The challenge posed by local environmentalists to this Japanese export gathered momentum this week as members of Thailand's military-appointed National Legislative Assembly met to debate the planned Thai-Japan free trade agreement (FTA).

Anti-FTA activists have also joined ranks with environmentalists, since this trade deal, which was debated Thursday, includes a clause that confirms Japan's intention to ship unlimited amount of its waste, including hazardous and toxic particles, as part of the new commercial agreement between the two countries.

Officials from Thailand's foreign ministry have already confirmed to environmentalists the range of waste the country would have to shoulder from Asia's richest industrialised nation. It includes hazardous items as slag, residues from incinerated municipal waste, residue from chemical and allied industries and hospital waste.

"We will be victimised by these trade polices pushed by industrialised countries," Penchom Saetang, coordinator of the Campaign for Alternative Industry Network (CAIN), a Bangkok-based non-governmental organisation, told IPS. "This is part of Japan's plan to promote the waste recycling business in South-east Asia, including hazardous waste."

Anti-FTA activists confirm that the opposition to the agreement's provisions on waste will not be easy to side-step since it is one of two clauses that Thais feel they have more to lose than Japan. There is also local opposition to provisions in the deal over patent protection on domestic biotechnology products.

"Japan wants Thailand to reduce existing tariffs on the trade of waste products, making it easier for Japan to send its garbage here," says Witoon Liancharoon, spokesman for FTA Watch, a lobby group campaigning against bilateral free trade deals. "This waste is to be recycled by Japanese companies to be set up here as part of the FTA."

Bangkok is also under pressure to give up its right to stop any incoming shipment of hazardous waste, he explained in an interview. "The investment charter of the Thai-Japan FTA has many clauses protecting the Japanese investor involved in recycling hazardous waste. Thailand won't be able to use any protections guaranteed under existing multilateral environment agreements if a problem occurs."

Tokyo's quest for garbage dumps in economically weaker South-east Asia is also manifest in an FTA between Japan and the Philippines, currently sent for approval to the Philippines Senate.

The deal must not be ratified unless "all nuclear and toxic waste dumping provisions are scrapped," says an activist for Greenpeace, the global environmental lobby. "It is highly immoral and unjust for a rich country like Japan to dump its dangerous wastes on countries which neither have the means nor the resources to manage their own waste problems."

"Japan has to deal with its own hazardous waste within its own borders," Von Hernandez, campaigns director for Greenpeace South-east Asia, told IPS. "Why export Japan's problems to other countries?"

Japan is only one of many industrialised countries that have been exporting waste to South-east Asian countries, which has also included Indonesia as a receiving nation. Others who have done so under prevailing loopholes that permit some forms of waste being shipped for recycling include the United States, Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Canada and South Korea.

The growing pressure on developing countries to accept harmful waste from industrialised nations goes against the Basel Convention, say environmentalists. The convention, adopted in 1989, and coming into force in 1992, bans all forms of hazardous waste being shipped from the industrialised world to the developing world.

Yet, as studies have shown, the international agreement adopted in the Swiss city has failed to stall the exports that have caused a stink. Britain, for instance, exported nearly 23,000 metric tonnes of electronic waste "illegally" in 2003 to parts of South-east Asia, India and China, reveals Greenpeace.

Japan has done so with Thailand, too. In 2002, it shipped 54 metric tonnes of waste, which increased to 334,000 metric tonnes in 2003, and 350,000 metric tonnes in 2004, according to Thailand's customs department. "Yet we don't know what happened to the waste; where it was sent to in the country," says Penchom. "That information is described as a trade secret. This mystery is a problem to us."

The 2002 shipment of Japanese waste to Thailand coincides with the period that Tokyo was under pressure to find an outlet for a growing waste management crisis at home. The North-eastern Asian nation had been running out of space for landfill sites, the cost of waste management and waste disposal was increasing and affected local communities were filing lawsuits.

A widely publicised case in Japan in the late 1990s was typical. Local communities in the Saitama prefecture, north of Tokyo, responded in rage after discovering that their local government leaders had concealed information about the high level of dioxins found in the air and the soil in their midst. The pollution was traced to the nearby incinerators run by privately-owned waste recycling companies.

"Developing countries should not be exposed to the health and environment risks that Japan wants to avoid at home," says Hernandez. "Thailand and the Philippines will have to stand up to Japan's attempt to circumvent the Basil Ban, which is an amendment to the Basel Convention to stop the export of hazardous waste even for recycling purposes."