When the Global South Says ‘No’: Waste Sovereignty and the New Geography of Environmental Security

In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja argues that waste is no longer merely an environmental management problem but an emerging question of sovereignty, justice, and environmental security. Underscoring the concept of waste sovereignty, he contends that the central issue is not simply who bears environmental burdens, but who has the authority to refuse them. Using Turkey’s transformation into a major destination for European plastic waste as a revealing case, the commentary demonstrates how the circular economy can shift environmental risks rather than reduce them when accountability is displaced across borders. Dr. Solaja calls for a new framework that links waste governance to political agency, material accountability, and environmental justice, arguing that the future of environmental security depends on empowering communities—not merely managing waste.

By Dr. Oludele Solaja

The world has a waste problem. But have we been asking the right question? Today, international environmental policy has focused mainly on waste as a management issue – how to collect, recycle, regulate and dispose of waste safely. Yet the growing international movement of discarded materials reveals a more fundamental political question: who has the authority to decide where the environmental consequences of global consumption will go—and who has the power to refuse them? This is not a semantic distinction. It’s about the kind of inequality that is at the core of the current world.

Now commodities, capital, and the waste flow across borders with great ease. Environmental risks do not. They tend to concentrate in specific locales, workplaces and communities — frequently in areas of weak political bargaining power and limited regulatory capacity. Some societies consume; others process; still others live with the pollution, occupational hazards and ecological damage generated along the way. Waste is therefore not simply what remains after consumption. It’s becoming more and more a question of power, sovereignty and security.

A Shipment Can Be Legal Without Being Just

Here comes the concept of waste sovereignty into play. Waste sovereignty is a shift from the question of how poorer countries can deal with the world’s waste, to why should particular countries and communities shoulder environmental risks produced elsewhere? It is about the ability of a state or community to decide what types of waste are brought into their area, how and for whom. More fundamentally, though, it’s about a political right to say ‘no.’

That right is significant because there are not two equally powerful actors conducting international waste transactions. A shipment can be legal without being just. A nation can say ‘yes’ to accepting waste and communities impacted by it have limited real say in the decision. The issue of consent can be particularly complex when the government accepts imports of waste since it benefits from jobs, foreign exchange or investment, but the environmental costs are borne by populations that have little political power.

This asymmetry is apparent in the international trade of plastic waste. Although plastic-waste trade declined between 2017 and 2022, substantial exports from OECD countries to non-OECD countries continued, particularly toward Southeast Asia. The Basel Convention’s new plastic-waste provisions have enhanced global controls, but that is not enough to overcome the issue of political inequality. The problem is not only that waste is moving across the borders in a legal fashion. It is whose interests are protected when it does.

Turkey Shows That Recycling Can Shift, Rather Than Reduce, Environmental Harm

Turkey provides a tell-tale example. It has transformed the country into a big hub for European plastic waste and worries have been raised about microplastic pollution linked to plastic recycling in the Adana area. This case has far-reaching implications beyond Turkey. It reveals a disturbing paradox in the circular economy: recycling is not necessarily good for the environment when it’s referred to as recycling.

Increased movement of the recyclable materials to locations where regulatory oversight, technological ability or environmental protection is less robust can lead to a shift of environmental risk, instead of reduction, through recycling. The questions raised are thus not limited to the question of whether something is recyclable. So, where, by whom, under what conditions and at whose environmental cost are things being recycled?

Politics of waste enters into the politics of circular economy here. While the circular economy can turn waste into resources, and resources do not circulate in neutral systems. They permeate markets, borders, labor relations and regulatory regimes. Circularity can perpetuate the very inequalities it aims to tackle if the environmental impacts of processing are continually passed down to communities who have less bargaining power.

Environmental Insecurity Often Accumulates Quietly Among the Politically Weakest

The African experience makes this even more apparent. Too often, the Global South is represented as the passive destination of unwanted materials around the world. However, in African cities, informal waste workers are collecting usable materials which are not always collected by the formal sector. In Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and elsewhere, informal recyclers perform essential resource-recovery work while often operating without adequate occupational protection, social security or political recognition.

Here lies one of the great paradoxes of contemporary environmental governance: those most excluded from environmental decision-making may be performing some of its most important work. This means that waste sovereignty cannot be reduced to the ability of governments to close borders to imported waste. It must also concern who controls the conditions under which waste is recovered, processed and transformed into economic value. Informal recyclers should not simply be incorporated into global circular value chains as inexpensive labor. A just circular economy must recognize their environmental contribution, protect their livelihoods and give them meaningful influence over the systems in which their labor and environments are embedded.

This broader understanding also changes how we think about environmental security. Environmental security is conventionally associated with climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity, disasters and displacement. Waste reveals another dimension: the insecurity produced when environmental risks are systematically displaced across borders and concentrated among politically weaker populations.

Consider the chain: Consumption → waste generation → international export → processing/recycling → environmental exposure → livelihood disruption → community resistance → political conflict.

A polluted irrigation canal can threaten agricultural livelihoods. A recycling facility can become a source of neighborhood conflict. A landfill can generate political mobilization. Informal waste workers can be criminalized even while providing essential environmental services. Environmental insecurity does not therefore always arrive as a spectacular disaster. Sometimes it accumulates quietly—in polluted waterways, degraded land, unsafe workplaces and communities living with risks generated by decisions made elsewhere.

Waste Sovereignty Asks Who Has the Power to Refuse Environmental Burdens

This is why waste should be understood as an emerging politics of environmental security. The critical issue is not merely whether environmental risks exist. It is whose security is protected and whose security is sacrificed in managing them.

This also requires abandoning the image of the Global South as simply a “dumping ground.” Such language may describe a real historical pattern, but it can obscure something equally important: contestation. The Global South is not merely where waste arrives. It is also where resistance, refusal and renegotiation can begin.

China’s 2018 restrictions on foreign waste imports disrupted established global waste routes and forced exporters to search for alternative destinations. The episode demonstrated that receiving countries are not powerless endpoints in a global waste system. They can restrict imports, renegotiate arrangements, strengthen regulation and demand greater responsibility from exporters. More recent European regulatory developments likewise reflect growing recognition that international waste movements require stronger safeguards and accountability.

But the deeper question is what happens when this capacity for refusal moves beyond governments and becomes a claim made by communities and workers themselves. This is where waste sovereignty extends the environmental-justice tradition. Environmental justice has taught us to ask: Who bears the environmental burden? Waste sovereignty adds another question: Who has the authority to decide where that burden is placed—and who has the power to refuse it? The difference is profound.

The Future of the Circular Economy Depends on Material Accountability, Not Recycling Alone

A society may be protected from environmental harm only when it possesses meaningful authority over the decisions that produce environmental exposure. Security without agency is fragile. Consent without participation is incomplete. Circularity without accountability can become another form of environmental displacement. The future of the circular economy therefore depends on more than increasing recycling rates or reducing the volume of waste sent to landfills. It requires material accountability.

Producer responsibility must extend across borders. Exporting countries should remain accountable for the environmental consequences of materials they send abroad. Importing countries must retain meaningful regulatory and refusal powers. Informal recyclers should be recognized as environmental workers rather than treated merely as obstacles to formalization. And communities living alongside waste facilities must have a meaningful voice in decisions affecting their environments. The principle is simple: No society should be expected to surrender its environmental security in exchange for another society’s convenience. This principle carries implications far beyond waste policy.

Globalization has long been understood through the movement of commodities, capital, technologies and information. Increasingly, however, we must also understand it through the movement of what societies no longer want. Environmental inequality is produced not only through the extraction of resources from poorer territories but also through the geographical displacement of unwanted materials and risks. 

When the Global South Says ‘No,’ It Redefines Environmental Security

The Global South is therefore not simply where the world’s waste ends up. It is becoming a political arena in which sovereignty, economic opportunity, environmental justice and security are contested. And this may be the deeper significance of waste sovereignty.

The politics of the twenty-first century will not be shaped only by who controls oil, minerals, land or data. It will also be shaped by who controls the movement of materials that others no longer want—and, crucially, who has the right to refuse them. The question for the coming decades may therefore be deceptively simple: Who has the right to decide where the world’s unwanted materials go? The answer cannot be determined solely by those who generate the waste.

When communities and states begin answering that question for themselves, waste ceases to be merely the end of consumption. It becomes a site of political authority. And when the Global South says “no,” that refusal should not be understood simply as resistance to global trade. It may represent something more consequential: a demand to redefine who counts in the making of environmental security.

The future of environmental security will depend not only on protecting societies from environmental threats. It will depend on ensuring that no society can make itself secure by making another society environmentally insecure. That is the political promise of waste sovereignty.