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Published by REUTERS

"While there is a large support for the Basel Ban throughout the international community, there are still a few free-trade zealots, such as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Canada, who seek to weaken the decision so it merely becomes a paper tiger," Greenpeace representative Kevin Stairs said.

His statement added that Greenpeace had documented hundreds of cases involving millions of tonnes of hazardous waste that was on offer "in all regions on the planet."

The Basle Convention on the control of trans-boundary hazardous waste and its disposal is supported by more than 100 countries.

It was developed under the auspices of the United Nations and has been in force since May 1992. The Basle Ban, an extension of the convention, came into effect on January 1 this year.

The fourth Basle Convention conference, which aims to reduce toxic waste movement to a minimum, began on Monday in Kuching, in the east Malaysian state of Sarawak, on Borneo island.

The conference was attended by around 300 mostly government officials and environmental activists from over 100 countries.

Greenpeace officials said rich countries, or those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), wanted to list developing nations under a charter called "Annex 7" as a way around the dumping ban and to enable them to receive hazardous waste.

"We don't want any countries to enter the Annex 7...we don't want any criteria for entries to be discussed," Nityanand Jayaraman, Greenpeace's spokesman for India, told Reuters.

Jayaraman did not give the full list of countries already identified under the Annex 7 but said Israel, Monaco and Slovenia were among those who had "offered" to come under the listing to receive toxic waste. Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network, said official representatives from the Netherlands, Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel and the U.S. were pushing Annex 7 in order to weaken the Basle Ban. Jayaraman added that the world's largest source of toxic waste was the United States, which had signed the Basle Convention but had failed to ratify it.

He said latest statistics available on global toxic waste generation dated back to 1990, when the United Nations estimated that about 400 million tonnes was being created annually.

"Now the figure is much, much higher. This is because day to day, there are more things that are hazardous," he said.