Henrietta Larson Award 2019
Henrietta Larson Article Award 2019 for "Hidden Externalities. The Globalization for Hazardous Waste."
Henrietta Larson Article Award 2019, cc Christina Lennartz.
Business History Review (Cambridge UP) annually awards its prize for best article in its publication. Simone Müller's "Hidden Externalities" focuses on chemical retailers Jack and Charles Colbert to, first, show the externalization processes linked to the greening of U.S. industry through stricter consumer and environmental protection regulations and, second, illustrate the limitations of nationally framed environmentalism targeting businesses in a global market. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Colberts traded chemicals that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had banned for use in the United States. They exported them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity—primarily in the global South. Rare interview material illustrates how the exporters justified their unequal business deals by misappropriating the meaning of recycling.