The International Trade In Toxic Waste: A Selected Bibliography Of Sources
Deanna L. Lewis <lewis@winthrop.edu> and Ron Chepesiuk <chepesukr@winthrop.edu>
Dacus Library, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC 29733, USA. TEL: 803-323-2131.
Call it a toxic memorial, a monument to loose laws and fast money. This monument, tons of municipal
incinerator ash from Philadelphia, lies on a rural Haitian beach where it was dumped one night in 1986 by a
barge called the Khian Sea.
The ship had entered the port with a permit to unload fertilizer. Fertilizer? Hardly! This cargo contained
some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet--dioxins and furan and laced with heavy metals such as lead,
cadmium, mercury and arsenic. As workers began heaping the ash only yards from the incoming waves, one
crewman even stuffed his mouth with a handful of the flaky black cargo to prove its harmless nature. Nearly
one fourth of the 13,000 plus tons of waste had been unloaded from the barge before the Haitian
government intervened and ordered the ash reloaded onto the barge. But the Khian Sea disappeared under
the cover of darkness, leaving approximately 3,000 tons of toxic ash on Haiti's beach.
The Khian Sea returned to Philadelphia with the remainder of its deadly cargo. The ship spent the next two
years vainly seeking a dumping ground; it crossed the Atlantic, sailed around the coast of West Africa,
through the Mediterranean, down the Suez Canal and into the Indian Ocean. When it finally pulled into the
Singapore harbor it had a new name (the Pelicano), a new owner, and an empty hull.
No one is willing to take responsibility for this scandal. The city of Philadelphia blames the middleman who
blames the barge owner. The owner claims the ash was still on board when the barge was sold. The tangled
case went to court; finally in 1993, two executives of Coastal Carriers, operators of the Khian Sea, received
modest fines and prison sentences for dumping in the ocean without a permit. The legal battle is not over
yet. But how much longer will the ash sit on the beach, and who will remove it?
While the Khian Sea incident is one of the most notorious episodes of the international toxic waste trade, it
is by no means an isolated incident. In Koko, Nigeria, 3,800 tons of highly poisonous waste, including
potentially lethal polychlorinated byphenyls (PCBs), were found in drums at an open site; they were dumped
by a local businessman who forged his cargo papers and bribed Koko port officials. An American chemical
company sold 3,000 tons of fertilizer to the Bangladesh government, but 1,000 tons of ash from copper
smelting furnaces was mixed into the fertilizer before it was shipped. U.S. officials verified that this altered
fertilizer contained dangerous levels of lead and cadmium. In another case, several hundred mysterious
barrels washed up onto the Turkish shore. When curious locals opened some of the barrels, they suffered
from nausea and skin rashes. A few barrels even exploded. In fact, countless barrels of trouble have rolled
down the economic slope to a number of poor, less developed countries: black South Africa, the former East
Germany, China, Romania, Poland, Thailand, the Ukraine, and others.
The lure of foreign currency available in the international waste trade can be awfully tempting to cash-poor
developing countries. In Papua New Guinea, for example, the government of the province of Oro negotiated
a deal with a California firm to build a $38 million detoxification plant to process 600,000 metric tons of toxic
waste a month. The deal, had it gone through, would have generated an income approximately six times the
annual provincial budget.....
