space Press Releases, News Stories

FIRM STOPS GREENPEACE INSPECTION IN PHILIPPINES

by Carlito Pablo, Philippine Daily Inquirer

CEBU CITY, Philippines, 10 May 1999 -- A scion of the Aboitiz family and his Japanese partners barred Greenpeace activists Friday from inspecting a shipbreaking plant reportedly polluting Tanon Strait, a body of water separating the islands of Cebu and Negros.

"Let the chips fall where they may," declared Andoni Aboitiz at the end of a one-hour negotiation with officials of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), who invited Greenpeace to observe the inspection of the shipbreaking facility in Balamban town.

Aboitiz is the president of the Cebu Industrial Park Developers Inc. which hosts the Kambara and Aboitiz Metal Industries Inc., a shipbuilding facility of the Tsuneishi Group of Japan.

"We were sent here by (Environment) Secretary (Antonio) Cerilles with explicit instructions to solve this problem once and for all," Peter Anthony Abaya, director of the Environmental Management Bureau told company officials but to no avail.

K&A Metal Industries has been the subject of a complaint filed with the Geneva-based secretariat of the Basel Convention, an international agreement on the transboundary movement of toxic and hazardous wastes.

The DENR inspection was in response to the request of the Basel Convention Secretariat. Since 1994, the K&A Metal Industries has been breaking old Japanese ships , which environmentalists describe as "floating toxic coffins." Steel recovered from the ships are reprocessed for teh shipyard.

The DENR Central Visayas office said data from K&A Metal Industries covering the last quarter of 1998 contained "some disturbing figures". In a letter to the firm, Central Visayas technical director Allan Arranguez noted that levels of heavy metals found in the coastal waters of Balamban were "alarmingly high".

Cadmium and lead levels in the coastal water samples showed 2,400 percent and 1,700 percent over the standard respectively, Arranguez said in his letter.

In response, a company letter dated April 8 attributed the contamination to the tailings of Atlas Consolidated, a mining firm which stopped operations five years ago.

K&A Metal Industries also said that water samples taken from Tanon Strait during the first quarter of the year showed favorable results.

Greenpeace member Marcelo Furtado, a Brazilian chemical engineer, said his group went to the shipbreaking plant to offer information and exchange views. "The company is so wimp they don't even want to talk to us," Furtado said. "They are definitely doing something wrong."

Von Hernandez, who oversees the Greenpeace campaign against toxic wastes in Asia, said the firm's refusal to allow independent observers to monitor the government's inspection was proof that it was hiding something. "If they're confident that they are doing things right, why not allow us in," Hernandez said.

No Japanese ship for breaking, however, was present during the DENR inspection. The company grounds were obviously levelled by earthmoving equipment. Water samples from the strait and drainage canals, asbestos and ash from the K&A furnace, which served as burner for wastes were taken by EMB technical people.

In plain sight were hills of rusting metal and loads of thick, used oil. Company officials, however, aree quick to point to a school of "dilis" at the shore. K&A metal Industries president Hitoshi Kono casually told DENR officials that he had thought that asbestos, a cancer-causing substance, could be simply disposed of by burying it. This is a banned procedure.

More than a ton of asbestos was stored in a metal shed although there could have been more from the ships already taken in before by K&A Metal Industries Inc.

Old ships usually contain asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), lead, tributyl tin (TBT), triphenyl tin (TPT) and other hazardous wastes.

The Senate is set to open an inquiry into the purported dumping into the country of these "toxic floating coffins."

"We'll deal with that later," Aboitiz said when told that senators along with local and foreign environmentalists, may inspect the facility.

FAIR USE NOTICE. This document contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The Basel Action Network is making this article available in our efforts to advance understanding of ecological sustainability and environmental justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a `fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond `fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
More News