30. Waste Down Under
At the outset, the defence of my comment “second rate activity” relied heavily on my own abstruse technical arguments combined with accumulated observations and experiences of the Pontypool incineration plant. Official pronouncements had increasingly overwhelmed my arguments until May 1991, when the pendulum began to swing the other way through the actions against ReChem by the Pollution Inspectorate. In October 1991, the University of East Anglia’s first report, which confirmed the existence of contamination around the plant, was encouraging but it wasn’t clear enough to close my case. Much more research was needed and going into 1992, the UEA continued its work.I had now released previously undisclosed data on contamination to my solicitor, but my vision of the company being legally identifiable with contamination outside the plant’s boundary was, as yet, still a vision. During the period of the writ, the book “Global Dumping Ground”, by Bill Moyers and San Francisco’s Center for Investigative Reporting, placed the social dimensions of the Rechem saga in perspective. It alluded to Pontypool’s lowly economic status in its first Chapter, entitled “The Paths of Least Resistance”, and aptly illustrated the movement of waste from rich to poor. It came at a time when unemployment in Gwent approached 10% and when, out of the 63 counties in Britain, our region’s prosperity was bottom but four. Against that background I felt my writ was a minor matter but one with symbolic significance. To add insult to the continuing economic deprivation, waste continued to our corner of Wales from the far corners of the Earth.
As our resistance to the pile of Western Australian waste escalated in early 1992, I became apprehensive about the long pause in the progress towards the final proof of ReChem’s impact on the environment. The tension was relieved when my wait for the UEA’s next report on contamination was punctuated by poisons entering the sewers at both the Pontypool and Fawley plants of ReChem. Also, in unconnected events, further sanctions against ReChem by the Inspectorate, leading to an ultimatum, helped my legal standing enormously.
At the same time as new domestic regulations such as Integrated Pollution Control were about to call time on the technology of the Pontypool incinerator, there was good news on the international front in response to Greenpeace’s “Single European Dump” publication, a document intended to influence the details of a single European market. In his letter to the head of Greenpeace UK, Prime Minister John Major assured Lord Melchett that the government wanted developed countries to be self sufficient in waste disposal. Furthermore the P.M. sided with the campaigning claim that the Treaty of Rome needed to give more consideration to environmental issues.A letter from Welsh secretary David Hunt to me was equally encouraging in its attitude against international waste shipments. However, we’d heard similar words before and as evidence that Australian politicians were paying little attention to mere words, in December 1991 the contractor Carpentaria published its 44-page proposal for shipment of the Waste from Western Australia to ReChem. With the associated public consultation deadline of 28th February it was running a month behind a competing plan from another company Brambles, who aimed to ship the waste to Cleanaway’s new incinerator at Elsmere Port.
The Australian example of insular leadership contrasted with significant breakthroughs we had seen in Europe, where Torfaen Council could take credit for influencing the international affairs of Austria, Belgium and Sweden although the Council had no official remit to do so.However, illustrating the difficulties I encountered in convincing all in authority to rise above officialdom, both the Mayor and the Chair of the Torfaen’s Environmental Health Committee declined to sign the ready-made requests I sent out asking for Australia to suspend its waste exportation plans. When the pair backed-out, saying that it would create confusion about the council’s role, I wondered how confused their Australian counterparts would have been in the same situation. I wrote back saying that it was their act of not signing the request that would create confusion but I couldn’t convince them to add theirs to the 1,689 submissions I sent off to the Australian authorities.
Aside from the intrigue of international affairs, life with ReChem continued to be alarming and especially so with the profound emission of orange and black smoke on 23rd February 1992. It was the Caldicott’s persistence which again produced a response that was important for me. In April, when the Inspectorate acted against ReChem in relation to that incident, the fate of the Australian waste was still not finally determined and ReChem in Pontypool was then caught in another spotlight, arising from liquid effluent contamination. As if contagious, the same subject cropped up at Southampton where ReChem’s discharges of arsenic, cadmium, dieldrin and lindane were reported to have exceeded the consent limits. The Southampton news meant that, after January’s report about the contamination of ReChem’s Pontypool sewage, both incineration plants had prosecutions pending at the very time when Australia needed the company to behave. That still didn’t put the leading Australian politicians off and whilst the Canadian waste protest of 1989 had been brief and explosive, the campaign against Western Australian Waste was becoming a long, hard grind.
Britain, with the EEC, was slowly moving towards ratification of the global Basel Convention with its unfortunate potential to make the waste trade appear more respectable. However, whilst there was still little official resistance to the flow of waste to Pontypool, grass roots opposition to incineration had grown strong within Australia itself. When the original proposal to export the stockpile of hazardous waste from Western Australia arose, it was no coincidence that it did so amidst strong public opposition to the idea of an Australian incinerator. After several years of study by the country’s authorities, a number of prospective sites had been considered and in September 1990 a newspaper’s proclamation that “Corowa Wins Toxic Incinerator” became a red rag to a bull. The so-called victory was soon defeated by public protest.
Back then, in the hiatus following Australia’s removal of the Corowa incinerator proposal, I had been pleasantly surprised when our own Environment Department appeared to join our campaign, and I wrote to the Australian Environment Protection Agency saying that all developed nations should move towards taking responsibility for their waste. Unfortunately, I couldn’t envisage the request having any impact on the antagonistic Australian authorities, but these were still early days in the affair. By 1991 an Australian incinerator was back on the drawing board and a short list of locations was again evident. This time there was no equivalent of a feisty, upwardly mobile Corowa town on the list of locations, as the pendulum swung towards underpowered, small rural communities. The official tactics were transparent but in appearing to identify lines of least resistance the incinerator idea created an almighty political crisis in which Australian public opinion prevailed once more. I imagined that Australia’s infighting over incineration was secretly satisfying for Rechem.
In the aftermath of the internal protests in Australia, the Independent Panel on Intractable Waste was formed to review the nation’s strategy. As the review proceeded, it was then that firm proposals arose to export 1000 tonnes of hazardous chemicals from Western Australia, where the state’s own plans to build an incinerator had also been shelved. The pressure on the Australian authorities was reflected in the bold newspaper headline: “UK ideal for Western Australian waste”, long before the Government’s review panel produced its own recommendations.
My main political points of contact in Australia were Dr. Carmen Lawrence, the Western Australian State Premier and Ros Kelly, the Federal Environment Minister. In London my links were Australia’s High Commissioner, Richard Smith, and also the Agent General for Western Australia, David Fischer.Beneath the surface, and for the informal distribution of campaign messages, I relied particularly on Robert Cartmell of Greenpeace, in Balmain, as well as local activists in Western Australia along with the perceptive Carmelo Amalfi, a journalist with The Western Australian. Our grapevine was usually way ahead of the commercial and political factions in keeping up with events.
The Strand’s palatial High Commission building, Australia House, is renowned for its architectural splendour and we went there in April 1991, on a visit that was a far from splendid. Showing only a glimmer of interest in our presentation, Richard Smith gave no indication of wanting to help. Instead, he tried turned the clock back on the reform of international waste principles by vehemently disagreeing with self-sufficiency in waste disposal. He enthusiastically argued the merits of the worldwide waste trade and favoured its continuation. He had no conscience about sending Australian Waste to Britain and he even implied that we deserved it because of Britain’s imperialistic nuclear testing in Australia.
On that occasion I left Australia House believing that if Richard Smith truly represented his government’s position then we certainly had a fight on our hands. Our best hope lay in the possibility that the embassy officials would transmit a message home about a resourceful, determined bunch of campaigners who might become a nuisance. I then wrote to Environment Minister Ros Kelly, complaining that the High Commissioner’s view clashed with the progress of international principles and was unsustainable. The minister was well known for playing a personal part in political progress by being the first Australian federal MP to give birth when in office. When I received her reply I was aghast at her unenlightened views on waste. She, too, appeared to be going backwards with her belief in the merits of a globalised waste trade. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the views I encountered in Australian government concurred with what I concluded from Australia’s regulations on waste shipments in 1989, when the Basel Convention appeared to be used to lubricate Australian waste exports. In harmony with Australia, New Zealand had also appeared peculiarly recalcitrant around that time when its 1988 “Strategy for Managing PCBs” recommended: “. . . . that the strategy for managing PCBs be a programme for accelerated withdrawal with the material being sent to suitable overseas facilities . . .”
After our visit to Australia House, MACATw’s Sarah Preece received a letter from the High Commission indicating that the Independent Panel’s review was nearing fruition and that a national incinerator was likely to be built in New South Wales. In that development it became apparent that the Australian politicians’ fondness of the free market in waste wasn’t really such a principled one. For them, the free market was now required to be free in one direction only, because a condition attached to the Australian proposal was that the incinerator would not be used to burn foreign waste. However, more public protests ensured that there wouldn’t be an incinerator at all and the advisory panel was being driven further down the direction of exportation. When we subsequently made our early objections to the plans for shipments from Western Australia, Health Minister Keith Wilson took Australia’s arrogance to new heights. His reported remark that “the views of the people of Pontypool did not come into it” was a propaganda gem that I used profusely in our campaigning material. I think that comment alone did more to arouse Welsh passions than the toxic contents of the waste did.
In Carpenteria’s proposal for exports there were 1722 drums of solvents and pesticide wastes, 1670 drums of liquid PCBs and PCB contaminated solid wastes together with 980 steel containers holding PCB capacitors. Robert Cartmell faxed the details of the procedure that now intended to get them out of the country. It required the submission of a detailed application called a Public Environmental Review (PER), from the exporting company. The PER was to be made available for public comment during a period of 10 weeks, taking it up to February 28th 1992. On the basis of the PER and the responses received, the Western Australian Environment Minister would compile an Assessment Report, which itself would be open to appeal for two weeks before a decision was finally taken and conditions laid down. There was a further administrative hurdle for prospective contractor Carpentaria, who already held a permit to export hazardous waste from Australia but who would see that permit expire on February 14th. Even if the company’s application was successful an extension to the permit would need to be obtained. The 40-page PER document had been submitted by Carpentaria in December 1991 detailing the 740 tonnes of PCBs and 260 tonnes of pesticides together with specifications for elaborate packaging, storage and transportation methods, overland route selection, health hazards, precautions, protective clothing, emergency procedures, bold warning signs and upwards of one hundred million dollars of insurance.At this stage the transparency of the process was commendable and poles apart from the clandestine approach to information we were accustomed to at home. Another glowing aspect of the submission was the emphasis of the Basel Convention conditions regarding ownership of the waste. Although found wanting in many respects, the Convention - which Australia had signed but not yet ratified - did signify some progress in sorting out issues surrounding the ownership of waste in transit. Under the conditions set, the contractors Carpentaria would never assume ownership of the chemicals and the Western Australian authorities would be forced to retain that responsibility until the waste was burned. That condition of the treaty at last recognised that waste cargoes carried different incentives from normal goods and without those conditions the offloading of ownership would lead to more wandering waste ships. I liked the ownership clause more than anything else in the procedure and I looked forward to the prospect of it needing to be enacted if we blocked the waste when it reached Britain.
From time to time, since it’s beginnings in 1984, our campaign had been criticised by its opponents for being unrepresentative of public opinion in our region. By 1992 such criticism was no longer viable and the amount of public participation in the Australian protest proved it. The first form of action we called for from Western Australia was very reasonable. We asked only for an extension to the period of public consultation so as to allow time for the consideration of comments coming long-distance from outside Australia. A more demanding second request was for the Australian Government to suspend the issuing of permits for any hazardous waste exports.I sent copies of the requests to eminent local people and almost all of them sent their signed requests back to me. Many MPs, including all six from Gwent, supported the campaign, as did non-political figures including G.P.s and the local minister. Amongst the variety of community groups who then came on board were the Caerleon and the Croeyceiliog Indoor Bowls clubs. In the array of supportive politicians were Paul Murphy, Alun Michael, Peter Hain, Kim Howells, Ann Clwyd, Donald Anderson and Welsh Asssembly leader Rhodri Morgan. Even the City Council of Cardiff joined us. Among the few exceptions were, unfortunately, the most powerful of the people I asked. Those declining to sign included Welsh Secretary David Hunt and his second in command Sir Wyn Roberts. Cardiff Central’s Conservative MP Ian Grist was worse than neutral. Showing no empathy for our case he informed me “. . . there is an international dimension to the destruction of toxic waste”. Of course it was damaging to our cause that the top man in Wales, David Hunt, would not ask the Australians to do as little as suspend their plans for a while, but the Welsh Secretary’s letter to me wasn’t entirely negative. He went as far as aligning himself with the international drive for self sufficiency in waste disposal and he pointed out that our government had already intervened, on 4th October 1991, by reminding Australia’s Federal Environment Department of the world-wide consensus and, “inviting them to consider whether the OECD Decision-Recommendation should be a factor to be taken into account in deciding whether export permits should be granted.”Whilst not making the firm objection we wanted, that diplomatic intrusion demonstrated that the residual unqualified abstention of other leading figures was out of step.
My weighty submission to Western Australia included the signed requests I had solicited and I hoped the bulging file would teach some Australians something about the free trade in toxic waste. I felt that Carpentaria’s application to export the waste contained inaccuracies and omissions which would mislead Australians about the reality of the Pontypool incinerator, which distorted the public’s view of it and which camouflaged the condition of British regulation. I also included details of the legal suppression of objective discussions about ReChem, with my own court case included.
A day before the consultation period on the Western Australian waste was due to close, with uncanny timing there was some disastrous news for us. I learned, from Greepeace’s Robert Cartmell, of a national newspaper report about the view of some of the experts called upon to advise the panel investigating all 90,000 tonnes of Australia’s hazardous waste. They recommended that exportation should continue to be included as an option. The expert’s opinions both ignored and exposed the impotence of the Basel Convention’s principle that countries should be moving towards self sufficiency.As early as in 1986 Western Australia had plans for an incinerator at Koolyanobbing. A second attempt was launched near Mount Walton in 1988. Neither got off the ground. Then, when in September 1990, both the New South Wales and Federal governments congratulated the town of Corowa on a successful application for incineration, the backlash grew bigger. After Corowa’s revolt and amidst subsequent protests from the substituted sites Tim Moore, the State Minister for the Environment admitted:
"The previous NSW government tried to locate such a facility in an urban area and failed. We have inherited such a balls-up situation that it is now practically impossible to sell the idea to an urban area."
And it seems that country people have become just as intractable as their city cousins. The government can't sell them a toxic waste incinerator either!
It was against this background of internal opposition that shipping the waste out finally got the go ahead with the conclusion of the Public Environmental Reviews in spring 1992, before the Independent Panel on waste issued its own recommendations.Included in the State government’s written assessment of the proposals was Carpentaria’s commentary on public responses. The commentary contained the claim that the success of public Liaison Committees at ReChem’s Southampton plant and at the controversially closed Scottish Plant was evidence of the widespread acceptance of incinerators in our communities.Thankfully, the Liaison Committee of Pontypool was long gone and could no longer be used in evidence against its own people.Not only did Western Australian authorities steal a march on the Independent Panel, but the Federal government also beat the gun by renewing Carpentaria’s export permit. Therefore the commendable paperwork processes actually failed to prevent the ironic outcome that an overseas incinerator was suitable for Australian waste whereas an Australian incinerator wouldn’t tolerate overseas waste. Contrary to the initial promise shown by the National Independent Panel and by Western Australia’s Public Environmental Review, neither process fulfilled its potential for democracy to extend beyond Australia and both processes reminded us that the toxic waste journeys were often political imperatives.It was of some comfort to know that politics certainly had some Australians sweating just before April’s 1992 general election in Britain. They knew that UK opposition leader Neil Kinnock opposed the waste shipments and they began to consider a landfill option, whilst John Major’s re-election would have restored their confidence in the waste going to Britain.
When opposing waste from other countries I knew that communicating our problematic experiences of incineration would make them more reluctant to incinerate the waste themselves and I didn’t want to advocate that either. However, an early morning experience helped me in my dilemma. It was a frequent request in interviews, for me to advise how a country should solve its problems if not by sending the waste to Wales. Up until the Australian affair I didn’t have a neat answer, but my experience of the Australian public consultation process provided the answer I wanted and I gave it during a phone call from a drive-time radio programme.Having been impressed by some of what I’d seen of Australia’s system of public participation, I said on air that I wouldn’t dare advise Australians about what to do with their waste, because they had fine democratic procedures for making their own judgement. Likewise I didn’t expect them to dictate to us that we should burn their waste in Pontypool. The reaction “He’s got a point” was tangible and from that day on the same sort of response frequently got me off the hook when being asked to solve the waste problems of other countries. It also reinforced the rationale behind STEAM’s successor, the Keep Your Own Waste campaign.Unfortunately my point didn’t impress the people at the top in Australia, who remained infinitely obstinate as we waited for the Western Australian waste to begin its long journey to Pontypool.
It was early in August 1992 that I received a letter from Neil Kinnock’s office, in which Joan Hammel said that I must have been be pleased with final outcome. Yes, I had been pleased, and shocked, by what happened when Australia’s internal arrangements meant that the shipment of the Western Australian waste appeared only a formality. The letter from Joan Hammell enclosed a press cutting from The Independent of 10th June, which reported Environment Minister David MacLean’s written reply to a question from Newport MP Paul Flynn. The question was about Australia’s request to ship the waste to us. A British “Yes” to the request would have previously been automatic, but this time the Minister said, “I have decided not to agree to the request and we are replying.” Astonishingly, out of the blue and in the eleventh hour it was our own government who stopped the Australian waste. The peculiar circumstances were explained in the June issue of the journal ENDS Report:
The Government has refused a request from the Australian authorities to export hazardous waste to the UK. The decision is the first in which it has invoked the 1989 global Basel Convention on transboundary shipments of hazardous waste to ban waste from a particular country, and looks to have set a precedent for future UK policy on waste imports from developed countries.The decision in the Australian case was announced quietly by Environment Minister David Maclean in a parliamentary answer on 9th June. The convention, which came into force on 5th May, imposes a general prohibition on trade in hazardous wastes between parties and non parties. Australia is a party to the Convention, but the UK will not ratify until an EC regulation on transboundary movements of hazardous wastes is adopted. A bid to reach agreement on the Regulations at the EC Council of Environment Ministers in May foundered on French objections to the scale of the waste trade into France. . . . However, Article 11 of the Convention goes on to provide for parties and non-parties to enter into bilateral agreements . . . . On 9th June however, Mr Maclean announced that the government had rejected the request for a bilateral agreement. He did not elaborate on the decision but the thinking behind it had already been spelled out by junior Environment Minister Tony Baldry in an adjournment debate on 22nd May . . . at least until the EC regulation is adopted, it is now likely that the UK would now refuse a request for a bilateral agreement with an EFTA country. It is also pretty clear that any developed country outside the EC and EFTA would not be allowed to export hazardous waste to the UK. In recent years, Canada and the USA, as well as Australia have sent small quantities of waste to the UK. Neither has ratified the Convention, but once the UK does so it will be in a position to impose a general prohibition on the UK’s waste trade with them.
Behind our government’s decision was the changing relationship between Australia and Britain within the Basel Convention. It was an unforeseen conjunction of circumstances that rescued Pontypool and perhaps also saved our Government from some embarrassment. When the Basel Convention was signed by a miserly 36 countries in 1989, it then needed at least 20 of those countries to progress to ratification before the treaty could be enforced. When the Western Australian waste export proposals were made at the end of 1991, the convention didn’t have the required 20 ratifications and was therefore not operational. The world’s toxic waste trade continued along the same lines as before. Even when Western Australia gave the go ahead for to the shipments in April 1992, the Basel Convention was still not operational. If that had remained the case the waste could have flowed freely from Australia to the UK, outside the bounds of the Convention. At the height of our battle, on 5th February 1992, Australia became the critical 20th country to ratify the Basel Convention. Under the procedures, three months were needed for the ratification to take effect. In theory this would have coincided with the time of the Britain’s anticipated ratification of the treaty. Once Britain’s ratification was complete, the waste shipments that had been able to flow anyway would then be able to flow with the blessing of the Convention. However, with the Convention in force, if one country in a deal had ratified it and the other hadn’t, there would be a complication.After Australia’s ratification, it was expected that Britain and other European member states would agree to ratification at a meeting on 24th May. However, with France now being awkward, European ministers failed to reach agreement and the decision was deferred. Therefore, with Australia now firmly under the rules of the Convention and Britain not, the Australian waste shipments fell between two stools.
The accidental miss-match in ratification dates was an even better coincidence than if neither country had ratified. With one in and one out, Australia would now need to obtain a separate bilateral agreement with Britain, before being able to ship the waste out. It was against this background that David Maclean informed Paul Flynn that the British government would not be making that bilateral agreement. By our government taking that timely opportunity to turn down Australia’s request in 1992, a clash of even greater proportions than that which occurred with Canadian waste was avoided. If the waste had been shipped to Pontypool, it could have become the most spectacular story ever in history of waste at sea, with the world’s media accompanying its long journey and with massive political repercussions. If then the waste had reached Britain it would have still been owned by Australia and protests would have probably prevented it from coming ashore. I never knew whether the sudden shift in our new government’s attitude was the true awakening of a dormant principle or a pragmatic means of avoiding another embarrassing conflict.
After the event, Dr Ben Selinger’s Independent Panel produced an interim report on waste strategy in Australia. The report now found little merit in the idea of exporting Australia’s intractable waste, but attempts at exportation it didn’t completely end and Australia didn’t stop trying to hinder progress in the Basel Convention. At the end of the Australian affair I was both elated by the end of a long struggle and slightly disappointed that the people of Pontypool were deprived of the climax of another port protest. When I first heard of our Government’s refusal to accept the waste I didn’t give a thought to the implications for me. Then the penny dropped.When I was sued, massive compensation was sought from me for the damage to ReChem’s trade by the return of Canadian waste. At the time, the government regarded my actions as wrong. Now it was the British government rather than a campaigner who was damaging ReChem’s trade - and on the grounds that the trade itself was wrong.In all my predictions about the way things might turn out for me I never pencilled-in the prospect that the government’s unilateral action on Australian waste would retrospectively reposition the legality of my role in stopping the Canadian waste.