Dumped!

WHY DO WE BUY THE WORLD’S TRASH?

If something’s rotten in the State of Denmark, some Indian companies are willing to import it and dump most of it here. PC VINOJ KUMAR tracks the stink

Bad Goods Customs and port officials in front of a massive consignment of trash

POLEPETTAI LIES on the outskirts of the port town of Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu, about 600 km south of Chennai. Famous for its salt industries, VVD brand coconut oil and macaroons (cashew-based cookies), Tuticorin port is now emerging as a major entry point for a particularly distinct global commodity – trash.

In September, customs at Tuticorin port detained nine containers of hazardous waste with a combined weight of 195 metric tonnes from Spain, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. A container imported by one Excel Trading Corporation from a Malaysian firm contained around 20 metric tonnes of waste, including used condoms and surgical gloves.

Excel, a manufacturer of reclaimed rubber used in making PVC doors and rubber spare parts said that they had only ordered a ‘rejected latex gloves stocklet’ worth Rs 2.87 lakhs for recycling. Excel was fined Rs 1.25 lakhs for ‘mis-declaring the goods’ and directed to return the consignment at its cost. But is Excel innocent? At Polepettai, it has a distinctive reputation. It’s known as “the company that deals in used condoms”. “You can find them strewn all over their premises. The stench is unbearable,” warns a local, providing us directions to their office.

And find them we do, telltale signs of the company’s ‘recycling’ activities: Packets of Lifestyles brand condoms — ‘ultra excitants,’ ‘flavoured’ and ‘dual pleasure’ — made by US company Ansell Healthcare Products. Thangadurai, a local living nearby says the company burnt most of its stock last month – roughly when its consignment was seized at Tuticorin port.

Of the other eight containers, four were imported by Tuticorin-based Harbour Petrochem Industries (HPI), which has a permit to recycle items such as PET bottles and PVC products. However, the containers had about 72.59 metric tonnes of waste that included oil cans, metal waste and other waste soaked with oil, dirt and grit. While HPI’s unit is into waste plastic grinding and packing, “The container had things that the company was not equipped to handle,” says additional commissioner of customs at Tuticorin port, S Chandramohan.

Ironically, HPI imported the waste from Nesma Recycling Company, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. That raw waste from a recycling company in Saudi Arabia finds its way to India is one more indication of how India has emerged the world’s waste basket. The other four containers were from Spain and also had waste – shredded carry bags and waste plastic pieces.

This is not the first time that containers full of waste have been seized in Tuticorin. In September 2005, 40 containers with a weight of about 1,007 metric tonnes of “mixed waste paper” were confiscated. Imported by ITC, Secunderabad from the US, they were found to be heavily contaminated with municipal solid waste (waste collected by a municipality, most of which is generated by households). ITC was compelled by a court order to send the containers back to the US in July.

Chandramohan says the Director General of Foreign Trade issued a circular in 2008 which stated that imported waste paper should be free from hazardous waste such as municipal waste and bio-medical waste.

Samples recovered from Excel’s recycling facility in Polepettai

ACTIVISTS FEEL the recent seizures are just a tip of the iceberg and that larger volumes of waste might be entering the country unnoticed. “Hazardous waste is entering the country in large volumes because the government permits the import of waste for recycling. Because of this, India has become the world’s dumping yard,” says A Sankar, a Tuticorin-based environmental activist.

According to an estimate, India imported around 16.8 lakh tonnes of ‘waste paper’ in 2005-2006, valued at about $290 million. However, environmental activists say that much of the socalled recyclable waste that is imported is trash and ends up in Indian dumps, landfills and sometimes, even farmlands. In September last year, environmental activist Nityanand Jayaraman discovered that ITC’s paper factory in Coimbatore had dumped hundreds of tonnes of municipal solid waste — household garbage, in other words — from the UK into agricultural wells in the area. “These paper factories import only ‘low level sorted’ waste since that is cheap. However, usually only about twenty percent of such waste can be reclaimed or recycled. The rest is trash and is dumped,” says Nityanand. Given the millions of tonnes of ‘waste paper’ entering the country each year, if this is the ratio of recyclable to non-recyclable items in imported waste, this could mean that India, a country with enough waste of its own, could be importing a truly colossal amount of non-recyclable waste from other countries. According to details in TEHELKA’s possession, the top five importers of paper waste at the Tuticorin port account for about 2 lakh metric tonnes annually. ITC, Kolkata alone imported about 1 lakh metric tonnes of paper waste through this port in the period between 2007-2009.

In the case of the nine containers seized in September, the PCB gave the opinion that they were unfit for import.

Over and above the imported waste — including hazardous waste — is the estimated 60 lakh tonnes of hazardous waste produced in India by nearly 30,000 industries. The Indian government has ignored strong protests from environmental activists against the import of waste. Recently, the ministry of environment and forests granted permission for a recycling plant in Roorkie to import 8,000 metric tonnes of hazardous e-waste (obsolete and discarded IT products) from UK and USA.

Environmentalists fear that this policy would open the floodgates of e-waste dumping into India. “India generates nearly 4 lakh metric tonnes of e-waste. When we are finding it difficult to dispose of our own waste, why import more from foreign countries?” wonders Priti Mahesh, senior programme officer at the New Delhi based environmental group Toxics Link. This is the question every environmentally conscious Indian is asking the government. But the government is pretending to be deaf — to our own collective peril.

WRITER’S EMAIL
vinoj@tehelka.com