Another shipment from the United States containing suspected electronic waste has been intercepted at the Port of Subic, the Philippine Bureau of Customs said on Saturday 22 August. It is the latest episode in a dispute that has been running since environmental groups first raised the alarm, and it turns on a legal question that has not been resolved: whether these shipments are lawful at all.

How the dispute started

In June 2026 a coalition of environmental organisations — including the Seattle-based Basel Action Network, BAN Toxics, Greenpeace Philippines and Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, operating together as END E-Waste Imports — said that at least 234 containers of suspected electronic waste, plus one container of plastic waste, had entered the Subic Bay Freeport from the United States between March 2025 and June 2026. The figures are the coalition’s, drawn from vessel and shipment tracking.

On 22 July, three containers declared on shipping documents as scrap copper arrived at Subic aboard the MV Tokyo Express. The Subic district collector, Geniefelle Lagmay, placed them under “retain on board” status because of the shipment’s country of origin, citing a precautionary approach consistent with Philippine obligations. The containers were never discharged and the vessel left the following day with them aboard.

On 29 July the coalition alerted customs and the Environmental Management Bureau to a further 184 containers suspected of carrying electronic scrap, scheduled to arrive at Subic between 6 August and 30 September.

The treaty at the centre of it

The Basel Convention governs the movement of hazardous waste across borders. It exists because of a pattern that became notorious in the 1980s: waste that was expensive to dispose of in wealthy countries being shipped to poorer ones where disposal was cheap and oversight thin.

Two features of the treaty matter here. The first is prior informed consent: hazardous waste cannot be exported without the receiving country being told what is coming and agreeing to accept it. The second is Article 4(5), which states that a party shall not permit hazardous or other wastes to be exported to, or imported from, a non-party.

That second clause is the crux. The Philippines has been a party since 1993. The United States signed the convention but never ratified it, and is therefore not a party. On the environmental coalition’s reading, shipments of hazardous e-waste from the US to the Philippines are prohibited outright in the absence of a separate bilateral arrangement — which is why BAN Toxics deputy executive director Jam Lorenzo has called the trade a criminal act.

The counter-arguments

There are two, and they are different in kind.

The first is about classification. Not all electronic scrap is hazardous waste under the convention, and the distinction between waste destined for disposal and material destined for recovery is where much of the argument sits. The Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority has defended recycling operations inside the freeport as “urban mining” — recovering valuable metals from discarded electronics — and says imported material undergoes inspection, laboratory testing and post-entry monitoring. It has since said it would accept only non-hazardous material from incoming US shipments.

The second is about domestic law. Recyclers inside the freeport, organised as the Subic Bay Freeport Electronics Recyclers Association, argued in a position paper in July that the Philippines has no local legal framework implementing the Basel Convention, and that an international treaty cannot by itself restrict corporate entities under Philippine law. Whatever one thinks of that as policy, it points at a real gap: a treaty obligation that has not been translated into enforceable domestic rules is difficult for an official at a port to act on.

Why customs cannot simply seize the cargo

The answer is jurisdictional, and it explains why the same story keeps repeating. A court ruling held that the Subic Special Economic Zone operates as a separate customs territory, which has constrained the Bureau of Customs’ ability to seize shipments there. The bureau has pursued legal remedies through the Office of the Solicitor General, and because the matter is before the courts it has declined to discuss the litigation.

The environmental coalition’s response has been to argue that the freeport authority is not the right decision-maker at all: that under the Basel Convention the competent authorities are the Bureau of Customs and the environment department’s Environmental Management Bureau, not the SBMA. Customs has convened inter-agency meetings bringing in the environment department, the justice department, foreign affairs, the Solicitor General and the environmental groups to work out who decides what.

The practical result, for now, is a standoff in which individual shipments are stopped case by case — as this weekend’s was — while the underlying question remains open.

Why it matters beyond the paperwork

Electronic waste is among the fastest-growing waste streams in the world, and it is genuinely valuable: circuit boards contain gold, copper and rare metals in concentrations higher than most ore. Recovering them is legitimate industry and, done properly, better for the environment than mining.

Done improperly, it exposes workers to lead, mercury, cadmium and brominated flame retardants, and contaminates soil and water around the sites. The gap between those two outcomes is entirely a matter of facilities, protective equipment and enforcement — which is precisely what the argument over Subic is about, underneath the treaty citations.

Sources: Philippine Daily Inquirer; Inquirer Global Nation; Philstar; Recycling Today.