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by DAVID NELSON

Asia's high population density and often tropical climate put it especially at risk for contamination. But while regulations have increased, enforcement is inadequate and often undermined by corruption. Asian governments seem to believe that cleanup can come after economic development.

When the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest, is completed in China, it will flood more than 1,600 major manufacturing facilities along the Yangtze River. Many sites are saturated with hazardous waste, including the massive Chongquing steel mill, described at one time by the World Bank as among the 10 most dangerous industrial facilities in the world.

No environmental cleanup is planned before the area is submerged. The city of Chongquing now discharges more than 300 million tons of untreated industrial wastewater, sewage, and hazardous waste into the Yangtze River each year. What was once carried downstream will instead back up behind the dam. In the worlds of one senior environmental planner, Chongquing, now known as the "Gateway to the Three Gorges," will become the "largest toxic toilet bowl in the world."

The case of Chongquing highlights an alarming trend. Asian growth is coming at tremendous cost. Insufficient emphasis on pollution prevention means more and more hazardous waste is being produced. Chemical contamination now stains the environment of every Asian country, sickening thousands of people and killing many others. In 1995, China alone produced more than 650 million tons (half a ton per person) of hazardous waste. If it continues at this rate, China will produce more than 1 billion tons annually soon after the year 2005.

MYTHS ABOUT HAZARDOUS WASTE

Several common misconceptions about hazardous waste complicate the situation in Asia. The first is that Asia can't afford to deal with hazardous waste issues until its economies are fully developed. The experience of the United States, however, shows that it is a matter of pay now, or pay much more later.

The U.S. Superfund program, targeting abandoned sites, has resulted in enormous litigation and relatively little cleanup, making it an unworkable and unpopular model. Unfortunately, no successful model exists. The only certainty is that it is less expensive to prevent hazardous waste problems than to correct them. A few countries are trying to regulate current waste generation, but they are having decidedly mixed success.

A second popular misconception is that nature will cure the problem on its own. In tropical areas, natural organic wastes from agriculture or animals degrade rapidly when discarded into the environment. Chemical wastes are abandoned in similar fashion with the same expectations, but they have a much longer life and can exert toxic effects for generations.

This cavalier approach to disposal is evident, for example, deep in the forests of Papua New Guinea. A portable timber treatment called "CCA" (chrome, copper, arsenic) impregnates wood, preventing insect infestation. But when the doors to the pressure chambers are opened, an extremely toxic chemical soup is discharged. This bright greenish-blue residue will contaminate streams, lakes and soils for many years to come.

A third fallacy common in Asia is that western technology will provide a fix. Not only is this not true, but tragically, just the opposite is happening in some cases. Many hazardous waste technologies that have been banned in the United States are now being sold in Asia.

One Canadian businessman, for example, is selling extremely polluting medical-waste incinerators in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand that could not be legally marketed in the United States or Canada. Some companies have shamelessly printed slick brochures with the motto "U.S. EPA-Approved" although the Environmental Protection Agency neither approves nor licenses technologies. Some salesmen from the United States and Canada suggest that Asians don't need or understand state-of-the-art environmental technology. This industrial neocolonialism is unwarranted and unwelcome.

Another myth widespread in Southeast Asia is that dumping chemical waste on soils - where they can filter down to the groundwater - is acceptable because groundwater is less used than surface water. Contaminated groundwater, however, can contaminate surface water. In Malaysia, several hazardous waste dumps have polluted rivers miles away by leaching chemicals through soils. Heavy rains only spread the threat more quickly.

More temperate parts of Asia rely on groundwater. Northern China and Korea depend heavily on it for human consumption, despite extreme contamination. Studies of groundwater in some areas of China have shown levels of lead (toxic to nervous system development) at 35 times the drinking-water standards for the country.

An infamous metal-plating waste site in Shenyang, China, has adulterated the groundwater for 20 towns, causing widespread health problems as well as deaths. The plant's wastewater, laced with toxic chromium, was used to irrigate rice fields.

THE PRESSURE IS ON

Many environmental organizations in Asia focus on toxic and hazardous waste issues. While U.S. law allows public access to environmental information, many Asian countries forbid it. Data on multinational companies' environmental records are available through the Internet, but are often buried in corporate reports, shareholder resolutions, and lawsuits.

A 1996 survey of hazardous waste management indicated that virtually every Asian country has "public activism" regarding hazardous waste but just over one half "allow" public input on the issue. This tendency to shut out the public may change as citizens acquire more information via the Internet and put pressure on the authorities.

Frustrated with poor enforcement of hazardous waste laws, citizens in many countries, including Indonesia, Vietnam, China and Taiwan, have taken to eco-vigilantism. Often with the cooperation and advice of employees inside offending facilities, they have disrupted manufacturing and even closed factories. In Taiwan, such citizen action has become a regular if unorthodox enforcement mechanism. In China, in one recent case, residents dug a moat around a chemical factory alleged to have discharged its hazardous waste into surrounding farmland. The moat prevented trucks from moving in and out of the plant, and the factory was shut down.

Hazardous waste in Asia is not getting the attention it deserves. Asian leaders have a chance to make pollution prevention a cornerstone of industrial policy at an early stage of economic development, rather than playing an expensive cleanup game later, as in the West. Changing attitudes toward hazardous waste in Asia will require the political will of those at the highest level.

David Nelson is the president of Salt Lake City based EnviroSearch International, an environmental consulting firm. He is the chairman of the board of the Pacific Basin Consortium for Hazardous Waste Research and Management, whose secretariat is at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has traveled and worked extensively throughout Asia for more than 10 years and served as a consultant to many Asian governments, development agencies, and private companies. He is also an adjunct professor in the College of Medicine at the University of Utah. Contact him by email at: dnelson@ditell.com