ABSTRACT
Homeless hazardous wastes are again making headlines, more than ten years after some of the first well-publicized illegal or mismanaged international hazardous waste shipments. 1 In late 1998,3000 tonnes of mercury-contaminated industrial waste packed in plastic bags was found in an open dump near Sihanoukville, Cambodia. The waste, labelled on import documents from a Taiwanese petrochemical company as ‘cement cake’, was subsequently implicated in local rioting and the deaths of at least two people. It was returned to Taiwan. Further attempts to send the waste to the USA and France also failed, although 32 containers of the crushed, used barrels were eventually dispatched to the Netherlands for incineration. 2 In early 2000 the Japanese government took back 122 containers of hospital wastes illegally exported to the Philippines as ‘waste paper for recycling’. 3 And, beginning in March 2000, a shipment of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contaminated waste from a US military base in Japan was rejected by both the USA and Canada, only to be sent back to Japan and then on to tiny Wake Island in the Pacific to await an uncertain future. 4
