23. Duck eggs to Canada
Judging by the media coverage of the Welsh Affairs Committee’s parliamentary sitting, many of the MPs had thoroughly digested the reports of Torfaen Borough Council and they understood the problems the local authority was facing. However, whilst I was awaiting recommendations from the Committee, the fuss around the MPs’ interrogation of Rechem faded away. Going into 1990, there was no sign that the views of the Welsh MPs would make Rechem less convenient to its European customers and I still viewed Europe as our main hope for sorting-out our own government’s handling of ReChem. Llew Smith certainly seemed to be getting more sense out of the Brussels bureaucrats than our parliamentary MPs had achieved with the British government. The Welsh MPs had been brilliant in their rhetoric but there was no indication that the government was listening.The organization of information for my defence made it convenient for me to send-off to Westminster a 99-page dossier that described emissions and incidents, as I continued to update the MPs during the time their report was being prepared.Unfortunately, whereas back in August I was being been inundated with helpful information from people nearby, the fear from ReChem’s writs had now taken a firm hold and so I was delighted with an offer of help from Gareth Cooper who worked at an automotive products factory near ReChem. He volunteered to use his advantageous location in response to a public request I made for continuing observations of anything untoward. The company’s litigious behaviour had frightened most people away from forwarding information and concern was being expressed that in making complaints about emissions, names would be written down. This repressive feature of the local situation would have been much more demoralizing if it had not been counterbalanced by the campaign’s winning of the hearts and minds of many across the wider world. Against an austere domestic background, my own international exchanges expanded and I was finding far more enlightenment overseas than in Britain, in 1990, as I updated my research in incineration technology for the purposes of my defence.
I had viewed 1989 as a year of two halves for ReChem. In the first half, Torfaen Council’s PCB test results were deflected by Rechem at the same time as the free trade in toxic waste became more legitimate and profits soared.In the second half of the year, the Council’s reports and the Canadian waste controversy made Rechem more reliant than ever on its lawyers to keep its business booming. In the New Year, although much of the mainstream media cowered before Rechem, Which magazine and She carried large sections on toxic waste. An indication of the strain the company was under came in January, for then, not a year after gaining prominence for its profitability, ReChem hit the business headlines because of an envisioned financial downturn. Not least because of the Canadian waste reversal, speculation over the future of waste imports mounted and share values fell from 653p to 485p in one day’s trading.News coverage of official waste import figures was still a safe activity, so that aspect of the issue remained alive and arose in the House of Commons again at the end of January when Welsh Affairs member Richard Livesey and writ receiver Alan Roberts the MP for Liverpool Bootle, tried to involve Environment Secretary Chris Patten in developments. The Environment Secretary’s answers were representative of his government’s position. Alan Roberts asked Chris Patten to condemn ReChem for issuing “writs like confetti”, 14 in all. The condemnation didn’t come and the Environment Secretary showed no any concern over the dwindling press and public freedom that was resulting from Rechem’s writs. Powys MP Richard Livesy pointed out that the government was actually on record as subscribing to the principle of ending transfrontier shipments of hazardous waste, whilst that aim was contradicted by other aspects of the government’s position. The Welsh MP demanded action on the shipments principle and his modest request was that the Environmental Protection Bill should ban PCB imports into Britain from other developed countries. It was a test for the Environment Secretary who had had probably earned some kudos for appearing to be in favour of change. He had announced his support for the “self-sufficiency principle” at the height of the Canadian Waste controversy and at the time his words implied that he would work towards relieving Pontypool’s burden of foreign toxic waste.
In responding to the Welsh MP’s request six months after the Canadian waste came and went, the Environment Secretary appeared to forget that the Pontypool plant had been behind all the fuss the previous summer and now he unilaterally excluded Rechem’s business from the self-sufficiency principle. For him, toxic waste incineration was a special case and a national treasure. Not only did he echo MP Michael Colvin’s support for ReChem’s PCB imports, he struck at the heart of my defence by effectively overruling my radio remarks about the performance of the Pontypool plant. He declared that “We have first-class technology, as my honourable friend says, for dealing with toxic waste.” Up until that moment I’d been happy with the progress of my defence but in one authoritative sentence I saw my intricate array of evidence collide with Patten’s condemnation of my own stance.My arguments about second-rate technology contained many complex deductions that the court would find hard to handle, whereas the Secretary of State quite simply overrode my contentions with his assured affirmation of “first-class technology”.I had appreciated from the outset that for me avoid defeat, the government’s rose-tinted view of ReChem would have to change, but at this stage Chris Patten was confirming that, as yet, it hadn’t.Thus 1990 began badly for ReChem’s shares, good for their legal authority and abysmally for my defence. The groundswell of opinion against imports, the mounting evidence of contamination and the Welsh Affair’s Committee’s questioning of ReChem’s scientific credibility had made no detectable impact on the government.
February 1990 began with the Caldicott's maintaining their pressure on both ReChem and the Inspectorate. The family continued to experience frequent clouds of vapour that enveloped their garden and gave them breathing difficulties. They sent five video-tapes of evidence to the Inspectorate.Mike Smith, for ReChem, responded by saying that prior to the family’s arrival in 1987 there were virtually no complaints from the residents of Pontyvelin House, whereas Shirley and Ken Caldicott were now responsible for most of the complaining calls that were received by company. As usual, Ken and I smiled at the possibility that ReChem may have thought the family was as responsible for the emissions as they were for the duck egg contamination. By now, the Caldicotts had substituted all but one of the ducks that laid the PCB contaminated eggs, but tell-tale eggs without shells continued to be come from the replacement ducks. New tests by Welsh Office scientists showed levels of PCBs up to 380 parts per billion and that mark was now higher than the department’s earlier tests. A Welsh Office spokesman referred to the PCB levels as being “still very low”, which they were obviously not, but he did advise the Caldicott family not to eat the eggs. Alongside the Welsh Office’s reluctance to do anything to improve things, another quite static state watchdog, the Health and Safety Executive, whilst refusing to co-operate in voluntary hazard procedures was given a new title by the increasingly involved South Wales Argus with its editorial headline “Health and Stupidity Executive”.
When Britain was still failing to see sense in the Seveso hazards Directive it was nice to find reason prevailing in Europe, when a delegation from Torfaen Borough council, armed with a 300 page dossier, finally got to Brussels for the overdue meeting with the Environment Commission’s legal chief, Dr. Ludwig Kramer.Dr. Kramer agreed that he would visit Pontypool to promote the testing he wanted to be carried out jointly by the EEC and the British Government.A sensible plan, I thought, but not one our government would take kindly to. The Argus editorial on the subject was headed “EC officials, 1 : HM Govt, 0” and the editor offered the European Commission access to the newspaper’s own files on the subject.The chance of the joint plan reaching fruition was slim, but I viewed the embarrassing European intervention as an important lever in pressing our government to act independently. The Council’s successful trip was significant for totally unexpected reasons too. Quite familiar with obstacles, the five-man delegation encountered an unexpected pause in progress on the way to Brussels, when their plane needed to turn back following an engine fire. The outcome of the eventual meeting was then met with a more conventional obstacle, when Rechem spokesman Mike Smith made a claim on behalf of the company that Torfaen’s document was fundamentally flawed and was based on only a handful of tests whereas ReChem had done thousands.
Campaigning during the month of February was centered on the handing-in of a 12,000 signature petition during the climax of a demonstration by MACATW, PEPA and STEAM at the Welsh Office in Cardiff on 20th February. It was the school half-term, so making the most of the holiday we went to the Belgian and Swedish embassies in London the day after our Cardiff protest. With other countries watching our moves, my continental contacts were rapidly multiplying and the accents of our visitors at home amused my children. Despite the positives from Brussels, Pontypool’s recent waste import figures brought Belgium into the lead in the league table, even though the country had its own new incinerator. When Sweden soon ousted Belgium at the top, there were signs that the Swedes did so with an uneasy conscience about its position. Wanting to help persuade Belgium to develop its own conscience about toxic waste exports, journalist Walter de Jonge was then another visitor. There was extensive coverage in a series of articles in De Morgen, where I admired the understanding shown in the editorial comment when it declared that control of the international waste trade amounted to a routine signature on a document. One MEP not happy with the position was Jos Geysels and another was Paul Staes, who prepared a motion for a ban on Belgian exports to Pontypool. Some visitors to my home in February were not nearly as welcome as the friendly, foreign journalists. These were the police, who said that there had been personal threats against directors and employees of ReChem and they needed to question me.It wasn’t the first time the police had called on me to me in connection with anti-ReChem activities and I knew that it went with the territory, but the seriousness of the questioning was a reminder of the reason why many people were afraid to raise their heads above the parapet. I took the visit as an opportunity to improve public relations with the local force.
My pleadings with Belgium had no immediate impact on the country’s Environment Secretary Miet Smet who showed that he preferred formality to morality by asserting that shipping the chemical waste to Pontypool was plainly not illegal.For things to change significantly there needed to be a change in our intransigent government’s own position on the whole issue of Rechem and toxic waste imports. At long last a sign of that appeared, although it was nothing concrete. It wasn’t a change of policy, nor action against imports, nor intervention in regulation.However, to the delight of Torfaen Borough Council’s leader Brian Smith, for once the Welsh Office appeared ready to make a positive response to the repeated requests for an inquiry. The first news was of rumours that Ministers were considering the prospect of an independent investigation as the government’s response to the Welsh Affairs Committee’s recommendations. Although a full public inquiry looked out of the question, the Council’s leader greeted the reported possibility of an investigation as good progress. By March and following a profit warning, ReChem’s shares had fallen to half of what they were before the Canadian Waste protest and, in demonstrating the Pontypool plant’s temperamental nature, the environment got its own back when bad weather slowed down operations at the plant. My solicitor, Sarah, had to shelve her own interest in our impending legal discovery process when, in the spring of 1990, she moved to become Greenpeace’s in-house solicitor, leaving Sally Moore from the same company to become my new guardian. Sadly, we lost one of our small band of parliamentary supporters, when the Bootle MP and opposition front bench spokesman on the environment, Alan Roberts, died having first acquiesced to his writ from ReChem. He had been suffering from cancer when the company took action against him. Also in March, the outcome of a meeting of environment ministers at The Hague may have told us more about the future of PCB imports to Britain than any previous indicators. At the meeting, and appearing to subvert EEC progress on self-sufficiency, Chris Patten killed any hopes of ReChem having to comply with European progress, by agreeing that Britain would happily take in Europe’s 250,000 tonnes of PCBs by 1999. The even bigger news at the time was Britain’s refusal to agree to the prohibition of nuclear waste disposal under the North Sea. Nine nuclear submarines were due to be decommissioned by the end of the century and the prospect of burying their reactors offshore was being considered. The Environment Secretary also withstood the pressure to clean up sewage entering the North Sea and I wondered if Pontypool’s convenience had been traded-off as compensation for Britain’s awkwardness. In the circumstances it wasn’t surprising that there was more negative news on PCBs, now from the Netherlands. The flurry of interest from European media had been very welcome when many of our own commentators were in retreat under the cloud of litigation, but the extra distance proved to be no barrier to ReChem’s lawyers. I’d been dealing with Albert Klingenberg of Stichting Natuur en Milieu, in Utrecht and following the press, radio and TV coverage of Dutch exports to ReChem, the Netherlands organisation received its own legal reproach from the company. This only it added to my work in assisting other defendants. With every indication that our government had a religious conviction about Britain’s unique capability in waste incineration it was clearer than ever that to prove ReChem wrong, I would still need to prove the government wrong.
When absorbed in trying to prove precisely where our government was falling short in its assessment, for a short time in April a Swansea waste importing company attracted my attention because it neatly illustrated the difference in standards between Britain and some other countries.Sewage sludge and incinerator ash were being imported from Switzerland through Swansea docks. In describing the situation as ludicrous, Swansea Environmental Health Officer Huw Morgan said that at the same time as Welsh Sewage sludge was being dumped in the Bristol Channel; the Swiss waste could sail past it on its way to a Swansea landfill. The potential for incinerator ash to contain dioxins had made the stuff undesirable since even before Philadelphia’s own ash went on its two-year world tour in 1986. Many lessons later some countries, including Switzerland, still considered the ash too hazardous to keep whilst in Swansea the receiving company Max Recovery said dumping it here was quite legal.
Llew Smith, busy in Europe, was seeking action against Belgium’s waste exports to Pontypool. He was also chasing progress on the development of a new EEC incineration directive. MACATw mounted another protest at the gates of the Pontypool plant just when Sweden’s press joined in on the Rechem issue and with the company’s credibility creaking it wasn't a surprise that ReChem created a philanthropic initiative at the end of April. The company announced a £5000 sponsorship package for green projects in local schools and colleges. As expected, some in the educational field helped improve Rechem’s image by supporting the initiative, but in May a different show of support for ReChem completely threw me. It was from Newport’s Transport and General Workers Union leader, Ray Rowlands, who I’d worked with and admired, at Alcan’s aluminium plant in Rogerstone. He was reported as praising ReChem by saying that the Pontypool plant had the most efficient method of disposing of toxic waste. I could cope with the government coming to ReChem’s rescue, but not Ray. To be fair, he also expressed his opposition to waste imports, but in rooting for ReChem’s employees with his comment about the plant’s efficiency he simultaneously sided with the government and went against me.There was some compensation from unions in general when opposition to waste imports finally became the official view of the Wales TUC at Llandudno, also in May, when previous reluctance to rock the boat was finally overcome. Less encouraging news was the government’s response to my ongoing reports of emissions and incidents. With my home a few yards outside the Torfaen boundary and in Monmouthshire, my own constituency sported a rare Welsh Conservative MP in John Stradling-Thomas. I thought this useful, as I felt he might have a better ear to the government than our local Labour MPs did.Unfortunately, whilst he was very responsive and followed things through thoroughly, he appeared to make little headway with his own government, particularly when a letter to him from the Welsh Office referred to the incinerator’s emissions as being “generally excellent”. That response once again underlined the government’s disagreement with my defence, but there was, nevertheless, a chink of light in some serious legal developments in London. My opponents now wanted the High Court to strike out parts of my defence. The formal application to have this done was discouraging, but the superficial blow was psychologically reversed when Sally said it could signify a reluctance of ReChem proceed into the discovery process. If, in this tactic, ReChem’s lawyers were content to consume time then that could be to my advantage.A few months later, my faith in my foraging Conservative MP was rewarded when he obtained a small but solid piece of evidence. He managed to get an official admission that a spectacular cloud I had seen from miles away was “not in the incinerator’s operational scope.” Such a rare comment about such a common occurrence was to be treasured.
As the spring of 1990 was advancing, I continued to keep one eye on the court proceedings and another on future factors that I believed would decide my fate. However, for the moment, as the passing of time added more items of evidence in my favour, it did so without influencing the opinions of ReChem’s allies, the staunchest of whom still appeared to be Environment Secretary who remained a supporter of Rechem’s technology and of waste importation for incineration. Thus the early undulations of 1990 contained more downs for me than ups, but when the whole toxic waste debate in Britain was becoming more politically polarised I encountered a welcome distraction. It came in the form of an invitation to Canada.
That invitation arrived at a conference motivated by incinerator proposals that were popping up all over Britain. With higher landfill charges on the horizon, our local authorities, hospitals and industries looked towards incineration as a miraculous solution to the waste problem. At the same time the publicity about ReChem had helped alert people to flaws in the concept and community groups sprang up all over Britain to combat the new incinerator plans and other problems with waste. With keen interest in clean technologies, Greenpeace promoted the national coordination of such local protest groups and a Middlesbrough campaigner, Pete Widlinski, became the first leader of the anti-incineration coalition named “UK Communities Against Toxics”. The inaugural conference of C.A.Ts. took place in Doncaster on 31st March 1990, where twenty British campaigning groups gathered together with a number of foreign campaigners. At the conference I was approached by a determined-looking Canadian man with a French accent. He was Alain Rajotte, from Greenpeace in Montreal. He explained that a number of communities in Quebec also opposed plans to build incinerators and Greenpeace was standing alongside them in an anti-incineration drive. Alain asked if I would undertake a tour of Quebec to speak at public meetings and press conferences. Although I had no previous intention of extending my own campaigning movements very far beyond Pontypool I agreed to do it because I was so indebted to Greenpeace for my legal support.Of course, the decision was conditional on my being able to negotiate time off school.
To the amusement of the school’s staff, pupils and parents, the view of the Sirhowy Valley from Pontllanfraith Comprehensive had been the backdrop to numerous TV interviews, which were usually conducted after the school day had finished and in time for evening news. Between combating the writ and continuing to campaign, there had been a period in which I thought I might not be able to continue teaching but I just about managed to juggle a busy balance between my school work and everything else.I tried not to let toxic waste enter into the school day and the school office staff became adept at liaising with the media to filter out matters that could wait. When the bell went for school to finish, ordinary life ended as I caught up with developments, dealt with the media, attended to the campaigning agenda and then settled down to grinding out more material towards my defence. I would typically spend hours in the school’s computer room typing away about toxic waste. Since I was only just keeping up with the demands of my job I was apprehensive about asking for time-off to go to Canada, even though Greenpeace would pay for a teacher to cover me.I needn’t have worried, as the school’s head, Mike Lewis, gave me his instant blessing and the staff wished me well on my travels.
Rechem’s intimation, that the PCBs in the duck eggs could have come from somewhere other than the Pontypool plant, was an endless source of amusement for both myself and Ken Caldicott. We enjoyed parodying ReChem’s idea with our own silly suggestions for alternative sources of PCB contamination and I enjoyed a bit more mischief with duck eggs on my Canada trip. I arrived at Mirabel airport in May, just as summer was gloriously emerging. With me I had three eggs from the Caldicotts’ ducks.On the tour along the St. Lawrence, which took in Amos, Montreal, Quebec City, Sherbrooke, the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation and Valleyfield, I was accompanied by the erudite incineration opponent and St. Lawrence University chemistry professor, Paul Connett.Unlike Paul, I tended to refrain from condemning incineration per se. I felt that it would have been a tactical error for me to base my criticisms of ReChem on generalisations about incineration. I preferred it the other way around. Therefore I didn’t say that all incineration was bad, just that Rechem’s was officially good, but in reality bad. I simply used the comparison between official views and public experiences to illustrate what can go wrong. In debates with incinerator protagonists I usually won, because they would be utterly unable to claim that ReChem was a poor example for me to choose, for fear of legal repercussions. At a public inquiry in Hull I was even congratulated by the opposing barrister.There was always something satisfying for me in using ReChem’s record as evidence against its own kind, yet I also recognised that in sounding the alarm on incineration in general I was ironically propping-up the company’s market position and its profits.
I took the duck eggs to make Pontypool’s PCB contamination come to life in Canada and before the trip the trip I wrapped each egg in cling film, then cotton wool, and put them all in a sturdy cardboard box. The box went on top of my clothes, below the zip of my travel bag, so that the eggs were accessible for me to check from time to time. On the plane from Heathrow I was given a list of items which couldn’t be taken into Canada and it was clear that duck eggs were prohibited. Whilst sniffer-dogs may not be trained in egg-detection, duck eggs are particularly strong-smelling and I wasn’t surprised when my bag attracted a security dog’s attention on arrival in Montreal. Getting nervous, I tried to think up excuses for having the eggs. I didn’t think I’d get into much trouble, but I was afraid that my precious visual aids would be confiscated.I normally show guilt like a neon light and I felt perspiration running into my eyes before the dog moved away from me and further along the queue.
With my eggs safe I hastily abandoned the airport and set off towards Montreal and the acclaim of its Gazette, which published an article over-generously entitled: “The man who sent the PCB ships packing”. The extent to which the Pontypool protest had left its mark was further reflected in the congratulations showered on the campaign at a gathering of science journalists in Quebec and then when I met Bernard Gagnon, the Mayor of St-Basile-le-Grand. He said the return of the PCBs was a “gift of education” that changed the philosophy of waste disposal in the region. I told him that it was yet to achieve a similar impact on our side of the Atlantic.