THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  Those are impressive numbers—I give them to every public official considering incineration or landfilling of hazardous waste. With such proven viability, TURI-style options should be exhausted before even considering any other approach. TURI has proven that industries can cut their waste by more than half and their emissions more than 90 percent.

  Although TURI’s work focuses on Massachusetts, its resources and tools are available online for anyone, anywhere. For those working to clean up industries, finding TURI is like hitting the jackpot. No longer can polluting industries get away with saying they’d love to change, but there just aren’t alternatives. TURI’s CleanerSolutions database offers options including “find a cleaner” and “replace a solvent.” Its online Pollution Prevention Gems (P2gems.org) has reams of information on reducing toxics in specific sectors, industrial processes, and products, for everything from bleaching and metal finishing to printing and wood finishing.

  The bad news is that, as this book was going to press, funding for TURI was in jeopardy. In spite of its phenomenal success in reducing toxic chemical use, it may fall victim to budget cuts in the state of Massachusetts. Environmental health advocates are fighting back, pointing out that the program pays for itself, as industries’ fees cover the costs of administering TURI, not to mention that preventing hazardous waste in the first place is far more economical than cleaning it up later. For updates, visit TURI at www.turi.org.

  Over the Sea and Far Away...

  In twenty years of working on waste, I’ve seen a lot of attempts by companies in our country to get rid of our trash—especially our most troublesome toxic trash—by shipping it somewhere else in the world. But guess what? The problems don’t go away. May I repeat: there is no “away.” Here are some of the most tragic stories I collected while tracking the trafficking of waste around the globe.

  To Bangladesh

  In late 1991, four South Carolina–based companies secretly mixed 1,000 tons of hazardous waste containing high amounts of lead and cadmium into a shipment of fertilizer that the Bangladesh government had purchased with a loan from the Asian Development Bank. This was discovered by U.S. environmental authorities at the local and state level during a random inspection of the Stoller Chemical facility (which produced the fertilizer). They found that Stoller had mixed in an unapproved material with levels of lead and cadmium beyond the legal limits, and they alerted criminal investigators at the Environmental Protection Agency. At that time, I was in close touch with EPA officials who tracked the international waste trade, and one of them told me about it.

  Unfortunately, the EPA didn’t learn of the illegal export until the contaminated fertilizer had already reached Bangladesh. By U.S. law, the companies would have been able to export this kind of toxic waste only after first obtaining written permission from the importing country.111 In this case they’d ignored that step, so the shipment was illegal. The companies were fined for the procedural violation, but neither the United States nor the Bangladeshi government was interested in taking action to recall the waste.

  I headed straight to Bangladesh. My goal was to find out what had happened to the fertilizer and, if it had already been used on farms, to collect soil samples as evidence to force both governments to clean it up. First, I visited the U.S. embassy in the capital city of Dhaka. I hoped the embassy would express some concern, or perhaps embarrassment, over the export of the contaminated fertilizer. On the contrary, the embassy staff person kept repeating, “It is not our responsibility. The shipment was a private transaction between private companies and we do not get involved in private business transactions.” Sure, U.S. embassies stay out of U.S. business activities overseas, just like those relentless Bangladeshi mosquitoes stayed out of my face.

  A representative of a local environmental organization in Bangladesh was far more helpful, accompanying me by bus and then bicycle rickshaw to a small town in the countryside where the contaminated fertilizer was rumored to still be for sale. Stepping off the bus, it was hard for me to imagine why any farmer felt the need to add fertilizer in this environment; everywhere I looked, the rice paddies were the most luscious vibrant green I had ever seen.

  But sure enough, at the local agricultural supply shop, I found one last bag of the crap still for sale, months after both the United States and Bangladeshi governments had been informed of the contamination. I couldn’t leave it in the shop for some unsuspecting farmer to pick up, so I bought that last bag for the equivalent of four dollars and carried it along on our journey. I also got the names of the local farmers who had bought some. One of those farms was my next stop.

  The Bangladeshi farmer welcomed us into his modest home for tea. The walls were made of earth and the roof from thatched grass. After we introduced ourselves and explained our purpose, he enthusiastically led us to the fields to take soil samples. I was confused about why the farmer kept smiling as my translator friend explained that the fertilizer on his fields contained toxic waste illegally sent from the United States. But then she translated what he was saying: “Now that your government knows where the toxic fertilizer has been used, they will come and clean it up so we will be safe.” Standing there, I was overwhelmed with sadness and shame. “No,” I explained, remembering my meeting with the U.S. embassy staff person, “I don’t think they will come.” But I promised him that I’d deliver his cleanup request to my government and I’d use the evidence from this case to support the call for an end to global waste trafficking. Saying that to this farmer, whom I had just informed that he had put toxic waste all over his fields, made me feel like such a schmuck. What good did it do him to know that the evidence from his field would be used to strengthen a United Nations convention on waste trafficking? Of all my times traipsing around the world investigating toxic waste, that moment was the lowest.

  I returned to the capital city of Dhaka with a heavy heart and a heavy bag of fertilizer. I didn’t know what to do with either. After musing on it for some days, I came up with a plan. U.S. embassies are considered U.S. soil overseas. U.S. hazardous waste law requires prior written permission to export this type of hazardous waste to another country. Although the original exporter had violated this law, I doubted the U.S. embassy would repeat the mistake, especially if they knew I was watching. So I decided to return the contaminated fertilizer to the U.S. embassy, knowing that the staff would be unable to simply throw it in the garbage.

  I wrapped up the fertilizer in a nice package, addressed to the staff person I had previously met with, and dropped it off at the embassy’s front desk with a little note informing him that I was returning this U.S. waste to U.S. soil, from which re-export was illegal. Although the embassy never did formally contact me, someone in the State Department anonymously sent me a copy of a telex message sent from the Dhaka embassy to their State Department offices in Washington, complaining about the waste, wondering what to do with it, and bemoaning my meddling. They concluded that they suspected they had “not seen the last of Leonard.”

  To South Africa

  One of the worst cases of international waste trafficking I’ve ever worked on was in a small, heavily industrialized town called Cato Ridge in South Africa. There, a British-owned South African company called Thor Chemicals was importing mercury waste from the United States and Europe, supposedly for reprocessing. The British parent company, Thor Chemical Holdings, had previously operated a mercury processing plant in the United Kingdom, which it closed in 1987 in the face of increasing contro versy and potential government action based on excessive mercury levels in the air and in the workers. Thor relocated its mercury processing operation to South Africa in 1988.112

  Thor Chemicals in Cato Ridge was a very busy plant, importing thousands of tons of mercury during the 1990s. Two of the biggest exporters were the U.S. companies American Cyanamid in New Jersey and Borden Chemical in Louisiana. Although there were mercury-processing plants in the United States, none of them would accept mercury waste with as high a level of organic co
ntamination as that which American Cyanamid and Borden Chemical produced. So Thor Chemicals willingly took it off their hands, for a fee of more than a thousand dollars per ton.113

  Thor’s operations in South Africa were even worse than in England. Within a year of starting operations, the local water board found high levels of mercury pollution in a nearby river. In 1989, a U.S. journalist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch named Bill Lambrecht became interested in the case. He visited Cato Ridge to test the waters himself. Lambrecht found mercury levels in the Mngeweni River behind the plant of 1.5 million parts per billion, 1,500 times higher than the U.S. level for toxicity.114 The Mngeweni flows into the Umgeni River, which continues through populated areas, irrigates agricultural and cattle grazing lands, is used for washing and playing, and feeds into the drinking supply of the big coastal city of Durban. As far as forty miles downstream, near Durban, mercury levels were found to be 20 times the U.S. limit.115

  Thor’s workers began immediately complaining of a metal taste in their mouths, black fingernails, skin problems, dizziness, and other signs of mercury poisoning. At one point, nearly one-third of the workers were found to have mercury poisoning. Thor documents, leaked to the South African organization Earthlife Africa, revealed that some workers had mercury concentrations in their urine hundreds of times higher than limits set by the World Health Organization. In 1992, three workers fell into mercury-induced comas and eventually died. The situation garnered international attention when Nelson Mandela visited one sick worker’s bedside in 1993.116

  Local environmentalists in South Africa, including Earthlife Africa and the Environmental Justice Networking Forum, joined forces with Greenpeace International to publicize and stop this disaster. Protests and letter writing campaigns were organized to pressure the waste exporters and Thor in both the United Kingdom and South Africa. In the mid-1990s, the South African government ordered the closure of the plant. However, a massive amount of mercury waste was left at the site.

  I visited Cato Ridge in 1996 to work with local activists concerned about the potential incineration of this toxic waste. My host, the indomitable Durban-based environmental justice activist Bobby Peek, pulled over his car and led me on a trail that allowed us to get right alongside the factory fence. With no workers on site, not even a security guard, it was easy to get unobstructed views. We saw holding ponds of mercury waste—like uncovered swimming pools—sure to overflow in the heavy rains, as well as storage sheds, which, Peek said, contained even more barrels of waste. There was so much untreated mercury on the site that local environmentalists suspected that Thor may never have intended to process the waste at all. Even worse, we followed a drainage stream out of the factory to the spot where it joined the larger river. The mercury discharge from the plant was so heavy that actual streaks of silver lined the drainage ditch, reminding me of the mercury balls from broken glass thermometers that my mother warned me not to touch as a child.

  It wasn’t until 2003 that Thor—now renamed Guernica Chemicals—finally agreed to contribute 24 million rand ($2.5 million at the time of writing) toward cleaning up the plant. This was less than half the estimated costs to clean up about 8,000 tons of mercury waste left on site.117

  As I write this, cleanup still hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, mercury contamination continues to be a problem beyond the factory fence. In October 2008, the South African Medical Research Council released its report detailing extreme mercury levels in community residents near a local dam, Inanda, whose lake is Durban’s main drinking water source. It also reported that 50 percent of the fish sampled from the Umgeni River, downstream from the Thor plant, had mercury levels above the safe eating limits recommended by the World Health Organization.118

  Some of the workers have taken legal action against Thor in search of both compensation and justice. In 1994 and again in 1998, a number of injured workers, plus representatives of three workers who had died, took legal action in the United Kingdom against Thor’s British parent company, Thor Chemical Holdings (TCH). The workers claimed that the parent company was negligent in designing and overseeing such a clearly unsafe facility and was responsible for the illnesses and death of the workers. In both cases, TCH attempted to wriggle out of the legal action, initially trying in vain to have the case moved to South African courts, where it presumably could have more influence over the outcome. In both cases, TCH ended up settling out of court; in 1997, it paid 1.3 million British pounds (more than $2 million), and in 2003 it paid another 240,000 British pounds (more than $300,000 at then current exchange rates).119

  To Haiti

  I have a small jar of grey powder on my desk. It usually goes unnoticed amidst the piles of paper, but every now and then someone asks about it. It’s from Haiti. Actually, it’s from Philly. It’s Philadelphia’s municipal incinerator ash that I got in Haiti. “Huh?” you might say. It’s a jar of the most famous incinerator ash in the world.

  You see, for years the city of Philadelphia had burned its trash in a municipal waste incinerator. Like many incinerators, its operators didn’t have a solid plan for disposing of the mounds of ash it churned out, which they just piled ever higher in an adjacent lot. In 1986, the city hired Joseph Paolino & Sons and paid them $6 million to get rid of the ash. Paolino & Sons turned around and hired another company, Amalgamated Shipping, which owned a cargo ship named the Khian Sea. Amalgamated loaded 14,000 tons of the ash onto the Khian Sea, which headed for a dump site in the Caribbean.120

  At the time, I worked with Greenpeace’s Toxic Trade Team, which tracked international shipments of waste, alerting target governments about the hazardous contents. Thanks largely to our warnings, the ship was turned away by the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guinea-Bissau, and the Netherlands Antilles. (In gratitude, some very nice bottles of rum were sent from several of these embassies to our Washington, D.C., Greenpeace offices.) The Khian Sea continued to sail the region in search of a dump site.

  In December 1987, the Khian Sea arrived in Gonaïves, a tiny, dusty, and very poor port town in Haiti. It had in hand a permit signed by the Haitian government to import “fertilizer.” Anxious to be finished with its nightmare voyage, the crew began unloading the ash onto the beach immediately. But when Greenpeace alerted the Haitian government to the real contents of the cargo, government officials ordered the ash reloaded and removed. The crew stopped unloading but left 4,000 tons of ash on the open beach and took off.

  The remaining 10,000 tons was definitely the best-traveled pile of ash ever. The voyage ultimately lasted for twenty-seven months, visiting every continent except Antarctica. Our Greenpeace team continued to track the Khian Sea, warning each country it approached. During the saga, the ship got a paint job and changed its name from the Khian Sea to the Felicia, then to the Pelicano, but it couldn’t shake us. At one point in its journey, the ship returned to Philadelphia in defeat, hoping to return the ash to the original contractor, Paolino & Sons. But Paolino & Sons refused to let the ship dock at its pier in Philly. By strange coincidence, the pier caught on fire that very night and was destroyed, preventing the ship from docking. Finally, in November 1988 the ship appeared in Singapore with its cargo holds empty. The captain refused to disclose where the ash had been dumped. Eventually an enterprising lawyer, Howard Stewart, from the Environmental Crimes division of the Department of Justice tracked down photos surreptitiously taken by one of the sailors that showed the ash being dumped overboard into the ocean, which is a violation of international law.121

  Meanwhile, the other 4,000 tons remained uncovered on the beach in Gonaïves, decreasing in size as more and more of it was blown away or washed into the sea each rainy season. I visited Haiti three times while the ash sat on the beach. I was amazed how widely known the ash was; wherever I went in Haiti, if I introduced myself as a person working on waste, immediately each person would ask if I had seen the ash in Gonaïves. I asked my Haitian friends why—with the many problems that Haiti was facing, including much more
immediate health threats—the ash had gained so much attention. My friends told me that Haitians have long felt “dumped upon” by the United States, and the actual ash dumping was widely perceived as the epitome of that careless attitude. What is more symbolic than the richest country in the hemisphere dumping its waste on the poorest and then turning a deaf ear to all pleas for help? So Haitians were especially committed to sending the ash home. It was a matter not just of environmental health, but of dignity and justice.

  Frustrated with the lack of responsibility taken by either Philadelphia or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, some Haitians living in the United States approached Greenpeace seeking assistance. In alliance with them, my Greenpeace colleague Kenny Bruno and I reached out to members of Philadelphia’s faith-based communities, especially the Quakers, and launched Project Return to Sender. We demanded that Philadelphia take responsibility for the ash in Gonaïves and dispose of it in a regulated landfill in this country. For more than ten years we hounded the mayors of Philadelphia, organized citizens to speak up at city hall meetings, and met with Haitians here and in Haiti. In response, successive city administrations kept changing the official party line. Sometimes they said Philadelphia bore no responsibility, other times they said they would take the ash back but had no money to help pay. Mayor Edward Rendell and most city council members turned a deaf ear, saying it just wasn’t their problem.

  So finally we decided to make it their problem.

  In the mid to late 1990s, Project Return to Sender organized a number of creative actions to get the attention of political leaders in Philadelphia and Washington. The mayor of Philadelphia and the EPA administrator received hundreds of envelopes from individual Haitians, each containing a pinch of the ash and marked “WARNING: contains toxic ash mislabeled as fertilizer, RETURN TO SENDER.” American students across the country sent valentines to the mayor, encouraging him to “have a heart, clean up Philadelphia’s ash.” Philadelphia residents attended city council meetings to demand the city take responsibility for its waste. In a wonderful demonstration of solidarity, a group of Philadelphians even went from Philly to Haiti to visit the ash and to protest in front of the U.S. embassy there.