Exports of used cars becoming a pollution problem, U.N. warns
WASHINGTON >> In recent decades, the United States and Europe have gone to considerable lengths to mandate cleaner, more efficient cars at home. But at the same time, they are shipping millions of their oldest and worst-polluting vehicles to poorer countries overseas in a largely unregulated trade that now poses serious health and environmental hazards, the United Nations warned Monday.
The report, by the U.N. Environment Program, is the most detailed look yet at the global trade in secondhand cars, which has historically attracted little scrutiny. From 2015 to 2018, the report found, the United States, the European Union and Japan exported 14 million used passenger cars abroad, with 70% ending up in low-income countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
In theory, this trade can be beneficial: Once older cars are no longer desirable to buyers in wealthy nations, they can have a second life as an affordable transportation option in other countries. In countries like Kenya and Nigeria, more than 90% of cars bought today are secondhand imports.
But in practice, the report found, many of the cars exported to low-income countries don’t meet even minimum standards for air pollution and are often unsafe to drive. There are few rules in place to govern the quality of the vehicles. In the Netherlands, investigators recently
determined, some exported cars have had their pollution controls removed and harvested for the valuable metals they contain, before being shipped abroad.
“What we found is not a pretty sight,” said Rob De Jong, an author of the report and head of the U.N. Environment Program’s Sustainable Mobility Unit. “Most of these vehicles are very old, very dirty, very inefficient and unsafe.”
If left unsupervised, the global trade in used vehicles could have stark consequences
for both climate change and public health in the decades ahead, the report’s authors said.
Today, there are about 1 billion cars on the road globally. That number is projected to double by 2050, with much of the growth coming from sales of secondhand vehicles in lowerincome countries. Transportation already accounts for one- quarter of humanity’s carbon- dioxide emissions, which are rapidly heating the planet. And in many African cities, cars and trucks have become a dominant source of outdoor air pollution, which already kills more than 3 million people worldwide each year.
A few countries have started taking steps to crack down on the oldest and dirtiest used cars: Kenya, a rapidly growing market, now accepts only imports of vehicles younger than 8 years old, mainly from Japan. As a result, its vehicle fleet is about one-third more fuelefficient than that of neighboring Uganda, which only last year set an age limit of 15 years for its imported cars.
But such restrictions are rare.
The report looked at 146 countries that import used cars and concluded that 86 of them had “weak” or “very weak” laws around the age or environmental performance
of used vehicles entering their markets. While the report’s authors don’t call for a ban on the trade of used cars, they do recommend that countries do more to coordinate on minimum standards.
Such rules can have a big effect. In the European Union, cars built after 2005 had to comply with so-called Euro 4 standards, which aimed to slash the most harmful pollutants in car exhaust by more than 70% compared with older models. These pollutants, such as fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, have been linked to increased risk of heart attacks, lung cancer and asthma.