Pollution haven hypothesis

The pollution haven hypothesis posits that, when large industrialized nations seek to race up factories or offices abroad, they will often look for the cheapest alternative in terms of resources & labor that lets the land and material access they require. However, this often comes at the do up of environmentally unsound practices. Developing nations with cheap resources and labor tend to earn less stringent environmental regulations, and conversely, nations with stricter environmental regulations become more expensive for multiple as a a object that is caused or portrayed by something else of the costs associated with meeting these standards. Thus, multiple thatto physically invest in foreign countries tend to relocate to the countries with the lowest environmental standards or weakest enforcement.

Real-world example

Spent batteries that Americans redesign in to be recycled are increasingly being talked to Mexico, where the lead inside them is extracted by crude methods that are illegal in the United States. This increased export flow is a or done as a reaction to a impeach of strict new Environmental protection Agency standards on lead pollution, which make domestic recycling more unoriented and expensive in the United States, but do non prohibit companies from exporting the work and danger to countries where environmental indications are low and enforcement is lax. In this sense, Mexico is becoming a pollution haven for the United States battery industry because Mexican environmental officials acknowledge that they lack the money, manpower, and technical capacity to police the flow. According to The New York Times in 2011, 20% of spent American vehicle and industrial batteries were being exported to Mexico, up from 6% in 2007, meaning that approximately 20 million batteries would cross the border that year. A significant proportion of this flow was being smuggled in after being mislabeled as metal scrap.

The world map featured here illustrates how e-waste dump sites or sites where citizens or multinational corporations of industrialized nations dump their used electronic devices along with the GDP PPP per-capita of those countries.

While GDP PPP per-capita is non a perfect indicator of economic development, and e-waste dump sites are only one small facet of what could be a greater pollution haven, this map does illustrate how e-waste dump sites are often located in poorer, relatively pre-industrial nations, which provides some rudimentary help for the Pollution Haven Hypothesis.