Prejudicial to Developing Countries
The Basel Convention was created primarily to protect developing countries from the exploitation caused by waste traders who were externalizing costs and harm to them from developed countries. Thus, it is ironic and contradictory to utilize analytical, numeric concentration levels that will be prohibitively costly to implement and enforce. Developing countries will be disproportionately burdened due to limited resources to implement the very expensive analytical lab work that will be required. Analytical testing teams, equipped with gas chromatography-mass spectrometric analysis, are extremely expensive, and not many police and labs in the developing world can do this technique routinely for the vast number of waste shipments currently arriving at their ports. Even if this analysis is required of the traders prior to export, a competent authority will still need to be able to independently corroborate the claims.
It is unreasonable to expect a small government with limited staff and budget to defend its assertion that a waste should be controlled as a hazardous waste and risk being challenged or sued by a company with far greater resources for lawyers and laboratories with a very different, self-serving idea. Legal battles favor rich plaintiffs and not developing country defendants. The victim country in such a case may never get accountability for illegal traffic and risks being victimized twice: first from the chemical assault, and second from the attempt to prove a legal basis for prosecution and accountability at great cost.
Violation of Sovereign Right to Adopt Stronger Controls
In Article 4, paragraph 11 of the Convention, it is asserted that nothing shall prevent a Party from imposing additional requirements to protect human health and the environment. Being shackled to "safe levels" of wastes denies that right of Parties to utilize a "precautionary" or even a "risk-based" approach to determining whether they wish to export or import a waste of concern. It is a fundamental contradiction with the Convention's established right to assert stronger requirements, even on a case-by-case basis This is the right of any Party and the job and in fact the responsibility of a Competent Authority and their staff. This comes ahead of dilution in the original bulleted list on p. 1 - perhaps re order the list to keep them in the same order?
Dilution Cannot be an Encouraged Solution
One of the perverse effects of setting concentration thresholds, below which chemical wastes will be deemed non-hazardous and therefore outside of the scope of the Convention, would be to create an incentive to dilute wastes to a point where they miraculously could be deemed "non-hazardous". In some jurisdictions such dilution is illegal, but enforcement of such a prohibition is near impossible. Operations can easily hide dilution as being part of process. As noted earlier, concentration levels are not a good indicator of harm. When the issue of ship recycling became of great concern in the Convention, the Parties resoundingly deemed that even when the toxic materials in a ship were vastly outnumbered by the volume of non-toxic steel, this did not render the ships non-hazardous and free to export outside of the Convention's scope.
By only being concerned about concentration levels and allowing such levels to determine whether we should subject materials to control under the Convention, we will in fact encourage dilution as a false solution to pollution.
