By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Early in March a parliamentary deputy from Orenburg province in the southern Urals contacted Greenpeace Russia with alarming news.
Shunted up a side track just outside the town of Svetly were 16 open-topped railway wagons. They contained 1000 tons of non-ferrous metal residues, packed in large bags. Some of these bags were torn, and all were covered with snow. Unless the load were appropriately repacked before the spring thaw set in around the end of March, residues would leak out and into the surrounding vegetable gardens and ponds.
Greenpeace investigated and found that the wastes originated in France and had been sent to Russia via Rotterdam by the Israeli-registered firm Stinwe Handelsvem. There was a contract with the Russian firm Yuzhuralnikel for reprocessing of what were declared to be industrial residues containing nickel and cobalt.
Yuzhuralnikel discovered, however, that as well as nickel and cobalt, the shipment contained heavy concentrations of highly poisonous cadmium and thallium, plus selenium, germanium, arsenic and lead. It refused to accept delivery.
The shipment is now supposed to be sent back. Stinwe Handelsvem, however, has delayed undertaking to accept the wastes, trying to find another plant in Russia prepared to process them. Until the supplier agrees officially to take the residues back, the railways will not ship them, and the port of Rotterdam will not handle them.
Greenpeace Russia activist Oganes Targulian notes, "One can count the days until spring comes to the Orenburg region, and when these wastes start leaking, it will be terrifying".
The trainload of wastes has become a major scandal in France, partly because this is one of the first cases in which hazardous wastes from France have been shown conclusively to have been shipped to a non-OECD country. In Russia, the case has received only brief mention in one Moscow daily newspaper — mainly because of the heat it has generated in the West.
The alarming fact is that the shipping of dangerous wastes here has become so commonplace that it barely attracts notice. A Greenpeace study lists 96 proposals or attempts to export hazardous wastes to Russia from Western Europe between 1987 and November 1993. By March, another 17 schemes had been documented. In 13 cases since 1987 the proposals have involved setting up waste incinerators or "reprocessing" facilities.
Around 50% of these schemes, and no less than 80% of the wastes involved, have been linked to German firms. US corporations also figure heavily, and other culprits are from virtually all the countries of Western Europe.
Greenpeace has evidence of 4000 tonnes of dangerous wastes, including radioactive materials, that were transported to Russia in the period to last November. The organisation considers, however, that this quantity was "merely the summit of the mountain of wastes that are more and more regularly being brought onto Russian territory".
Greenpeace is especially concerned at the proliferation of "reprocessing" schemes. "Reprocessing" is often little more than a cover for dumping hazardous materials. Even where there is a real effort to extract useful materials, the Russian plants involved are often heavy polluters.
For Russian enterprises, the temptation to collaborate in the dumping of hazardous wastes can be enormous. Many firms are close to bankruptcy, and the prompt payments in hard currency offered by the waste peddlers may spell the difference between survival and collapse.
Even where firms are perfectly solvent, their managers are all too often prepared to bid for the dollars and deutschmarks of the poison merchants. As Greenpeace notes, a major problem is "the predominance among the 'new' entrepreneurs of a mentality that could be summed up in the phrase 'Grab everything you can while the going's good'." The fact that Russia lacks effective legal sanctions against the traffic in hazardous waste makes joining in the trade that much easier.
"Russia must adopt a strict law as soon as possible", Oganes Targulian argues. "There is a need for a national waste import ban, of the type already adopted by neighbouring countries."