By Peter Montague
The city of Philadelphia has a long history of dumping its toxic wastes on other states and nations. Now the "city of brotherly love" is refusing to spend a paltry sum to clean up 3.6 million kilograms of the city's toxic incinerator ash that was dumped on a beach in Haiti 10 years ago.
Philadelphia's attitude pervades US environmental policy. The US remains the only industrialised country that has refused to ratify the Basel Convention, which makes it illegal for industrialised countries to send their toxic wastes to the developing world.
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights in April issued a report naming the United States as a major exporter of toxic waste. Half of US waste exports go to Latin America, the report said.
Starting in the late 1970s, Philadelphia burned 40% of its municipal garbage in two large incinerators, then dumped the resulting toxic ash in the Kinsley landfill in New Jersey. In 1984, New Jersey woke up and refused further wastes from Philadelphia. In 1986, after six states refused to accept Philadelphia's toxic ash, Mayor Wilson Goode signed a contract to ship 900,000 tonnes of it to Panama.
The US Environmental Protection Agency analysed the ash and revealed that the first year's shipment of 227,000 tonnes would contain 816 kilograms of arsenic, 1950 kilograms of cadmium, and 197 tonnes of lead. EPA said the toxic ash contained more dioxin than the soil at Times Beach, Missouri — a town that had been evacuated in 1983 to protect residents.
The Panama plan was one of many cooked up by Philadelphia to dump its waste elsewhere. In the summer of 1986, Mayor Goode signed a $640,000 contract with a local road-paving company, Joseph Paolino and Sons, to ship 13,500 tonnes of toxic incinerator ash to the Caribbean.
Paolino in turn hired Amalgamated Shipping, based in Freeport, Bahamas, and on September 5, 1986, the vessel Khian Sea left Philadelphia carrying the 13,500 tonnes of toxic ash.
When the Khian Sea arrived in the Bahamas, officials turned it away. During the next 14 months, the Khian Sea was turned away by the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea-Bissau and the Netherlands Antilles.
Finally, in late 1987, the Haitian government issued an import permit for "fertiliser", and the Khian Sea dumped 3600 tonnes of Philadelphia's toxic ash on the beach near the city of Gonaïves.
As soon as the Haitians realized they weren't getting fertiliser, they cancelled the import permit and ordered the waste returned to the ship, but the Khian Sea slipped away in the night, leaving the toxic ash on the beach. Some of that ash has been moved inland, but much of it remains on the beach, blowing around and washing slowly into the sea.
This embarrassing episode did not deter Philadelphia from continuing to export its wastes to the developing world. In March 1988, a Norwegian ship dumped 13,500 tonnes of Philadelphia's toxic ash — labelled "raw material for bricks" — in a quarry on Kassa Island off Conakry, Guinea.
After it left Haiti, the Khian Sea travelled to the Mediterranean and then into the Indian Ocean, still carrying Philadelphia's ash.
During the next two years, the Khian Sea changed its name twice, but it still couldn't fool anyone into taking the cargo. It was revealed in 1992 that the crew eventually solved its problem by dumping Philadelphia's toxic ash into the Indian Ocean.
Basel Convention
Partly because of Philadelphia's infamous wandering ships, at a meeting in 1989 in Basel, Switzerland, 33 countries agreed to the Basel Convention, which limited the shipment of toxic waste from one country to another.
The 1989 version of the treaty was weak; it said that industrialised countries could send toxic waste to poor countries so long as there was "prior informed consent".
Because the waste trade is enormously profitable, a few corrupt or desperate officials can always be found who will issue an import licence. The Basel Convention seemed simply to legalise dumping on the poor.
In protest, the African nations walked out of the Basel meeting, saying they would develop their own treaty, which they did. The Bamako Convention, adopted on January 29, 1991, by every African nation except South Africa and Morocco, is much stronger.
The Bamako Convention makes it illegal to export toxic waste to Africa, and makes it a criminal act for any African nation to import wastes. Bamako was soon followed by other, similar regional agreements — one covering the Caribbean, one covering the Mediterranean and another covering Central America.
These regional conventions provided momentum within the Basel Convention nations. Eventually 118 countries — not including the US — ratified the Basel Convention.
In 1992, at the first meeting after ratification — when only 65 countries were party to the convention — the Basel group agreed that there should be no waste exports from OECD countries to developing nations. This became known as the "Basel ban" and was adopted formally in 1994, thus greatly strengthening the Basel Convention.
At the Basel meeting in 1995, the US argued that the Basel ban did not have the legal force of an amendment to the original convention. So, to meet US objections, the Basel ban was formally proposed as an amendment and passed.
The latest US ploy to undermine the Basel Convention is the plan, recently announced, to ratify the convention but not ratify the Basel ban amendment.
The US is hoping that, because of its economic and political power, it can create havoc by ratifying only those parts of the convention that the US likes. The goal is to keep the options open for countries like India and Brazil to become landfills for US toxic wastes.
Today the US maintains no records of most exports of toxic waste because most of it is exported in the name of recycling. Once a waste is designated as "recyclable", it is exempt from US toxic waste law and can be bought and sold as if it were ice cream.
Slags, sludges and even dusts captured on pollution control filters are being bagged up and shipped abroad. The prevailing attitude seems to be that the US has a right to dump on the rest of the world.
Request
Two years ago, New York created a Trade Waste Commission to get the mob out of the trash business and open it up to competition. Now, when a company applies for a licence to haul waste in New York, the Trade Waste Commission does a background check on company officials.
Last year the commission began looking into Eastern Environmental Services, Inc, and found that one of its principals, Louis D. Paolino, had formerly run Joseph Paolino and Sons, the firm that hired the Khian Sea.
Faced with the prospect of losing a lucrative licence to haul waste in New York, Eastern Environmental Services agreed to put up US$100,000 to help retrieve Philadelphia's toxic ash from Haiti and bury it in the company's Bender landfill near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, the $100,000 cash contribution won't be sufficient to retrieve the waste — another $200,000 is needed. Philadelphia has been asked to put up the $200,000, but Mayor Ed Rendell has refused.
Why should Philadelphia pay?
First, Philadelphia saved $640,000 on the original deal in 1986, because Paolino was never paid for hauling the waste away. The city profited richly by sending the waste to Haiti.
Second, Philadelphia had a $130 million budget surplus last year, so the city is flush.
There is a clear opportunity for Philadelphia to expunge an act of international environmental injustice. Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere, with a GDP in 1990 of about $2.4 billion and average per capita income of $380.
Mayor Rendell says the city is too poor to pay $200,000 to retrieve its waste from Haiti. The Philadelphia Inquirer has editorialised, saying the city should pay the $200,000, which represents only 0.008% of the city's annual budget.
[From Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly. Like Green Left Weekly, Rachel's is a non-profit publication which distributes information without charge on the internet and depends on the generosity of readers to survive. If you are able to help keep this valuable resource in existence, send your contribution to Environmental Research Foundation, PO Box 5036, Annapolis, Maryland 21403-7036, USA. In the United States, donations to ERF are tax deductible.]