Poisoning the air for profits

Trafigura, Vitol and BP exporting dirty diesel to Africa, says Swiss NGO, Public Eye. Traders blend cheap fuel with sulphur levels sometimes hundreds of times over European limits for sale in African countries.

Major European oil companies and commodity traders are exploiting weak fuel standards in African countries to export highly polluting fuels that they could never sell at the pumps in Europe. When the fuel is burned, the sulphur is released into the atmosphere as sulphur dioxide and other compounds that are major contributors to respiratory diseases such as bronchitis and asthma. Vehicle emissions are a significant contributor to air pollution, which is why in Europe the maximum sulphur content of diesel has been set at 10 parts per million (ppm) since 2009. In parts of Africa, the legal limit on sulphur in diesel is 5,000 ppm.

The high-sulphur fuels also have a knock-on effect, rapidly destroying emission-reducing technologies in vehicles, according to Rob de Jong, the head of the UNEP transport programme. “So if you buy a vehicle that’s a couple of years old and import it into some of the African countries, the technology in there – sensors and filters – all gets spoilt, and these cars, which are potentially very clean, are destroyed in a couple of tanks, and for the next 20 years will be belching smoke,” he said. “It’s important to understand the tragedy of this,” he added. This in turn increases emissions of fine particulate matter, which can lodge deep in the lungs, causing cancers and other health problems.

Air pollution is estimated to have killed more than 17,500 people in Ghana alone in 2013, costing more than $542m in lost labour income, an estimate that doesn’t even include the cost of treating pollution-related disease.

De Jong said suppliers deliberately blended products towards the high end of the nationally imposed sulphur limit to increase their profits. “There’s not much market anymore for high-sulphur fuels. These are really specific batches made for those specific countries.

The companies involved all deny any wrongdoing and say they comply with the law in the countries in which they operate. Public Eye, however, says the result is “regulatory arbitrage” that allows traders and fuel companies to dump cheap, dirty fuels by blending them into other diesel before export, maximising profits at the expense of Africans’ health.

Trafigura made headlines when a ship it had chartered dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast a decade ago, and the company’s lawyers attempted to gag the press from reporting on a draft report into the incident. Vitol’s sales last year topped $270bn. Its chief executive, Ian Taylor, is a major Conservative donor.

Ghana, the Waste Dump

40 million tonnes of electric and electronic waste (also known as e-waste) are produced worldwide every year. That is boundless heaps of refrigerators, computers, television sets, ovens, telephones, air conditioning units, lamps, toasters and other electric and electronic devices, with a total weight equal to seven times that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The greatest producers of e-waste per person are the United States and the European Union, while developing countries, such as China, are producing an ever-increasing amount. Only a small part of this waste – about 15.5% in 2014 – is recycled with methods that are efficient and environmentally safe. Researchers from the University of Ghana explained that "the treatment of e-waste in full respect of developed countries’ environmental laws increases its costs, and highly polluting procedures will tend to migrate towards developing countries, where there are no such laws".

Ghana is an important centre for receiving, re-using, recovering and disposing of electronic waste. Accra, the capital, hosts a thriving second-hand market, a sprawling network of repair shops, and a range of activities which attempt to tap into the full potential of e-waste. And yet, it is also the location of an enormous and heavily polluted electronic waste dumpsite. A significant part of Ghana’s e-waste is transported to Agbogbloshie, a suburb of Accra. Here, men and children extract copper, aluminium and other materials – using methods that are harmful to health and the environment – which are to be shipped back towards the factories and refineries in developed countries. To call Agbogbloshie "the largest electronic waste dump in Africa" is - paradoxically - an understatement: it is actually a city within the city. This is where the poorest classes of Accra have spent years dismantling, recovering, weighing and reselling parts and metals extracted from the scrapped devices and from the heaps of electronic waste.

"What was once a green and fruitful landscape is now a graveyard of plastics and skeletons of abandoned appliances," explains Mike Anane, an environmental activist from Accra. "The e-waste boys burn hundreds of kilos of electric cables to extract the copper and then resell it for just a few cedis per kilogram. The toxic fumes rise into the sky, poison the air and then settle on the soil and on the vegetables sold at the market," explains Anane. The consequences fall directly on the inhabitants’ shoulders. "Our boys have very serious health problems," says Wolfgang Mac-Din, of founder of Help the African Child, a foundation that supports Agbogbloshie’s children, providing them with free schooling and protection masks, among other things. "Some of them, like Fuseini, 19 years old, or Ben, 16 years old, we found already dead. Others have cancer."

Blood

A team of researchers from Ghana and the United States have collected and analysed blood samples from Agbogbloshie workers. "The samples have revealed high levels of lead," explains team researcher Onallia Osei, "and the amount of time in which one is exposed to e-waste seems to determine the amount of lead present in the blood." (International growth centre)

Urine

Traces of iron, lead and antimony have been detected in the e-waste boys’ urine samples. Scientists speculate that these heavy metals originate from the fish and seafood around which the eating habits of Agbogbloshie’s inhabitants are based. (Science of The Total Environment – Volume 424, 2012)

Milk

Disturbing amounts of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) have emerged from the analysis of breast milk in the Agbogbloshie area. PCBs are highly toxic compounds found in old electrical appliances. The analysed samples have shown levels ranging from two to 34 times the threshold allowed by international PCB standards. (Environment International, 2011)

Air

An air control station installed in the Agbogbloshie dumpsite has detected iron, lead and copper. 1.5 milligrams per cubic metre of copper (the allowed threshold is 1.0 mg), 7.8mg/ m³ of iron (threshold: 5.0) and 0.72 mg/ m³ of lead (threshold: 0.15) have been found. These thresholds are meant for work areas, but Agbogbloshie is actually an entire area of Accra with about 90,000 inhabitants. (Journal of Health and Pollution, 2011)

Soil

Out of 100 soil samples collected in Agbogbloshie, more than half have shown an amount of lead which is over twice as much as the standards allowed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). The detected values range from a minimum of 135 ppm (parts-per-million) to a maximum of 18.125 ppm. The threshold indicated in the USEPA guidelines is of 400 ppm. (Journal of Health and Pollution, 2011)

Poisoned African Air

West Africa’s air pollution is reaching dangerously high levels—and we don’t know the worst of it. Air pollution in fast-growing West African cities is reaching dangerous levels. But the worst part, according to a new study published by Nature magazine this week, is that we know almost nothing about the pollutants emerging from these new urban centers and their impact on weather systems, crops, and public health at large. There’s little monitoring of pollution, no emissions inventories, or statistical information on things like fuel consumption. Researchers say that they struggle to find funding to study the issue. While air pollution in India, China, and other emerging economies has become a major area of focus for scientists and policymakers, it has gained little traction in Africa where it’s a growing problem across the continent.

In Lagos, smog has quickly become another aspect of city life. In the city of more than 21 million people—known to some as “Africa’s first city”—the majority of residents live near industrial plants, breathing in exhaust from thousands of cars and millions of generators providing power to the city. As much as 94% of Nigeria’s population is exposed to levels of air pollution that exceed what the World Health Organization deems as safe. Gaborone in Botswana was the seventh-most polluted city in the world, according to WHO data in 2013. And pollution within homes, often from fuel stoves and diesel generators, is believed to have contributed to as many as 600,000 deaths in Africa in 2012, the highest deaths per capita from indoor pollution of any region in the world.

“Not only is pollution in these cities killing local residents, we found these emissions may even be altering the climate along the coast of West Africa, leading to changes in the clouds and so potentially to rainfall with devastating effects,” wrote the study’s co-author, Matthew Evans, a professor atmospheric chemistry at the University of York. Evans and the study’s lead author, Peter Knippertz, from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, worry that these pollutants will change the West African monsoon, a sensitive atmospheric circulation system that controls everything from wind and temperature to rainfall across huge swathes of the region. (Scientists have previously linked aerosols to changing rainfall patterns in Asia and the Atlantic Ocean.) Population growth in West Africa, expected to reach 800 million by 2050, will exacerbate these effects, they say. 

SHELL: Business As Usual In Ogoniland

If there is one country where Shell’s broken promises ring hollower than anywhere else it is in Nigeria.
For decades, the company’s operations in the country have been mired by pollution and community protests which in turn have been met with endless cycles of violence against protestors.
The communities in the Niger Delta have been protesting for decades against this chronic pollution and grinding poverty. But year after year, promises from Shell of a better future for the local communities have been found to be as broken as brittle bones.

And the community in Nigeria where the wounds impacted by Shell probably go deepest is the Ogoni, once led by the charismatic Ken Saro-Wiwa, before he was brutally murdered by the military junta in the mid-nineties. Shell has always denied complicity in his death, despite evidence to the contrary.
Ogoniland is where Shell has operated at the centre of this vortex of pollution and violence and where you would have thought the oil company would be most willing to try and make amends. A place where it would try to heal the deep and bitter wounds.
But you would be wrong.

For seasoned Shell-watchers, it is of no surprise that three years after the publication of a report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on oil pollution in Ogoniland, which urged Shell to clean up the area, the company has spectacularly failed to do so.
In fact its operations have been deemed “shameful” by a group of influential NGO’s such as Amnesty International, Environmental Rights Action, Friends of the Earth Europe, Human Rights and Development and Platform.
In a new report they argue that Shell and the Nigerian Government have failed to implement the recommendations in the UNEP report, which would “put an end to the abuse of the communities rights to food, water and a life free of pollution.”

Of the twenty seven recommendations in the report, none had been fully implemented by this month.
“The people of Ogoniland continue to suffer the effects of fifty years of an oil industry which has polluted their land, air and water,” the report argues. Shell for its part, “continues to use deeply flawed clean-up practices,” which were declared ineffective by UNEP.
A crucial recommendation by UNEP to set up a $1 billion fund to clean up contaminated land in the region has not been implemented. The report, entitled, ‘No progress’, also highlights Shell’s manipulation of information to avoid accountability for old and leaking pipes – pipes so old the company will not disclose their age or condition.

Godwin Ojo of Friends of the Earth Nigeria argues that “Three years on and the government and Shell have done little more than set up processes that look like action but are just fig leaves for business as usual. The lack of meaningful action in the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence is outrageous.
Ojo accused the Nigerian government and Shell of continuing to get away with environmental and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta.
Paul de Clerk of Friends of the Earth Europe adds that: “Three years after finding out that their operations have exposed almost every man, woman and child in Ogoniland – and almost certainly tens of thousands of people in others parts of the Niger Delta – to lifelong pollution, Shell is still more concerned with protecting itself.

He called on the Governments of Nigeria and the home countries of Shell, Netherlands and the UK, which have so far exerted no pressure on Shell, to make sure that the oil company starts a comprehensive clean up and pays due compensation for the pollution in the area.
But Shell’s shameful response continues. The company is trying to spin its web of greenwash and denial, arguing it “has made progress in addressing all the recommendations directed to it.”
After fifty years, it has failed to learn a simple lesson: that actions speak louder than empty words.

from here

The Poison of Profits

More than 200 million people around the world are at risk of exposure to toxic waste, a report has concluded. The authors say the large number of people at risk places toxic waste in a similar league to public health threats such as malaria and tuberculosis.

The study identified the Agbobloshie dumping yard in Ghana's capital Accra as the place which poses the highest toxic threat to human life. The researchers say that the report has not been hidden from governments, and they are all aware of the issue. Agbobloshie has become a global e-waste dumping yard, causing serious environmental and health issues Dr Caravanos explained. The study says that "a range of recovery activities takes place in Agbobloshie, each presenting unique occupational and ecological risks".

As the second largest e-waste processing area in West Africa, Ghana annually imports around 215,000 tonnes of second hand consumer electronics from abroad, particularly from Western Europe, and generates another 129,000 tons of e-waste every year.

The study warns that that Ghana's e-waste imports will double by 2020. At the Agbobloshie site, the study found the presence of lead in soil at very high levels, posing serious potential health and environment hazards to more than 250,000 people in the vicinity.

The World Health Organization, in conjunction with the World Bank, estimates that 23% of the deaths in the developing world are attributable to environmental factors, including pollution, and that environmental risk factors contribute to more than 80% of regularly reported illnesses according to the report.

Exporting Pollution to Ghana

Environcom, one of the UK's largest recycling companies,  has shipped thousands of banned second-hand fridges to Ghana. The compny which describes itself as the UK's largest electrical re-use and recycling company, flouting rules designed to protect the country's environment against harmful chemicals. Environcom have sent a shipment of about 37 containers – almost 4,000 second-hand fridges.

Environcom has links to British retailers Dixons and Argos, which supply used appliances to the company for recycling. It admitted exporting the fridges to Ghana but said it did so before the ban came into place.

"Environcom stopped exporting fridges to Ghana some months ago in line with the introduction of the ban, however some containers that left us on time got delayed in transit and arrived in Ghana late...” Environcom replied, defending itself.

However, the Guardian has seen documents which show the fridges were shipped from Britain to Ghana in August this year, almost two months after the ban came into force. Environcom says it sells second-hand fridges to third parties to ship to Ghana, and that it could not be held responsible for delays during the process.

Socialist Banner can only say that if it required legislation to end it exporting pollution or blaming its middle-men for the situation,  then the company wasn’t very ethical.

 Second-hand electrical goods to African countries, where many end up in toxic rubbish dumps scavenged by children and poisoning local environments. Three-quarters of second-hand goods" imported to Africa could not be reused, and that in Ghana, goods that had been dumped were releasing hazardous substances into the environment, including toxic metal lead; chemicals such as the phthalates DEHP and DBP, which are known to interfere with sexual reproduction; and chlorinated dioxins known to promote cancer. Ghana is the first country in the region to introduce a ban on old fridges, and officials hope it will reduce the quantities of toxic and ozone-unfriendly chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and reduce the energy burden on its already squeezed national grid, where old fridges suck up more than half of the national energy output of 2,000 megawatts a year.

 In violation of the ban there has been 177 seizures of second-hand fridges.  "Most of those have come from the UK – over 90% of the imports are coming from there. They know about the regulations, but they are errant companies that want to defy the law." said Victor Owusu, public affairs spokesman for Ghana's energy commission."I know that in the UK itself this kind of thing would not happen. I think they think it's Africa, so they can get away with it."

To Hell with Shell

Niger delta communities devastated by giant oil spills from rusting Shell pipelines have unanimously rejected a compensation offer from the company, calling it an insult, and cruel and derisory. A court in London is now likely to decide how much the Anglo-Dutch firm should pay 11,000 fishermen and others from the Bodo community who lost their livelihoods when the 50-year-old Shell-operated trans-Niger pipeline burst twice within a few months in 2008.

Chief Patrick Porobunu, leader of a Bodo fishing community, said: "Shell is cruel, very wicked. It has given us nothing again. People here are very angry. All we have is poverty because of Shell. We have no electricity, no health. Our suffering goes on."

Estimates of how much oil was spilled ranged from around 4,000 barrels to more than 300,000. Communities this week reported that no cleanup had been done and that water wells were still polluted. Five years after the spills the creeks and waterways around Bodo have an apocalyptic feel. The air stinks of crude, long slicks of oil drift in and out of the blackened, dying mangrove swamps and a sheen of oil covers the tidal mudflats. "It's everywhere. The wind blows the oil on our vegetable crops, our food tastes of oil, our children are sick and we get skin rashes. Life here has stopped," said Barilido,

Shell offered the communities £30m, or around £1,100 for each person affected. Martyn Day, a partner with the UK law firm Leigh Day who represented the those communities, said Shell's offer was rejected unanimously at a large public meeting in Bodo. "The amount offered for most claimants equated to two to three years' net lost earnings whereas the Bodo creek has already been out of action for five years and it may well be another 20-25 before it is up and running properly again. I was not at all surprised to see the community walk out of the talks once they heard what Shell were offering."

It emerged that Shell had offered the communities only £4,000 shortly after the two spills occurred in 2008-9. "Shell continue to treat the people of Bodo with the same contempt as they did from the start when they tried in 2009 to buy us off by offering the community the total sum of £4,000 to settle the claims," said Chief Kogbara, chairman of the Bodo council .

Chief Tal Kottee, Bodo elected regent, said: "We had been expecting a good settlement from Shell. Our livelihoods here have been totally destroyed. It's an outrage that it has taken so long for a cleanup and to get compensation."

Shell is the largest firm on the London stock exchange with a market capitalisation of £141bn, for what they called its "meanness". They accused Shell of financial racism and applying different standards to cleanups in Nigeria compared with the rest of the world.

"Is it because we are Nigerian and poor that they offer so little for the damage they have caused?" said one fisherman at the Bodo meeting.

"It is a big shame on Shell that they are unwilling to pay a fraction of their profit as compensation after subjecting the people and the environment to such unthinkable harm they would not dare allow in their home country," said the Nigerian environmentalist and chair of Oilwatch International, Nnimmo Bassey.

Toxic Colonialism

Reduce, re-use, re-cycle! This familiar environmentalist slogan represents the goal of minimising the amount of waste that ends up in landfills, incinerators, and waterways.

Trade in toxic waste refers to the migration of dirty industries to less developed countries. Unfortunately, Africa is the first choice of location for the dumping of European waste. Industrialised countries export their waste to emerging nations and capitalise on less expensive disposal cost. When the treatment of hazardous waste is considered too polluting or least profitable, Western countries send the waste Africa and Asia, in the name of recycling. All the way down the West African coast, American and European ships offload containers filled with old computers, slops, and used medical equipment. Scrap merchants, corrupt politicians and underpaid civil servants take charge of this rubbish and, for a few dollars; they dump it off coastlines and on landfill sites.

Africa is vulnerable to the uneven economics of waste trade because it includes most of the world's severely impoverished countries, most of whom are in dire need of foreign exchange. Africa has long existed as a sphere from which the West could extrapolate wealth and resources. When those resources have fulfilled their purpose, Africa absorbs the garbage produced with their resources, but not by them. A major factor that spurs on the trans-boundary shipment of waste is the disparity in disposal cost between developed and developing nations. The rising cost of waste disposal and the introduction of more stringent environmental control standards in the developed world render developing countries (particularly in Africa) an attractive destination for waste disposal. Disposal of hazardous waste may cost as much as US$ 2,000 per tonne in a developed nation, versus US$ 40 per tonne in Africa. The high cost of waste disposal in many developed countries is due in part to compliance costs with strict regulations and in part to effective local opposition to sitting landfills (often called NIMBY- Not in My Backyard).

Although they lack adequate installations of toxic waste treatment, numerous African countries, including Benin, Congo-Brazzaville, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Nigeria, Togo, Somalia and others imported whole cargoes of toxic waste (industrial muds, cyanides, solvents, pesticides, pharmaceutical waste) and even nuclear waste ( from Somalia) at very low cost to the ‘sellers’: between US$ 3 and US$ 40 per ton, compared to the US$ 75 – 300 that elimination would cost industrial nations. Sometimes the waste was packaged in barrels marked ‘fertiliser’ or even ‘humanitarian aid’.

Toxic waste colonialism can take various forms. Often masked as the exportation of valuable goods, large amounts of discarded computers, mobiles phones and other electronic junk, as well as old cars and refrigerators are sent to Africa. The objects are all filled with hazardous substances, some of which are highly toxic, including oil, fire retardants, dioxins and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). Due to ongoing technological advancement, many electronic products become obsolete within a very short period of time, creating a large surplus of unwanted electronic products, or ‘e-waste,’ defined as all secondary computers, entertainment device electronics, mobile phones, and other items such as television sets and refrigerators (whether sold, donated, or discarded by their original owners). This definition includes used electronics which are destined for reuse, resale, salvage, recycling, or disposal. Under the cloak of cooperation and development aid, this kind of pollution continues. 500 shipping containers loaded with second hand electronic equipments arrives in Nigeria monthly. This amount of containers equals about 100,000 computers or 44,000 TV sets.Three-quarters of the supposedly reusable electronics shipped to Africa's largest port are broken. The useless e-waste ends up in unofficial dumpsites, where it is picked apart by unprotected workers (many of them children) in search of saleable metals. After all the metal has been removed, the remaining plastic, cables and casings are usually burnt. These processes are extremely hazardous to health: most of the e-waste contains toxins such as lead, mercury and chlorinated dioxins, not to mention the noxious fumes and chemicals released by the burning waste. The waste and toxic gases disposed on opened ground around the densely populated city of Abidjan caused significant health problems to the majority of Ivorian people living at the periphery. According to official estimates, 20 people died, 69 were hospitalized and there were more than 108,000 medical consultations resulting from the incident. The sludge was particularly harmful to children who made up the majority of the official deaths. It is suspected that many deaths were not counted in the official toll.

Sometimes it is arranged in the form of contracts, signed between the Governments of underdeveloped and developed states. For instance, in one case the Government of Benin signed an agreement with France and received an advance cash payment of US$ 1.6 million and 30 years of development aid in return for accepting hazardous waste, including radioactive waste. Waste shipments contain poisonous metals, hospital waste, expired chemicals and pesticides and toxic sludge, all destined to be buried, incinerated or recycled.

The issue of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) is also part of the growing trend in toxic waste trade in Africa. There are huge stockpiles of pesticides in African countries, estimated at hundreds of thousands of tonnes. These pesticide stockpiles are unwanted and obsolete and some are already banned in many countries of the world due to their hazardous threat to the environment, human health, animals and plants. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) compiled an inventory of obsolete stockpiles for 45 countries in Africa. The stockpiles estimated to exist in Africa was totalled at 20,000 tonnes, but more stockpiles have since been declared. This includes heavily contaminated soil and empty and contaminated pesticide containers, so the current total stands at nearly 50,000 tonnes and is likely to increase much above this total. These substances are produced and exported by the 11 most powerful multinational chemical companies who dominate 90% of the world market, namely American Cyanamid, BASF, Bayer, Ciba-Geigy, DowElanco, DuPont, Monsanto, Rhône-Poulenc, Sandoz, Zeneca, and AgrEVO.

Taken from here

toxic waste dumping

The Scottish newspaper, The Herald, exposes the scandal of "re-cycling" , a cover for tens of thousands of tonnes of toxic waste from Scotland are being illegally dumped in Africa.

Mountains of broken televisions, defunct microwaves, worn tyres, contaminated paper and other waste exported from Scottish homes and businesses end up threatening the environment and endangering the health of people in Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana and elsewhere. Much of the wastes contained hazardous chemicals and metals which needed to be properly disposed of. But in developing countries, they were just dumped or burned, causing dangerous contamination. The exports are “dressed” as legitimate recycling operations, with waste electrical goods hidden behind a few rows of properly packaged and working TVs in shipping containers.Recent changes like the switch from analogue to digital displays and flat screens had created a “tsunami" of old TVs and computer monitors flooding ports in Ghana and Nigeria, . There they are often recycled in primitive and environmentally damaging conditions or simply dumped or burned if there is no market for it.

More than 100,000 tonnes of old TVs, computers, microwaves, fridges and other electrical goods are reckoned to be thrown away every year in Scotland. European Commission estimates suggest maybe half of that is unaccounted for. The huge trade in illegal waste has been condemned by environmental groups.
Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: “We are adding insult to injury by dumping our contaminated and toxic waste back in the very countries, like Nigeria, that have already been scarred so deeply by our thirst for cheap oil and resources.”

legal vultures

Socialist Banner has previously reported on the Ivory Coast environmental disaster caused by the company Trafigura. Many of the victims managed to gain a share of £30million compensation for the health affects by the illegal dumping of toxic waste.

But it seems that the multimnational were not the only sharks . The lawyers ,Leigh Day and Co, who represented more than 30,000 victims , poor , uneducated citizens of the Cote d' Ivoire have claimed 105 million pounds legal costs including a £50 million success fee , £20 million more than the compensation reward. Not just that but they have failed to ensure that all the claimants received the money . Only 12,250 of them had cashed their cheques.

Civil litigation experts said that the costs were unusually high. "£105m is a very high figure – I don't think I've ever heard a higher one in over 25 years of practice," said David Greene, head of litigation at law firm Edwin Coe.

Criminal Capitalism

A British oil trading giant has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades.
Trafigura, a London-based company which bills itself as one of the world's largest oil traders, said it was in talks to reach a "global settlement" to the claim by 30,000 people from Ivory Coast, who brought Britain's largest-ever lawsuit after contaminated sludge from a tanker ship was fly-tipped under cover of darkness in August 2006.
The incident caused at least 100,000 residents from the west African country's most populous city, Abidjan, to flood into hospitals and clinics complaining of breathing difficulties and sickness. Investigations by the Ivorian authorities suggested that the deaths of at least 10 people were linked to the waste.

Trafigura struck a series of bargains on the international markets in 2005 and early 2006 to buy cheap and dirty petroleum, called coker gasoline, which the company believed could then be cleaned up at profit of £4m per cargo.Rather than send the oil to a refinery, Trafigura used the Probo Koala, a Panamanian tanker chartered by the company since 2004, as a floating processing plant while it was anchored off Gibraltar. "This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars."
Using an ad hoc process of adding caustic soda and a catalyst to the coker gasoline, the oil was "cleaned" to produce a sellable fuel and a toxic sludge which sank to the bottom of the ship's tanks. "This operation is no longer allowed in the European Union, the United States and Singapore" it is "banned in most countries due to the 'hazardous nature of the waste'", one e-mail warns.

Problems began for Trafigura when it needed to dispose of the slurry. When the Probo Koala arrived in Amsterdam in July 2006 and tried to unload the contaminated slops, allegedly described as "watery cleaning liquids", the process caused a health alert and Trafigura was informed the cost of dealing with its by-product would rise from £17 per cubic metre to £80.Rather than pay the estimated bill of £500,000, Trafigura ordered the waste to be pumped back on to the Probo Koala and the vessel travelled to west Africa where in Ivory Coast fleet of 12 trucks hired by a local waste contractor, Compagnie Tommy, which had only received its operating licence weeks earlier, offloaded the sulphurous sludge from the cargo vessel and deposited the waste at 18 locations around Abidjan .

A United Nations report found that "there seems to be strong prima facie evidence that the reported deaths and adverse health consequences are related to the dumping".

Trafigura repeatedly deployed one of Britain's most aggressive firms of lawyers to dispute reporting on the case by media outlets including the BBC. Trafigura, a privately-owned multinational last year claimed a turnover of $73bn (£44bn). The figure is double the entire GDP of Ivory Coast, where half the population of 21 million live on less than a dollar a day.

Poisoning Africa

In August 2006 a local company hastily fly-tipped truckload after truckload of chemical waste at around 15 locations around the city.

Trafigura had chartered the ship carrying the waste, which unloaded the waste in Ivory Coast, after a failure to agree deals to get it treated in the Netherlands and Nigeria.It said it had contracted a local firm, Tommy, to handle the waste in good faith.

In an out-of-court settlement, Trafigura agreed to pay the Ivorian government around $200m (£100m) in one of the largest ever payments of its kind.

Thousands of victims say they have yet to receive compensation - or say that what they have been given - around $500 (£250) in the main injury category - falls short of the amount they have lost in medical bills and earnings.

Trafigura also disputes whether the chemical slops were the cause of the large number of medical cases.

The United Nations says the dumping of the 500m tonnes of waste led to at least 16 deaths and more than 100,000 other victims needing medical treatment.

Two years on it is still here.

The UN special rapporteur on the dumping of toxic waste, Professor Okechukwu Ibeanu, recently spent four days in the country speaking to officials and victims.

"After almost two years, these sites have still not been decontaminated and continue to threaten the lives and health of tens of thousands of residents, across different social spectrums in Abidjan.The government has informed me that it does not have the technical capacity to clean up and decontaminate the dumpsites in a timelier manner," he said in a statement."This should be an absolute priority."

Poisoning the Poor

Greenpeace is calling for an end to what it calls "poisoning the poor". It wants electronics manufacturers to stop using hazardous materials and to take responsibility for the whole lifecycle of their products.

In Ghana the piles of old computers are increasing every week even though the trade is illegal.

As we upgrade at an ever faster rate, campaigners are calling for action to prevent toxic, electronic or "e" waste being dumped on poor countries.

The United Nations believes we generate between 20m and 50m tonnes of e-waste around the world each year. Agbobloshie dump site in Ghana's capital, Accra, is a computer graveyard. But PCs are not given a decent, safe burial - they are dumped on this expanding, toxic treasure trove. Many of the well-known brands are there: Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Philips, Canon, Hewlett Packard.

Environmental campaign group Greenpeace took soil and water samples from the scrap market and found high concentrations of leads, phthalates or plastic softeners and dioxins that are known to promote cancer.

"Chemicals like lead are very dangerous especially for children. They affect the brain when it is developing and therefore cause a lower IQ when they grow up," Greenpeace's Kim Schoppink says."Other chemicals we found cause cancer or disrupt your hormone system."

There are international laws banning the export of computer waste but people are getting round this by labelling the shipments "usable second-hand goods".

"My research shows that about 90% of the computers are just junk. They just don't work. This is dumping."

what price platinum?

From the BBC

Mining giant Anglo American courts prime ministers and presidents, keen to be seen as leading the way in corporate responsibility. But there are concerns that people are being forced off their land as the world's third largest mining operation seeks huge profits from the increasing world demand for platinum.

The global drive for clean air is driving the market in platinum which is used to produce catalytic converters. Nearly 90% of the world's platinum reserves are in southern Africa with Anglo American's mines proving to be highly productive and profitable. It makes the company a major player in the South African economy paying nearly £1bn in tax to the government. Nearly 20,000 South Africans have been displaced by mining giant Anglo American in its search for platinum, a BBC File on 4 investigation has found.

This platinum rush has seen a new wave of mines with deep pit mining abandoned and massive open casts mines coming on stream. But thousands of villagers have had to move from their ancestral lands - relocated to purpose built townships financed by Anglo American's subsidiary Anglo Platinum which offers compensation and new land. Not everyone was happy to leave. Villagers who have resisted claim they have been shot with rubber bullets by the police.

Villager Rose Thlarera told File On 4: "I worked my arse off working for these people - for white people - and cleaning their houses. I'm not going to move just because they come and tell me - force me to go - I can't do that. I believe I have also got rights" Rose said . "What the mine is doing to us is worse than the apartheid era - during apartheid we had our water and electricity but we didn't have the mine amongst us." She added: "They are forcing us out - they don't care how they are getting their platinum."

With no water the remaining villagers rely on a seep dug next to a stream, "We don't think it is clean - it is not healthy any more," said Rose.

They fear the water is polluted with chemicals from the nearby mine and Abel said he was hospitalised for three weeks with a stomach ailment and breathlessness. Last October an independent analysis, commissioned by the charity Action Aid , of water at 10 sites near Anglo Platinum mines in the Limpopo Province found water unfit for human consumption. The analysis by environmental chemist Carin Bosman found it contained high concentrations of salts, particularly nitrates, which could cause stomach cancer and sometimes a fatal blood disorder - one of its symptoms is breathlessness. Her analysis at one village Ga-Molekane, found the village water supply has extremely high levels of nitrates and bacteriological contamination. Ms Bosman said she is certain a waste reservoir next to the mine is responsible for the contamination.

An Action Aid report also accuses the company of exploiting those forced to leave their land.
"People need to be given fair amounts of compensation, they need to be asked whether they want to be moved or not in these mining processes of mining and they should be compensated adequately for that," said its author Mark Curtis.

Anglo Platinum has also been criticised over safety standards - on average, around 20 people a year are killed whilst working in its mines.

The question is what price platinum and who ultimately has to pay that price ?

Zambian Polluters

At least 13 people in northern Zambia have been admitted to hospital after drinking water alleged to have been contaminated by a nearby mine . Those admitted to hospital in Mufulira were suffering from abdominal pains and vomiting .

Officials from Mufulira, who visited the site, claim acidic effluents from Mopani Copper Mines accidentally entered the water supply on Wednesday. Mufulira residents, who number about 800,000, are afraid to drink tap water. They are collecting water from shallow wells or nearby streams. Farmers fear their crops planted near the Kafue River will be affected. There was a near riot in Mufulira yesterday following water contamination , some people had mobilised themselves and attempted to march to the civic centre and Mulonga Water and Sewerage Company offices, but police were deployed in strategic areas .


This , of course is no isolated incident . Mr Mwandila , Mufulira Town Clerk , said this is the second incident experienced in Mufulira, with the first one having happened in 2005. A similar water contamination affected nearby Chingola in 2006. Also a US-based environmental charity , The Blacksmith Institute has stated that the Kabwe in Zambia, site for mining and smelting of metals was one of the most polluted regions in the world . The pressure group War on Want has also in the past accused the Konkola Copper Mines of negligence leading to toxic leaks.

As per usual , workers health is never a priority when it comes to prevention of pollution or profits .