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Drawing on a novel dataset of hazardous waste shipments among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, we seek to enhance dominant modes of understanding transnational trading and regulation at the scale of the nation-state. We argue that these, while valuable, are limited by methodological nationalism. This epistemological position identifies the nation-state as the most relevant unit of analysis in examining “transnational” phenomena. In the case of transboundary waste trading, tracking waste between nation-states has come at the expense of identification and analysis of specific sites within nations that receive hazardous materials or send them abroad, obscuring the ongoing proliferation of waste havens at a subnational level and related environmental justice concerns. Working against methodological nationalism entails an epistemological shift that we pursue in this article through a series of empirical, analytical, and representational practices. We propose three visualization tactics that undermine nation-centered imaginaries: (1) documenting waste havens within the understudied United States through identifying subnational sites importing hazardous waste for processing; (2) establishing connections through flow maps connecting importing and exporting localities transnationally trading specific hazardous wastes; and (3) analyzing the corporate networks dominating the transnational waste trade. We argue these tactics build toward an alternative conception of methodological cosmopolitanism that highlights alternative routes toward environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This illustrated essay attempts to respond to the slow violence of the hazardous waste trade. We introduce and analyze common representational styles of hazardous waste: greenwashing, ruin porn, environmental justice toxic tours, and Ngai’s concept of the merely interesting. We argue that the first two styles tend to reproduce the status quo, but that the latter two are potentially more disruptive. We then turn to a data set about the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America to argue for and produce alternative representations of this waste, literally drawing from the data and figuratively drawing inspiration from toxic tours and the merely interesting. Our intervention is thus visual as well as conceptual: We argue against status quo representations of hazardous waste and then discuss and produce alternatives based on a novel data set we created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HazMatMapper is an online and interactive geographic visualization tool designed to facilitate exploration of transnational flows of hazardous waste in North America (http://geography.wisc.edu/hazardouswaste/map/). While conventional narratives suggest that wealthier countries such as Canada and the United States (US) export waste to poorer countries like Mexico, little is known about how waste trading may affect specific sites within any of the three countries. To move beyond anecdotal discussions and national aggregates, we assembled a novel geographic dataset describing transnational hazardous waste shipments from 2007 to 2012 through two Freedom of Information Act requests for documents held by the US Environmental Protection Agency. While not yet detailing all of the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America, HazMatMapper supports multiscale and site-specific visual exploration of US imports of hazardous waste from Canada and Mexico. It thus enables academic researchers, waste regulators, and the general public to generate hypotheses on regional clustering, transnational corporate structuring, and environmental justice concerns, as well as to understand the limitations of existing regulatory data collection itself. Here, we discuss the dataset and design process behind HazMatMapper and demonstrate its utility for understanding the transnational hazardous waste trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]