of environmental protection and cross-border trade. The general obligation proposed by the convention is that states exporting hazardous wastes must do so in an environmentally sound manner for the state of import and that they respect the policies of any country that prohibits imports as a whole. Currently, 176 states, including China, have ratified the convention. China signed the Basel Convention in 1990.The United States is the only developed country that has not ratified this treaty. Some US recycling plants have found that shipping their hazardous e-waste overseas for processing is much less expensive than handling it in the states where there are strict labor, environmental, and safety regulations. Members of the European Union can be penalized for shipping e-waste to developing countries, but they do manage to get away with it on some occasions. However, shipping e-waste to other countries is still legal in the U.S., so there are no consequences for companies that choose to do it. The Convention does not impose a complete ban on the international transfer of hazardous waste. The transfer may be allowed under certain conditions, for example, if the state of export does not have the technical capacity and the necessary facilities, capacity or suitable disposal sites in order to dispose of the wastes in question in an environmentally sound and efficient manner. The definition of some of these key terms, “technical capacity,” “necessary facilities,” “environmentally sound and efficient manners,” and “wastes required as raw material” can be rather controversial in practice. Different countries may understand differently what can be counted as “necessary facilities” and what varieties of materials should be seen as “e-waste. Waste has been classified into two categories in the Basel Convention, namely, “hazardous wastes” and “other wastes” (wastes collected from households). The Basel Convention is only applicable to hazardous wastes. Many elements of e-waste are often categorized in the field under both entries: hazardous and other. The physical and chemical constitution of e-waste is very complex, and different elements are usually articulated or blended, making it highly labor-consuming to separate them. Consequently, wastes which have been categorized as “other wastes” are exempt from the regulation of transboundary movement, despite them being identified by the Convention as hazardous wastes. At the global scale, trajectories of global e-waste flows are shaped by the multitude of loopholes, contradictions and ambiguous articles left by the Basel Convention and by different countries’ disparate attitudes