CDS (I) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 49 of 120

Correct — A, Hazardous wastes. The treaty's full name says it: the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. It was opened for signature on 21 March 1989 and entered into force on 5 May 1992, and its purpose is to cut the movement of hazardous waste between countries and, above all, to stop rich countries shipping it to poorer ones for cheap disposal. It works through prior informed consent: a shipment may not leave without the written agreement of the importing state. As of June 2024 it had 191 parties, with East Timor, Fiji, Haiti, South Sudan and the United States outside. Each of the other three options is a real convention with its own subject, which is what makes the set worth learning together.

• (b)Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) — That is the Stockholm Convention, which bans or restricts long-lived toxic chemicals such as DDT, PCBs and dioxins — the original dirty dozen. Different treaty, different city.
• (c)Mercury — That is the Minamata Convention, named after the Japanese city poisoned by industrial mercury discharge, which controls mercury supply, trade, use and emissions.
• (d)Chemicals and pesticides — That is the Rotterdam Convention, which applies prior informed consent to trade in certain hazardous chemicals and pesticides. It shares Basel's consent mechanism, which is why it is the most tempting wrong answer here.

Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm are administered together as a cluster and are often called the three chemicals-and-waste conventions. Basel governs the movement of hazardous waste; Rotterdam governs trade in listed hazardous chemicals and pesticides through prior informed consent; Stockholm eliminates or restricts persistent organic pollutants outright. Minamata, agreed later, sits alongside them and deals with mercury.

The whole set can be reduced to one word each — Basel for waste, Rotterdam for trade in chemicals, Stockholm for persistent pollutants, Minamata for mercury — and the examiners rely on students learning three of the four and guessing the fourth. Anchoring each name to a place story helps: Minamata to the mercury poisoning in Japan, Basel to Switzerland's chemical industry and to the African waste-dumping scandals of the late 1980s that provoked the treaty. Present-day note: the Basel plastic-waste amendments agreed in 2019 brought most plastic scrap under the prior-informed-consent regime from 1 January 2021, which is why the convention now turns up in news about plastic waste exports as well.

• The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal was opened for signature on 21 March 1989 and entered into force on 5 May 1992.
• Its aim is to reduce movements of hazardous waste between nations and to prevent transfers from developed to less developed countries.
• It had 191 parties as of June 2024; East Timor, Fiji, Haiti, South Sudan and the United States are not parties.
• The Stockholm Convention covers persistent organic pollutants, the Rotterdam Convention hazardous chemicals and pesticides in trade, and the Minamata Convention mercury.
• The 2019 plastic-waste amendments brought most plastic scrap under Basel's prior-informed-consent regime from 1 January 2021.

• Mixing Rotterdam and Basel; both use prior informed consent, but one covers traded chemicals and the other covers waste.
• Attaching Minamata to a disease rather than to the mercury treaty named after the place.

As a convention-to-subject match, or as a single-line identification of what a named convention aims at.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Stockholm Convention deals with which one of the following?

  • (a)Persistent organic pollutants
  • (b)Transboundary movement of hazardous wastes
  • (c)Mercury
  • (d)Wetlands of international importance

  Answer(a) Persistent organic pollutants — it bans or restricts long-lived toxic chemicals such as DDT, PCBs and dioxins.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Minamata Convention is concerned with which one of the following substances?

  • (a)Lead
  • (b)Asbestos
  • (c)Mercury
  • (d)Cadmium

  Answer(c) Mercury — it is named after the Japanese city where industrial mercury discharge caused mass poisoning.