The Geography of Industrial Harm

Industries that produce toxic byproducts face a choice: clean up, or find somewhere to operate where cleanup is not required. The second option has consistently been cheaper, and the history of industrial capitalism is substantially a history of inflicting costs on people and places with the least power to resist.

Environmental regulation imposes costs on production, so if firms can move production to pollution havens with weaker regulation without losing access to their markets, they will. The result is that strengthening environmental law in one country tends to relocate production rather than reduce pollution, and the communities that absorb the relocated production are rarely the communities that consume its output. Labor costs, proximity to markets, and political stability often matter more than regulatory standards, but many cases still fit this pattern.

The Bhopal disaster of December 1984 is the clearest example of the cost of differential regulatory standards. A Union Carbide pesticide plant in Madhya Pradesh, India, released methyl isocyanate gas in the middle of the night. The immediate death toll was at minimum several thousand people, and estimates of total deaths from the release and its long-term effects run into the tens of thousands. The Bhopal plant operated under safety standards that would not have been permitted at comparable Union Carbide facilities in the United States; on top of that, cost-cutting measures had disabled safety systems. The parent company settled with the Indian government for $470 million in 1989, an amount widely regarded as grossly inadequate. Warren Anderson, Union Carbide’s CEO at the time of the disaster, was declared a fugitive by Indian courts after failing to appear for criminal proceedings. He died in the United States in 2014 without having faced trial, and the site has never been fully cleaned up.

Toxic materials generated in wealthy countries have followed the same geographic logic. The 1989 Basel Convention was supposed to restrict this practice by requiring that receiving countries explicitly agree to accept hazardous waste shipments. Industry opposition was immediate and implementation was uneven. The Basel Ban Amendment, which would prohibit exports from wealthy to developing countries entirely, was adopted in 1995 but took until 2019 to enter into force; again, enforcement has been weak and uneven.

Electronic waste is just one example of this pattern. The devices produced by the tech industry contain lead, mercury, cadmium, beryllium, and brominated flame retardants. These materials have value if they can be recovered from discarded devices, but extracting them is toxic work. Much of the world’s e-waste ends up in Accra, Ghana and in Guiyu, China, where workers—many of them children—burn cables to recover copper, use acid baths to extract precious metals, and are exposed to toxic smoke and contaminated groundwater without protective equipment. Workers at these sites show elevated levels of lead in their blood and are exposed to persistent organic pollutants at levels far above what health standards in wealthy countries would permit.

The tech industry has been unusually successful at presenting itself as having no geography. Cloud computing happens somewhere. Device manufacturing happens somewhere. The rare earth mining that produces the materials in every battery and processor happens somewhere. The somewhere, systematically, is where environmental regulation is weakest and labor is cheapest, and the people doing that work bear risks that consumers of the final products do not. The gap between the industry’s self-presentation and its actual material footprint is not accidental. It is sustained by the geographic distance between production and consumption, and by the way that distance makes the connection invisible to those who benefit from it.

See the whole series

Lapierre2002

Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro: Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster. Grand Central Publishing, 2002, 978-0446530880.

Nixon2011

Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011, 978-0674049307.

Patel2017

Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. University of California Press, 2017, 978-0520299931.