space Press Releases, News Stories

by Robert McClure, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

SEATTLE, U.S.A, 23 July 1999 -- An unusual coalition of Tacoma dockworkers, environmentalists and a federal agency has stopped the first in a series of shipments of potentially hazardous waste bound from Taiwan through Tacoma to an Idaho landfill.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union No. 23 in Tacoma said this week its workers might refuse to unload the material once it arrived at the Port of Tacoma because they were uneasy about the material's potential toxicity.

The incident highlights a U.S. policy allowing the importation of foreign waste that is drawing criticism from environmental groups as the U.S. Congress prepares to deal with the issue.

The waste in question this week was illegally dumped last year in Cambodia, where its presence eventually ignited a panic that killed several people. Shipped back to Taiwan, the waste has languished for months at the Port of Kaohsiung.

This week, though, a small portion of it was loaded aboard the vessel Astoria Bridge. Environmentalists, alerted by a Taiwanese reporter that the waste was aboard, turned to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for help.

Union officials contacted a stevedore company, which went to the local agents for the shipping company. The shipping company, K-Lines America, ordered the material taken off the ship, said Scott Mason, business agent for the union. Yesterday, the ship sailed for Puget Sound and the Port of Tacoma -- without the waste.

Mason said the union implied that, in a worst-case situation, the longshoremen might have refused to unload the material.

"We could have had a garbage-barge situation here," Mason said, referring to the ship load of trash that was transported up and down the East Coast in the late 1980s, while its owners searched for a place to dump the load.

The regional office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Seattle also had requested that the shipment be stopped. The agency's requests went to Envirosafe Services of Idaho Inc.,based in Grand View, Idaho, near Boise, which operates a hazardous-waste landfill and treatment facility, where some of the waste was destined.

Environmentalists say the foreign waste illustrates how U.S. policy allows importation of hazardous waste.  

The EPA acknowledges that it has no power to stop toxic material coming over the borders, so long it meets requirements that U.S. companies have to satisfy for safe transportation and disposal.

"It doesn't matter if it's from Tukwila, Toledo or Taiwan, the company is on the hook for proving they are capable of handling the waste," EPA spokesman Bill Dunbar said.

"There's nothing that prevents U.S. (waste) companies from importing waste that is consistent with (U.S. law) . . . since there is no difference between foreign waste and domestic waste,"

Dunbar said. "The EPA's concern, as well as the environmentalists' concern, has been, 'what is in this waste?'

"We've had some trouble getting to the bottom of that."

Envirosafe told the EPA that the only material in this first shipment would be a load of triple-rinsed, 55-gallon drums that briefly housed the waste after it was illegally dumped in Cambodia.

The company said it would not even qualify as hazardous waste under U.S. law, said Mike Bussell, director of the EPA's office of waste and chemicals management in Seattle.

"We find that kind of a reach," said Mason, of the longshoremen's union. "If there is nothing wrong with those containers, why do they have to go to a hazardous waste landfill in Idaho?"

The trail of the waste begins at a Taiwanese plant, Formosa Plastics Corporation, an international petrochemical company that manufactures polyvinyl chloride pipe.

Because of the antiquated process the company uses to produce chlorine, an ingredient in PVC, it ended up with thousands of tons of a white, chalky, cakelike substance that contains mercury and other toxic wastes, said Bussell of the EPA.

"From what we know this far, there is nothing in there that would present any imminent danger to human health or the environment," Bussell said.

Last year, Formosa Plastics hired another company to dispose of the waste.

It ended up dumped in an open field near the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville.

A dockworker who handled the material died after suffering convulsions, according to unconfirmed reports. A young man who rooted through the wastes showed similar symptoms, but doctors did not conclusively trace his illness to the waste, said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, a group that monitors international trade in hazardous waste.

News reports of what followed show that riots broke out when people in Sihanoukville learned of the dumping, storming the offices of local officials they blamed for allowing the waste in the country. One person was killed in the melee.

Then, when heavy rains started,more than 10,000 Sihanoukville residents panicked and made a mad dash out of town in an exodus that killed four more people in traffic accidents, news agencies reported.

Chastened and under severe diplomatic pressure from Cambodia, Formosa Plastics agreed to take the material back. And there it sits near the docks of Kaohsiung, 357 containers of the white, chalky waste, along with crushed drums and other materials scooped up from the dump site in southern Cambodia.

Puckett, of the Basel Action Network, is angry that local EPA officials did not inform environmentalists and the longshoremen about the supposedly non-hazardous waste on the way to Tacoma.

Bussell, of the EPA, said he also was surprised to learn Envirosafe was going ahead with the importation of the crushed drums that Envirosafe considers non-hazardous, given the sensitivity of the situation.

The larger issue is whether the EPA will allow the far larger portion of the waste load, which is almost certainly toxic, into the country. Normally the EPA does not have to make such decisions.

But in this case, Taiwanese officials, smarting from the Cambodia debacle, are refusing to allow shipment without preapproval by U.S. authorities.

In addition to Envirosafe of Idaho, two other companies are vying for the contract to handle the waste: Nevada-based U.S. Ecology and Texas-based Waste Control Specialists. The transporter was to be Onyx Environmental Services, a British company with 49 percent ownership by Waste Management Inc.

Later this year, Congress is expected to reconsider U.S. waste-importation regulations as it ratifies the Basel Convention, a 10-year-old international treaty on hazardous-waste transport.

"We should not be importing toxic waste," said Puckett of the Basel Action Network.