Toxic waves flowing into life

(Photo: Ian Parker)


There is a warm paradise called Annobon 350 km off the west coast of Africa. Visitors are stunned by its valleys and steep mountains, exuberant woods and tropical beaches.

Annobon is under Ecuadorian Guinea jurisdiction, and therefore under Dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema’s control.

At a single glance the landscapes are still paradisiacal there, but the tragedy striking its 2,000 inhabitants flows underground and it is hard to trace because of the isolation imposed to the island.

It started in the 1980s, when Obiang struck a secret deal with European and US companies to dump hazardous waste. The storage of highly contaminated industrial garbage –including radioactive material- is believed to earn his government $200 million a year.

Today, according to European scientists, the island is at an ecological disaster’s door.

The trees are sick; the people are suffering hunger, anaemia, skin ulcer, and leukaemia and increasing mortality. But it is difficult to access to reliable data, since Annobon is isolated by the regime’s military and the tragedy is silenced.

Ecuadorian Guinea is one of the smallest countries in Africa, but Africa’s third largest oil producer. Its per capita income (about £26,000) is second in the world after Luxemburg’s, but the most of its 500 000 inhabitants live with less than £1 a day.

The bulk of the money is in Obiang’s and his supporter’s accounts and properties.

Watchdog Transparency International put it in the top ten of its list of corrupt states, and the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) included it in the 2006 ranking of the world’s top five “most-censored countries”.

Obiang’s oldest son is the Minister of Forestry, or Minister of Chopping Down Trees as American Press called him, and in 2006 bought a mansion in Malibu by USD 35m, the sixth highest price on America’s real state history.

While the country’s natural resources are ruined, the Obiang’s clan holds power safely, blessed by US government and labelled as “a good friend” by the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

It is the reward by the hospitable treatment to US oil firms, said the Washington Post in 2006.

American drillers such as ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco get the oil, Obiang’s clan gets the money and people from Ecuadorian Guinea just survive.

At the end, Annobon is only a tiny spot on the Atlantic.

Toxic cargo

Annobon is not the only ruined paradise.

Since the 1960’s, when hazardous waste began to travel from the highly industrialized Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries to lesser developed non-OECD nations, the trade has endured through illegal markets or cross-border smuggling in spite of international laws and efforts to tackle the trend.

Greenpeace estimates that in the twenty years before 1989 approximately 3.6 million tons of hazardous wastes were exported, but as much as 6662.6 million tons were shipped in only five years between 1989 and 1993, mainly to countries in Asia and Africa and involving companies like Aventis, BASF, Bayer, Dow AgroSciences, Dupont, Monsanto, Sumitoma and Syngenta.

The total stockpiles estimated to exist today in Africa including heavily contaminated soils and empty and contaminated pesticide containers is more than 50,000 tonnes, according to UN figures.

The bulk of it is stored in unsafe facilities or in unknown whereabouts, and a great part reached the life chain, contaminating air, soils, ground and drinking water and agricultural irrigation systems.

Environmental groups like Greenpeace believe hold that 86% to 90% of all hazardous waste shipments destined for developing countries are purported to be materials for recycling, reuse, recovery, or humanitarian uses. It is a creative way to avoid laws and controls.

Ironically, stricter environmental protection in the developed countries contributes to the spread of dangerous waste stocks in the Third World, where many governments are tempted by the profits.

In August 2006, the Probo Koala, a boat chartered by the Netherlands-based firm Trafigura, dumped hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste in Ivory Coast, killing ten and hospitalising dozens, with almost 100,000 people suffering to some degree.

European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas said then, “It is shocking that toxic waste from Europe reached the Ivory Coast, causing so much human suffering and damage to the environment, but I fear that the Probo Koala incident is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Fuel, timber and the rainforest

Amazon rainforest is known as the “lungs of the world” and home to up to 30 percent of the world’s animal and plant species, but also as home to many of the much talk of environmental scandals in the last years.

Later this year is expected the end of the case involving Chevron in a US court, after 80 communities and five indigenous groups from Ecuadorian Amazon accused the company of contaminating the environment where they have lived for centuries.

They allege that Chevron carved close to 1,000 open-air waste pits out of the jungle floor and filled them with toxic-laden oil sludge that seeped in the soil and groundwater.

The company would have also dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste water into rainforest waterways from 1964 to 1990.

“Chevron created an environmental catastrophe in Ecuador and as a result thousands of vulnerable rainforest residents are suffering from dangerous toxic pollution,” said Luis Yanza, a representative of claimants.

Amazon is also under threat in Peruvian territory.

According to Amazon Watch, the proportion of the rainforest zoned into hydrocarbon blocks in Peru has risen from 13 percent to roughly 70 percent in the last two years, despite the widespread toxic contamination and negative social impacts left by previous oil companies, such as Occidental Petroleum, Hunt Oil and Pluspetrol in the area.

In recent decades, forced contact of isolated communities in Peru has resulted in disasters.

The Yora de Kugapakori tribe was forcibly contacted in 1984 by illegal loggers using roads built for Shell Oil’s operations. Human rights groups estimate that as a result more than 42% of the Yora population died from respiratory diseases for which they had no immunological defences.

Oil concessions and uncontrolled farming and resulting fires in Amazon are jeopardizing the ecosystem’s balance in the world’s biggest tropical forest, where deforestation rates increased in the last months after a three-year declining, as reported by Brazil’s National Space Research Agency.

Rainforest’s health is also at stake in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Greenpeace last year accused Uniliver, Nestlé, Procter and Gamble and other multinational of destroying the forest to expand palm oil plantations.

Palm oil is found in one in 10 food products available in supermarkets, including chocolate, bread, crisps, detergents and lipsticks, and the increasing demand is boosting the pressure over the Indonesian forest.

In spite of the alarm, a Friends of the Earth survey last year showed that 84% of UK companies do not know where their palm oil comes from.

Cooking the climate, a report by Greenpeace, showed that companies are planning to expand the palm oil plantations in Indonesia in sight of the biofuel boom.

In Riau province, Sumatra Island, the project would affect peat bogs and could unleash into the atmosphere more than 14,000m tons of carbon, which equals the total of worldwide greenhouse emissions in a year.

The timber trade and illegal logging are also contributing to deforestation at a large extent, and the recipients are often the most unexpected places.

In the UK, Greenpeace reported that wood of endangered species from African and Amazon rainforests was used during the early 2000s in renovation works at the Queens Gallery in Buckingham Palace, the Cabinet Office building in Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament.

Electronic waste

Analysts considerer that Microsoft Vista operating system launch in 2006 meant that almost 10m computers were discarded in the UK alone, overloading the recycling business, already struggling to cope with Europeans regulations that banned dumping PCs in landfill sites and made producers and importers of electronic goods responsible for the recycling of their products.

Electronic waste, including PCs, games consoles, microwaves, mobile phones and other digital gadgets and washing machines, is today the fastest-growing form of rubbish in the developed world.

The computers market combines a series of polluting sources, such as the short life of equipment (average for PCs is three to five years), quick changing technology and lack of standardization among manufacturers.

The resulting massive discards of electronic equipment totals 50m tons a year worldwide, according to the UN Environment Programme, and switchover to digital high-definition TV is providing a huge contribution.

Africa and Asia are the main destinations for that waste, which contains toxics like lead and mercury and other persistent organic pollutants.

So far, the electronic industry has bet on permanent change and sale, but in this area as well as in others it is time to change a system based on built in immediate obsolescence and compulsive consumption for another based in sustainability and global responsibility.

At the end, Annobon is a tiny spot on the Atlantic, indeed, but certainly toxic chemicals in the subterranean waters eventually reach the ocean. At that point, no one is safe.

-If you were to analyse the fat in your own body, you would be likely to find harmful chemicals such as brominated flame retardants, DDT, dioxins and many other persistent organic pollutants (POPs), chemicals that your body cannot get rid of, so they gradually build up over our lifetimes. POPs are even found in babies still in the womb. The production and trade of many synthetic chemicals are now widely recognised as a global threat to human health and the environment.
(Greenpeace)

-Today we know at what extent human activities contribute to the global warming: electricity (24%), manufacturing (11%), shipping (4.5%), aviation industry (2%), refineries (4%) and deforestation (20%). The US contribute the 42% of global fossil fuel CO2 and 34% of combined greenhouse gas emissions (CO2, methane and nitrous oxide).

-Producing computers requires the mining, processing, and transporting of massive quantities of raw materials — almost two tons of such stuff is required to produce the average desktop PC and monitor, according to a 2004 United Nations’ study. A single two-gram microchip produces more than 50 pounds of waste, some of it toxic. Every year, 100 million compu-ters, monitors, and TVs become obsolete in the US, and this number is growing. The 80 percent of this gear is sent to Asia and Africa. Electronic toxins include mercury (which can cause brain and kidney damage, particularly in babies and children); chromium (which can cause asthmatic bronchitis and damage the DNA); and cadmium (which can cause kidney damage and harm bones). Brominated flame retardants, which are used in computers and in TVs, have been linked to fetal damage.