The New York Times reports that "a toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda" was dumped in the middle of a highly populated urban community in the city of Abidjan, the capital of West Africa's Ivory Coast. The smell of the sludge reportedly causes burning pain in the eyes and noses of those who get anywhere near it. Within days of the dumping incident local residents reported skin lesions, headaches, nosebleeds, and stomach aches.
An engineer working for a French cleanup company brought in by the Ivory Coast government to remove the waste proclaimed, "in 30 years of doing this kind of work I have never seen anything like this. This kind of industrial waste, dumped in this urban setting, in the middle of the city, never."
The tanker transporting the toxic waste was leased by Trafigura, a transnational oil and metals trading company. The vessel was pausing en route to Estonia in order to unload what the company had described as 250 tons of "marslops" or "regular slops", terminology used to refer to wash water from cleaning a ship's holds, which are typically laced with chemicals such as oil, gasoline, and caustic soda among others.
Amsterdam Port Services, a Dutch waste processing company, had signed a contract with Trafigura to dispose of the toxic waste. The company said that as workers unloaded the waste they encountered problems. There were two paritcularly troubling observations reported: 1) the volume of the supposedly 250 tons of waste apppeared closer to 400 tons; and 2) the fumes emitted from the waste made the Dutch workers ill. A spokesperson for Amsterdam Port Services declared that "No one had ever seen similar waste." Safe disposal of the toxic sludge in Europe is estimated to have cost upwards of $300,000 (perhaps twice that counting delay fees); Amsterdam Port Services had agreed to do the job for approximately $15,000.
The New York Times reports that since the dumping incident eight people have died, dozens have been hospitalized, and some 85,000 have saught medical attention; however there has been no explicit expert confirmation regarding the exact role, if any, that the toxic sludge played in these events. Nonetheless, environmental scientist Lucas Reijnders, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, said that he had seen results of an Ivory Coast lab analysis performed on samples taken from the Probo Koala before the Abidjan dumping incident. The analysis reportedly showed high levels of caustic soda, a toxic compound Reijnders says “smells of rotten eggs, but at high concentrations you can no longer smell it because it paralyzes your nervous system. It's very lethal and acts very rapidly.”
However Transfigura's website posted a statement claiming that tests performed on the substance discharged by the Probo Koala in Abidjan by a laboratory in Rotterdam indicated that the material was not toxic. The statement reads:
“Contrary to speculation in the media and the activist communities about residue washings in a recent shipment to Côte d’Ivoire, tests conducted by the company and others show the washings themselves to have little or no toxicity."
But the New York Times reports that Saybolt, the Rotterdam laboratory that performed the chemical evaluation, told the Dutch press that Trafigura had only requested a limited analysis and that "the samples were not sealed, not properly marked and not wholly reliable."
The exact origins of the waste remain unclear. Trafigura spokesman Jan Maat said that the Probo Koala had been used "as a floating storage tank" that took loads from several other vessels. Maat reportedly declined to give further details.
The Greenpeace environmental advocacy group has filed criminal complaints against Trafigura, Amsterdam Port Services, and the Dutch environmental authorities. The city of Amsterdam and Dutch Parliament have each launched their own investigations regarding the Abidjan toxic dumping incident.
Environmental activist Jim Puckett, a member of the Basel Action Network, stated flatly: “This is the underbelly of globalization. Environmental regulations in the north have made disposing of waste expensive, so corporations look south.”
-Travis
Link to the story below.
Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast (New York Times)
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