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Greener borders

Greener Borders 
The Morung Express 29 June 09 Last month, the World Customs Organisation — a relatively unknown inter-governmental body seeking to harmonise rules and regulations across countries — launched the Protect the Environment global campaign and organised a five-day Green Customs workshop at the National Academy of Customs, Excise and Narcotics (NACEN) at its sprawling campus in Faridabad……………….the Basel Ban (under the UN Environment Programme, or UNEP) that regulates the generation, trade and disposal of hazardous waste. Under the Basel Ban, implemented into legally-binding EU law, exports of hazardous waste from the EU to non-OECD countries are prohibited…………………For reasons best known to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, radioactive waste has been exempted from the Basel Convention, providing a loophole for unscrupulous exporters. Again, if the receiving country’s laws permit the disposal of such waste, it becomes difficult for any international intervention to implement laws to the contrary. The complexity of this trade is apparent in the fact that secondary products like recycled steel imported into Germany and Sweden have been found to contain traces of radioactivity.Under the Basel Convention, however, the secretariat can inform all countries about shipments of hazwaste so that it can at least alert everyone concerned about the potential dangers of accepting and handling such waste. But the secretariat has rules governing private and naval ships, not those belonging to the government. One has only to remember the fate of several Soviet nuclear submarines that were dumped in the oceans and lakes by former Soviet bloc countries after the break-up of the Union simply because they couldn’t maintain them any longer.

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June 29, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized