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by Hemant Babu, India Abroad News Service

The Ministry of Environment has recently allowed placing zinc ash, which is treated the world over as an environmentally hazardous industrial substance, under the open general licence (OGL) of imports.

According to experts the decision clearly violates the Supreme Court's order of May 1997 banning the import of hazardous wastes. The decision also bypasses the process set up by the Supreme Court empowering a committee headed by former federal minister M.G.K.Menon to look into all aspects of hazardous waste generation, imports and disposal.

According to sources in the industry, the government was under pressure from the small scale industrial units who use zinc ash to extract zinc. It was around the 1980s when the Indian government had encouraged small entrepreneurs to set up units to extract zinc. However, the import of hazardous wastes was banned by Supreme Court in 1997 making it difficult for these small scale units to procure zinc ash.

The Supreme Court had imposed a ban on import of hazardous industrial wastes after the global environmental pressure group, Greenpeace International had exposed toxic zinc ash in German exports to Bhopal based Bharat Zink in September 1995. At the factory the conditions of processing and disposal were found to be abysmal.

Prior to the Supreme Court ban on imports of hazardous wastes including zinc ash, was under the restricted list and permissions to import were to be given on a case-by-case basis. Industry sources say that zinc ash is not necessarily hazardous but it cannot be characterised as non-hazardous either.

Analyses then performed by Greenpeace on German zinc ash found the waste to be contaminated with 43.21 grams/kilogram of lead and 26.1 grams/kilogram of cadmium. Both lead and cadmium have no known biological function and are potent toxins, particularly for children.

The term zinc ash refers to the substance that is formed as a skim on top of a molten zinc bath when the molten zinc reacts with air. It is a mixture of zinc-bearing residuals typically ladled/skimmed (hot) from the top of a galvanising bath. The ash will often comprise varying amounts of metallic zinc, zinc and lead oxides, and to a lesser extent, spent flux along with other generally inert contaminants. Up to 90 % of the fluidizing agent ends up in the zinc ash.

The International Basel Convention has described Zinc ash as a waste, which may not always be hazardous. But several characteristics make it very likely to be hazardous. Australia and the European Union deem zinc ash as hazardous until proven otherwise.

A Greenpeace campaigner, Nityanand Jairaman, says "Environmentally sound hazardous waste reprocessing is a myth. Otherwise the Western countries would have treated it themselves rather than pulling strings to have it dumped in the developing countries, he added.

He alleged that even after the Supreme Court ban there were as many as 140 cases of illegal imports of various form of toxic wastes. He pointed out that the European Union has banned since 1 January 1998 all exports of any material that is a part of the red and amber list of hazardous wastes as categorised by the Basel Convention.

Analyses of several zinc ash samples over the last three years have vindicated the stand of environmental groups that the zinc ash that is shipped to developing countries more often than not tends to be significantly contaminated with lead, cadmium and sometimes organohalogen compounds, Jairaman says.