2. Wandering Waste
When some of the heavily exploited less-developed countries took a firm stance against unwanted waste imports in the 1980’s, I was happy – but not just for those countries. It was hard to envisage our own position in Pontypool improving until their problems had been addressed. Unfortunately, as the less-developed world began to repel toxic waste, the shortage of countries then willing to take it bad news for the public in Pontypool.
During my early years of campaigning I’d noticed the amazing journey of the Khian Sea, which set out from Philadelphia on August 31st 1986 with 13,000 tonnes of dioxin contaminated ash from a huge pile produced by the city’s municipal incinerators. Philadelphia had gone big on burning, but didn’t want to keep its toxic residue. The sub-contracted ship carrying the ash was first ejected from its expected destination of Ocean Cay in the Bahamas. It then wandered through the Caribbean and along the Central American coast as it approached at least seven countries as prospective recipients of the waste. A bungled attempt to find a consenting destination ended with some 3,000 tonnes of Philadelphian incinerator ash being left onshore in Gonaives, Haiti, where the waste acquired a suspicious identity as fertiliser. The vessel hastily sailed off in defiance when the Haitian government ordered it to reload the landed ash.Now on the run, the Khian Sea turned back towards Philadelphia after nearly two years at sea, still carrying most of its cargo. The return of the vessel to US waters illuminated the irregularities in waste ownership when Philadelphia disowned the ash and banned it. The encumbered Khian Sea slipped away again, into the night, with the waste that had been legally removed from USA responsibility. That particular cargo was never a prospect for Pontypool, particularly as it wasn’t really toxic enough for our local plant, but it was an alarm bell for us. In a different time and context we were to experience the operation of the same non-return valve for American chemicals but back then, after leaving the US waters for the second time the desperate vessel undertook a longer and even more infamous voyage. A detailed Greenpeace account tells of the wandering waste ship re-appearing, now renamed the Pelicano, off the Singapore coast some 27 months after it first left Philadelphia. It had unsuccessfully tried 15 countries in five continents, under three different names. By that time, the vessel’s holds were mysteriously empty, despite its failure to find an accommodating country.
Closer to home, and during the time of the voyage of the Khian Sea, Italy was involved in some major waste scandals that did eventually impinge on Pontypool. It wasn’t uncommon for waste brokers to collect unwanted chemicals from different sources, in the hope of somehow finding a home for them, but with welcomes wearing thin the lucrative business was becoming increasingly risky. One cargo that helped sensitise the European public to the dark underbelly of the waste trade was the collection of cast-off chemicals on another vessel, the Zanoobia. When, in humiliation, the vessel took its wandering waste back home to Italy in April 1988, it was denied permission to offload the array of chemicals at the very port from which the Italian authorities had waved it goodbye some fourteen months earlier. Like the Philadelphian’s, they wanted their ‘goodbye’ to be forever. The waste’s return to Italian waters had followed an unfruitful excursion to Greece when approaching the end of its meandering cruise on several vessels and with two visits ashore for the waste. First loaded onto the Lynx in Italy, the 2,200 tonne toxic cargo had been assembled by a company with the nice name of Jelly Wax. The cargo was originally intended for the desert but it was repelled from the tiny nation of Djibouti on the horn of Africa. On a different continent, Venezuela was initially more accomodating and the Italian collection of waste resided in Puerto Cabello for six months, whilst attitudes changed. Concern arose over leaking barrels, ailing residents and the death of a young boy prompted the Venezuelan government to order the waste to be sent back home. The material was then transferred to the Makiri but, predictably, it didn’t go home to Italy. Along with a good deal of money, the cargo found itself on land again, in Tartous, Syria. That was before Syria’s uncompromising government stepped in.
Enter the Zanoobia, a vessel whose origin, ownership and track-record were disputed. The Zanoobia removed the waste from Syria and tried to land it in Greece before the vessel’s desperate, chemically debilitated crew finally turned the boat back to its port of origin in Italy. When the waste originally left Marina di Carrara in February 1987, it did so with inadequate documentation. It was now refused entry to the same port for the same reason. As the condition of the crew deteriorated amidst the leaking chemicals, the captain pleaded for mercy and the authorities allowed anchorage in Genoa, though not without a dock-workers’ dispute about the condition of the waste and the predictable arguments about ownership of both the waste and the vessel. In pass-the-parcel style, Captain Tabalo of the Zanoobia declared Jelly Wax the owners, whilst Jelly Wax claimed that the Syrian company Samin were the new owners.The cargo’s negative value had multiplied and when it was eventually off-loaded at arms-length from the population, onto a floating dock, I suspected that it would not be staying in Italy. The grapevine went quiet, until in October 1990 Rechem’s external affairs manager acknowledged that some of the Zanoobia’s waste had resumed its epic journey to end up in Britain, with the company I had pencilled-in for it two years earlier.
In the same era, another wandering waste ship temporarily came closer to home before its cargo also acquired a permanent Pontypool connection. Widely publicised in Western Europe because of another Italian debacle, was the name Karin B.Britain had already played a bit-part in the Karin B’s long running drama well before ReChem’s eventual involvement. The waste scheme at the centre of the drama was masterminded by two Italian broking companies: Jelly Wax again, together with a company bearing the even more superficially attractive title, Ecomar. Unbelievably, between late 1987 and May 1988, eight thousand barrels of toxic waste accumulated on rented property in the small port of Koko, Nigeria. The official importers went under the title of a construction company and one description disguised the chemicals as “Substances related to the building trade”. When the truth surfaced, the Nigerian government acted. Mass jailings, threats of execution, the recall of the Nigerian Ambassador from Italy, the seizing of an Italian ship and the demand for one million dollars in compensation were amongst the repercussions. This episode served to unite African nations in opposing their treatment as chemical dumping grounds and it also disrupted plans for projects to use Africa for radioactive waste.
Along with its sister ship the Deepsea Carrier; the Karin B was commissioned to remove the waste from Koko, Nigeria. The vessels left for Ravenna, Italy, but changed course after Italian officials characteristically objected to the return of Italy’s own waste. In the glare of the world’s media the Karin B was then banned from docking in France, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany. In the light of the UK’s lenient policy on waste imports, British waste company Leigh Environmental offered to take the cargo, until, under the pressure of publicity, our government’s Virginia Bottomley famously found a technical reason to turn it away. There was no U-turn on policy and the refusal wasn’t a point of principle for the government – it was simply said that the waste needed better packaging. On September 2nd 1988, the Italian government finally ordered the two wretched vessels to bring the waste back home. The homecoming plan crumbled as three prospective ports of entry experienced protests and blockades. The deadlock was partially broken when, with chemicals now leaking, some crew members of the Karin B fell ill and were allowed ashore. The vessels remained at anchor in different locations before beginning to offload the wave-weary material in December 1988. I again assumed, that with this cargo being so hot to handle, ReChem would one day feature in its obituary and as usual I kept my ear to the ground to detect any movement. Official information was usually hard to come by, since companies and regulatory bodies would rely on commercial confidentiality to prevent disclosure. After several rumours, followed by a two-year silence, one morning I had an anonymous phone call from Cardiff, which I judged to be from an employee of a transportation company connected with rail transport. He gave me details of 800 tonnes of waste now on the move to Britain and thought to be from the Karin B. Official sources denied that it was happening and there was little time for me to do anything about it but the storyline was ultimately confirmed by an official admission that Pontypool did become a final destination for some of that infamous, wandering toxic waste, albeit better packaged, from the notorious Karin B.
Environment Minister Virginia Bottomley had had gained popularity with her temporary diversion of the Karin B’s waste, but any hopes that it reflected an enlightened attitude to the waste trade were ill-founded. Britain was up to its neck in the booming business and Dennis Thatcher, husband of the Prime Minister, was sitting on the board of the major waste company Atwoods.Waste imports into the country had shot up through the 1980s, and the toxic proportion of those imports more than matched the general growth in the waste trade. Even then, official figures that flagged-up a massive increase in the trade were most likely understated due to inconsistencies in classifying the categories of waste. For example, on paper, Austria exported far more hazardous waste to Britain than Britain imported from Austria - because some waste classified as hazardous in Austria could be classified as harmless in Britain. Whilst less-developed nations were beginning to act aggressively against the world’s waste trade and some developed countries developed imaginative excuses to support toxic waste’s exportation but not importation, in Britain the importation of waste steadfastly remained a proud manifestation of the government’s ego.
I had long been accustomed to the tendency of the global waste market to contradict common sense and to evade the application of fundamental environmental principles. In 1972 the United Nations Stockholm Declaration said that one state shouldn’t cause environmental damage in another state - but that principle didn’t to stop the flow of toxic waste across national boundaries in the 1980’s. The EEC Waste Framework of 1975 had also established the principle of regional self-sufficiency in waste disposal, but the European Transfrontier Shipment of Waste Regulations seemed to subvert the EEC’s own principles by using a tick-box system that effectively legitimised waste movement. Coupled with the quickening pace of environmental regulation in some countries in the mid ‘80s, the European administrative process for hazardous waste actually drove more of the stuff to Pontypool, because more environmentally concerned countries could sanitise their waste exports by ensuring that the packaging and paperwork was in order.
On the surface, by 1989 when Pontypool’s prominent place in the global waste business was beamed around the world during the Canadian PCBs controversy, many European countries were content with their dirty washing being out of sight in Wales and officially in compliance with the Stockholm Declaration. After all, in the 1984 EC Directive on transfrontier shipments of hazardous waste, Europe seemed very strong on principles. Contemporaneous OECD edicts could be taken as another sign that tight controls were in hand. However, evidence that the words in use were woeful came with the wandering waste ship scandals of the late 1980’s and the accompanying international attention catalysed calls for tougher controls. Some countries didn’t wait for the bureaucratic wheels to turn and unilaterally banned hazardous waste imports. Under pressure from African states in particular, The United Nations Environment Programme was enlisted. There were high hopes that it would prevail but the outcome wasn’t what most waste victims wanted. The early OECD waste controls had formed the foundation for a multilateral treaty with principles which superficially discouraged the export of hazardous waste from industrialised to developing countries but which, in practice, sanctioned the trade.It was in Basel, on 22nd March 1989, that a politically influenced agreement emerged from the new deliberations, with some of us viewing the outcome it as years of work torn up in tatters. Up-front in “The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal” was, indeed, a principle which we campaigners had been trying to impress on officialdom. It was to reduce the movement of the waste by dealing with it as close to the source as possible, thereby reflecting the proximity principle of the 1975 European Waste Framework Directive.However, this laudable aim was not in keeping with international free-trade and it was destroyed by the devil in the detail.
Only one-third of over a hundred countries who were present in Basel signed the treaty, whilst many were dismayed by there being no outright ban on the toxic shipments from rich to poor. The list of those who did sign-up was well-populated by powerful industrialised nations. African, Latin American, Asian, Pacific and Middle Eastern ministers refused to agree to a system that could actually lubricate the wheels of the waste trade and which also provided scope for hazardous waste to be fast-tracked under the guise of materials for recycling.With the Basel Convention reinforcing the false fair-trade status of toxic waste, I envisaged a long road ahead.Keeping the international waste under the same umbrella as normal trade had never been a solution for me and, just like the Treaty of Rome, the Basel Convention appeared to give the continued trade in toxics its blessing as it, perhaps unwittingly, reinforced waste globalisation. The idea that the Basel outcome resulted from a clique of vested interests was supported by a New Scientist article saying: “In a classic ploy . . . the governments of the rich nations, led by the US, Britain and Japan, introduced new points in the last minutes of the negotiations and this resulted in losing nearly all the safeguards sought by the developing countries.” When the treaty was signed, Greenpeace summarised events in Basel even more concisely, with a banner mounted on Basel’s Plaza Hotel reading “Basel Convention legalises toxic terror”.
As European and global bureaucrats were sanitising the toxic waste trade in the late 1980’s, campaigning despair continued to deepen as the ideological march towards a single European market gathered pace. The future could see waste tourism enshrined permanently and the conventional wisdom behind that idea was one of the targets of my own words on BBC Radio’s “The World Tonight”.