Return to Sender? On the Challenges of Making Transnational Environmental Justice Work

• In Event: “Productive Crossings”: Transnational Activism in a Shrinking World

Abstract

In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia, began a two-year journey, roaming the world’s oceans in search of a dumping ground. Its initial destination and then country after country refused to accept the waste. The ship ended up dumping part of its load in Haiti under false pretenses, and the remaining waste was illegally dumped in the ocean. Two shipping company officials eventually received criminal convictions. In the late 1980s, the Khian Sea became the flagship of Greenpeace’ Global Toxic Campaign, smoothing the way for the UN’s Basel Convention on the Transboundary Trade with Hazardous Waste passed in 1989. Yet, it should take fourteen years, before the US ash once abandoned in Haiti by the Khian Sea was “Returned to Sender.” Only in 2002 did the ash eventually find its resting ground in a Pennsylvanian landfill, close to Philadelphia.

Zooming in on the aftermath of the ship’s journey, this contribution sheds lights on the challenges international environmental activists faced to ‘make their success work.’ Although the Khian Sea and its journey had been crucial for international environmental activists’ campaigning for the Basel Convention, the global framework helped them little to get the ash returned. Additionally, with both the United States and Greenpeace shifting interests away from the global waste trade—for different reasons—, the moment seemed to have passed. New and unusual alliances, it seemed, had to be formed to have the campaign’s promises become reality.

Author

• Simone M. Müller, DFG Heisenberg Professor for Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg, Germany