Tricks under Trade: How International Trade Both Facilitates and is Facilitated by Corporate Environmental Crime in the Waste and Hydrocarbon Sectors

Abstract

Legal scholarship in the realm of international economic law has a blind spot: the practice of international trade. Cargo and container shipping is the blood and guts of international trade, and it is fuelled by bunker oil – a hydrocarbon mixture of the dirtiest petroleum-based products. Worryingly, there is empirical evidence of bunkers being intentionally contaminated with waste oils. This fraudulent contamination violates numerous international, national, and EU rules on waste management and poses immense risks to the health of planet and people alike. These same acts of fraud are also extremely profitable, and they facilitate the smooth functioning of our global economy. The fraud is itself not just incentivised in the tight-margins reality of international trade, but it is facilitated by the lack of proper legislation and the vulnerability of the existing means of enforcement in the areas where there is legislation to comply with. Economic operators often use falsified documents to market fuel oil that should be considered as waste. Systematic wrongdoing of this kind is detrimental to the environment and risks eroding the rule of law in both its formal and substantive conceptualisations.