaten because what we test is food. We don't test oceans or some abstract fish, we work on food sovereignty. That means we sample food.
Are you consuming it?
Often.
Is that difficulte after seeing what's inside of it?
No. It's delicious. In the area we're researching, we do find plastic, but we also find them in smaller numbers than we find them in other places. Up in the north, we're fluent in things like the breast milk debate. In the 90's there were these big debates where scientists found really high PCBs in breast milk, and there was this huge protracted debate as to whether or not mothers could be considered abusive for feeding their kids that breast milk. A lot of stigmatization, ostracization, really screwed up relations within science. It turns out after multiple years, scientists decided, and medical practitioners decided, that actually, it's better to feed your kids contaminated breast milk than it is to feed them formula for their entire lives.
That being said, we have some of the least contaminated food in the world at this moment. Maybe not going to stay that way, but we consistently find lower ingestion rates in say, cod or ducks, than in other places. Part of that is the water that surrounds the province that I work in comes from the Arctic. There are certainly plastics in the Arctic, and that number is increasing, but it's not like the Gulf Stream which is filthy, where a lot of people get their fish.
Courtesy of: Max Liboiron
What state is the plastic in when you find it in animals?
The vast majority of what we find are microplastics, smaller than five millimeters, that are fragmented from larger things. You can't usually tell what they're from. Most people don't eat the guts of animals, so we don't usually ingest those plastics. There are some exceptions. People here eat seal intestine, and if you eat the fish called capelin or sardines, you eat the entire animal.
The concern that we have is that we know plastics absorb oily chemicals. Like when you have your tupperware that's stained orange from your chile or your curry, that's because plastics is really good at sucking in oily chemicals. If you want to wash that orange color out, which is really hard, you would put it in hot, abrasic, acidic conditions, like a stomach.
My dogs eat plastic everyday and there's no crisis of the dog species. Most dogs eat plastic.
The albatross on Midway Island, Chris Jordan's photographs, drive me crazy because those birds did not die of plastics. In fact, albatross are one of the only marine bird species in the world that is increasing in population and range. They are the healthiest bird species literally in the world. Albatross die a lot because they're what's called an R-species. They live a really long time and have a baby every year, and the vast majority of those babies die. While those babies are dying and starving, they eat a lot of things that aren't food, including plastics. When you find an albatross that's dead with plastics in its belly, the incorrect assumption is that it died because of plastics, not because it was dying and thus ate plastics.
That’s a revelation & also cause for pause about what we’re panicking about.
I think we need to be concerned, but differently than we're currently concerned.
Right.
We're really concerned about objects that are plastics, and that is a concern. But more concerning are all the chemicals that originate in plastics and get absorbed by plastics, many of whom are built by the same industry. The petrochemical industry makes plastics, makes gas, makes plasticizers, makes fragrances, makes flame retardants. Those are the same companies. Those are the same set of products. And the plastic parts are like the vehicles or the vectors, and that's not great, especially because it assumes disposability and therefore access to land, which is a form of colonialism, to dispose of. But the health concern is really these chemicals.
Are you optimistic about the future of plastics? In our ability to innovate, or participate in change?
No, because I don't believe in end of pipe solutions. At all. And that's because I fully understand the scale of plastics. It's like trying to bail out a boat, but you haven't plugged the hole that's sinking the boat.
How about if we stop top of pipe? How about if we stop the production of disposable and ubiquitous plastics? People like GAIA, or Break Free From Plastics, which are these large coalitions that not coincidentally are global coalitions with a lot of people from the global south in them, those are the groups that are like, screw your end of pipe, because they're the end of the pipe. They're where American corporations are building their incinerators. They’re where the people are shipping their recycling to. And they're like no, these solutions clearly don't work. They just defer and shuffle the problem.
What you need to do is stop the pipe. That's what I believe in. This isn't a technological problem, this is a problem rooted in colonialism that assumes you get access to other people's land for your solutions, whether it's storing your pollution or your recycling or whatever. I'm really interested in things like China's recycling ban, which ripped a hole in the world's recycling program because the entire world's recycling programs depended on the idea that things went away, and away was China.
People are looking for other ways. They're like oh, let’s ship our recycling to other places in Southeast Asia. Oh, Vietnam. And you're like, no, no. China taught us something, folks. What it taught you was you're going to run out of aways, and your aways are going to get tired of you, and folks in Malaysia right now are fighting, fighting, fighting not to be the next away. That's colonialism. That's just waste colonialism. That's just the newest frontier in waste colonialism.
If I'm going to put my optimism somewhere and my change making somewhere, it's in that. It's in people being like no, I'm not going to be your away. Go find your own god damn away. Once we run out of that, or once we take ownership of that – when I say we, I mean industrialized nations mostly. I don't believe in most narratives of “we” because they make it sound like consumers can do something. If you live in Newfoundland, even if you live in other places, there's one fucking store. There's no such thing as consumerism or consumer choice. Reuse is already to the nines because there aren't a lot of resources. So all of the...banning straws? There are no straws.
The straw thing put me over the edge!
A lot of the common discourses make zero sense in the north. It's a handy barometer when someone's like, this is a solution! And you just sort of look around and you say no, not possible. Moving on. Really helps you scale and prioritize the types of things that might work.
What is the alternative to our dependency on mass produced plastics?
The alternatives would mostly come from industry. The number one product category for plastics is packaging. It's not more than half, but it's the largest chunk. Most of that packaging has been necessary only since the 50's. That's living memory. We could circulate goods in ways we remember from living memory differently than totally packaged in plastic. Yeah. They circulate differently. They don't circulate as far. It just means you have different distribution systems. The problem is that oil has just reinvested in plastics big time. Eight months ago they invested more money than they put in the last few years into new plastic production. So that's their call, right?
Why are they re-upping their investment?
I don't know. There was no discussion of why this, like why plastics? I do know, and I have studied historically the reason that plastics and plastic packaging in particular is so attractive to industry is because it is so cheap and it is so easy to turn a profit off of. Part of that is disposability. The fact that you don't have to be responsible for the end of life of your product. Some other country, someone else's land takes care of that for you. It's a huge cost savings compared to other things that are possible.
That's deeply upsetting.
It is. That's why any conversation about plastic, if it also doesn't talk about power, it's missed the boat. If it talks about individual agency and consumers, and it talks about empowerment but not power, it's actually missed the entire structure of plastic production and pollution.
Do you think large government policy can be effective in altering our use of plastic?
Yeah. If government stops subsidizing oil. I look for these things that are not the expected things, like China saying no. Or someone being like, no more corn. No more subsidizing corn for alternative plastic stocks, which makes plastic just like plastic. These unexpected things, because plastic is so dependent on these really extensive networks. Transportation, extraction, production, disposability.
Are more people understanding the relationship and connectedness between plastic and industry?
I don't know about more people, but I do think that key people do. Some of these international global coalitions, get it. A few key scientists get it. The Story of Stuff pretty much gets it. GAIA gets it. Teen Vogue gets it! These folks who have moved away from the end of pipeline story and the recycling story and the five small steps story, and have considered or deeply know power structures. That's increasing, a lot.
I've been working on plastic pollution since before it was cool, and the story has shifted significantly. The recycling and five small things continues to proliferate on its little treadmill, but there's now a lot more variety than there ever has before, especially as people are like holy shit, car tires. Holy shit, clothes. Holy shit. Those are things where you can’t just make a little shift because of their massive infrastructural ubiquity. People are starting to understand scale. Key people are starting to understand scale. Yeah. So that's nice.
How do you work to eliminate plastics but also acknowledge those who will likely become more disenfranchised by a rising cost of plastic, primarily medical items, that are dependent on plastics?
I work with folks who are at the periphery who aren't getting benefits. People who hunt and fish and need that food for all sorts of reasons. The thing is, if you think about anyone who needs plastic medical equipment – medical waste is different than packaging waste. I don't want a pacemaker that's not plastic. First of all, it's not possible. Second of all, I want my fucking pacemaker. But the thing is, there's ways to do that that is not about mass production, that is not about releasing and patenting and circulating chemicals that haven't been tested properly.
The problem isn't plastics. There are natural plastics. There are polymers that decay.
That's the problem. This idea that you either have to ban it all or take it all, you're like no. Those are not the only two things available. And I know this because I live in the fucking north. Concepts of ubiquity don't really work here. The all or nothing doesn't work in a lot of places, and that's obvious.
What would a local plastic economy look like? Huh. No one’s ever asked that question really. If you had to own the plastics, own the extraction of those plastics, own the chemicals that go in the plastics and the extraction of those chemicals, I bet your plastics would look a lot different. I bet you wouldn't have packaging. I bet you wouldn't have BPA. I bet you'd just move to something else half the time. And I bet you'd have plastic pacemakers.