National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

those used for scrap vehicles. A lot of E-waste also ends up in Asian countries.
One frequently used transport method involves loading up scrap vehicles with
E-waste to combine the two waste streams.
Hazardous waste materials
It has been known for some time that Africa is regularly used as a dump site.
A study carried out for the United Nations back in 2000, for example, described
incidents relating to the importing of hazardous waste materials into African
and Asian countries in 1993 and 1994. Most of the offenders were Nigerian
businessmen. The most widely used method to prevent the discovery of the
illegal activities was to mislabel the waste materials. The offenders tried to evade
inspections by pretending that the materials were raw materials or components
with a positive economic value.
Since the 1990s China has also been the destination for various shipments of
hazardous waste. Research by Greenpeace shows that most of these shipments
come from industrialised (OECD) countries. In many cases, however, the exporter
or intermediary can no longer be traced, often because the ‘companies’ involved
turn out to have only a PO box address. As a consequence the costs of returning
and processing the waste must be borne by the national government. In the late
1990s the Philippines and Indonesia imported a lot of waste metal from batteries
(with permission from the authorities). In many cases this was supposedly for
recycling purposes, but it turned out that the quality of the processing plants
was insufficient. The result was that much of the waste was dumped on
mountains of domestic waste.
It is striking that the legal stream of a particular type of waste can follow
a different route from the illegal stream of the same waste material. Fridges
and E-waste are two good examples: the legal stream stays within the European
Union, whilst illegal transports end up in Africa and East Asia.
The VROM Inspectorate has discovered that a lot of violations of the export
ban are linked to the port of Amsterdam. These violations involve the export
of waste materials such as computer components, televisions and scrap vehicles
to Africa, countries in the Caribbean and islands in the Pacific. Electronic
equipment is often loaded into used or scrap vehicles.
3.5.5 Consequences for Dutch society
The negative consequences of cross-border waste streams are mainly in the
destination countries, where damage to the environment and public health
126 National Threat Assessment 2008 – Organised crime