Ashland University Sets Environmental Lecture on ‘Away is a Place’

Ashland University’s Environmental Lecture Series will continue its 20th year of the series on March 15 when it plays host to Colby Self, director of the Green Ship Recycling Campaign of the Basal Action Network in Seattle, Wash.

Self will speak on “Away is a Place” at 7:30 p.m. in the Trustee's Room of Myers Convocation Center. The lecture is free and open to the public. The theme of year’s series is “Chemical Pollution in a Global Economy.”

Self is an environmental policy analyst and director of the Basel Action Network’s international ship recycling campaign. Working on human rights and environmental protection, he addresses the issue of environmental justice with the aim of developing fair and sustainable solutions to the world’s growing waste crises.

This lecture will “speak to the realities of our globalized economy, realities that are often overlooked in traditional economic value assessments. It will focus on the issue of toxic trade, and in particular the examples of the global shipbreaking industry and the mounting e-waste crisis that arises due to the ease by which current trade rules, or lack thereof, facilitate the externalization of costs to developing countries and the disproportionate burden of harm on them – environmental degradation, human health damage and human rights abuse.

Self also will discuss the role of the Basel Convention and market strategies to internalize costs of hazardous waste production upstream and at source. “In this age of mass consumerism and post-consumer wastes now flooding across national borders, we are all part of the problem, and thus we must all become part of the solution, always remembering that ‘away’ is a place that others call ‘Home’,” he said.

His recent work on the international shipbreaking issue (see http://ban.org/ban_news/2011/110407_navy_abandons_plan_to_sink.html), a problem that has profound global economic, environmental and human health implications, recently took him to the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Basel Convention in Cartagena, Colombia, where multilateral agreement was reached, decisions that will someday be remembered historically as the turning point for global waste trade.

Self is also a social entrepreneur, working to establish innovative solutions that internalize costs of waste production to disincentivize the externalization of costs to emerging economies downstream. To this end, he is co-founder of Ecorate.com and the Automotive Science Group, both product rating platforms for consumer durable goods aimed to help consumers make better informed purchasing decisions.

He has a B.S. from the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development, has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford, and is a select member of the Cambridge-MIT Institute Enterprisers Forum.

Current support for the lecture series is provided by a grant from the Lubrizol Foundation and additional support from Ashland University. Recent lectures are archived for viewing at www.ashland.edu/departments/environmental-science/lecture-series.

Ashland University, ranked in the top 200 colleges and universities in U.S. News and World Report’s National Universities category for 2012, is a mid-sized, private university conveniently located a short distance from Akron, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Ashland University (www.ashland.edu) values the individual student and offers a unique educational experience that combines the challenge of strong, applied academic programs with a faculty and staff who build nurturing relationships with their students.