Trash India
Toxic waste from rich countries is a money-spinner for recycling racketeers

MRX MADE his million transporting cargo in and out of the Kandla port in Gujarat. To make more millions he decided to import hazardous waste. There were countries ready to pay for clearing their garbage, and he set up shop in the UAE, the biggest exporter of garbage to Kandla.

Thus Mr X imported the garbage he exported from Dubai and he told the authorities that he would recycle it, do 25 per cent value-addition and re-export it. Others followed suit, reducing the Kandla Free Trade Zone to a dhobi ghat when more valuable expoets o fragmented Soviet Union became a trickle.

All waste is welcom at the dhobhi ghat: lead-acid batteries, metal scrap, cables, d-ry films, floppy discs, magnetic tapes, poluthene bags and even dirty clothes. 'Orient Clipper" anchored at Kandla on January 16 with five tonnes of "old, used clothing." Kandla gives the very best opportunity for washing rich man's dirty linen. Waste recycling is the most lucrative business today in the port town of Gandhidham, a paradise of international rag pickers. The trash traders channel the muck from filthy rich lands to the UAE and then it is destination India.

The ship 'Particia Rickmers' reached Kandla on August 2 last year with 22 tonnes of "hazardous toxic material." It was followed the next week by 'Igor Ilynisky', which too openly declared that it was carrying "hazardous material". When a ship declares its cargo as "hazardous' and 'toxic' what it actually carried is left to the imagination.

All this despite the Delhi High Court's direction to the Centre four months earlier (April 10, 1996) to stop the import of toxic waste. The last consignment of lead acid battery, which the commerce ministry listed as hazardous, reached Kandla port early this year. It was brought by 'Orient Clipper", which had three containers of battery scrap weithing 65 tonnes, besides dirty linen.

HILLOCKS of empty battery cases, separators and acid remians tower inside a battery-breaking factory in the free trade zone. There is hardly any activity, a customes officer having stopped the unloading of batteries in the zone in January this year.

Acid-burnt gloves lyingstrewn on the factory floor indicate how hazardous the imports are. And how the importer has been breaking rules. "It is dangerous to handle the battery while breaking the case," says the factory watchman from Bihar. "But now only the ash remains." It is obvious that the batteries arrived without acid being drained out. A clear violation of the Basel Convention, which allows the export of only battery cases from which acid is completely emptied.

"We don't do business directly," says the factory manager Joshi thinking that he is talking to prospective buyers of the battery shells. "We have agents in Singpore and the UK. We place the order and they supply us the material. We don't have to bother about where it comes from."'

A thousand tonnes of waste lies around the two-year-old factory-mostly batery cases it is supposed to recysle! "We have not technician or machinery to recycle them," Joshi says. "We don't need them, and I don't think that they would be of any use to you." Why then did they import the batteries? The reason is simple: to take the lead electordes, for which the 'recycling technology' required is just a curde axe blow.

Though Joshi concedes that the 'empty' batteries often contain acid the customs officials insist that only drained batteries have been allowed into Kandla. The battery shells - besides the tell-tale burnt gloves - belie them. The shells have no holes which the exporter is supposed to drill as proof that acid has been drained. Anothe factory would rather sell crushed battery cases within India than recycle and export them. "We want to sell them," says the manager, "but all inquiries should be made in Mumbai, where the owner has an office," Asked for samples, a worker fetches plastic pieces-white in one hand and black in the other.

Colour segregation is the only sorting done even in large recycling units here. The consignment is merely labelled 'plastic waste' and hardly anyone checks if they contain dangerous substances before tossing them into the granule extruder. The granules later becoms sandals, carrybags and toys. Who knows whether they contain any cancer causing radioactive material.

The customs officer who played spoilsport was new to Kandla. Intrigued by the battery dumping he asked the factoryes if everything about the import was in order. They waved no-objection certificates that the Gujarat Pollution Control Board had given them at start-up time. Unsatisfied, he asked them to get a specific certificate to import and process batteries, and stopped the unloading of the batteries this January. The factory owners rushed to the board, which then wrote to the Union environment ministry for clearance. The ministry passed the buck back saying it was for the board to decide.

"If the Centre feels eveything is okay we have no objection," says Dr. G.B. Sony fo the board, pointing out that all plastic material is being reexported with lead. "We visited the units last year and our regional officers have verified tha tnothing remians here." They obviously are blind to the vast dumps of battery cases. And few officers in Kandla and andhinagar are aware of the Delhi High Court order against the imports.

The secretary of the board, J.M. Barot, has no love lost for waste importers. They should "sell vegetables if they have no other means of livelihood," he says. Yet he justifies the board's decision to give them a onetiem clearance: "We gave the clearance because they said they had remitted foreign exchange to bring it in. They have given an undertaking that they wouldn't bring in the waste in future."

The clearance, ironically, came in the wake of a Supreme Court ultimatum on February 12. It gave the environment ministry officials six weeks to prevent factories from using or dumping banned noxious substances. Or else face punitive measures, it warned the officials. But the free trade zone is a privileged place where only three items are prohibited: animal fat/oil, animal rennet and wild animals. Customs officials say that even the commerce ministry's notification of April 1995 on hazardous wastes is not binding on free trade zones.

Under the notification one needs a licence to import any hazardous waste. And official at the direcotrate-general of foreign trade (DGFT) in Delhi reveal that no licence has been issued for importing hazardous waste. As Environment Minister Prof. Saifuddin Soz said in Parliament, hazardous wastes were placed in the restricted list in April 1995. (Till then they were in the open general licence list.) Even then waste keeps coming into the free trade zone.

The customs officials say they are helpless when the pollution control board has given clearance to the factories. The factory owners make most of the loopholes in the free trade zone rules and sell a good part of the waste to buyers in India against foreign exchange. Their exports are mostly on paper. The clearing agents at Kandla says physical export of recycled waste is negligible. "The saleable items are sent to Dubai and from there to Mumbai, so that the buyer who offloads it at Mumbai has to pay only in rupees," says a clearing agent. Thus the foreign waste practically never leaves Indian shores.

"Dumping in India is in the garb of recycling. The industrial capacity hides the act of dumping. That there is no depletion in the production of zinc despite the High Court ban proves that we really don't need it," asserts environmental activist Vandana Shiva, whose Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources moved the Supreme Court agaisnt the import of hazardous wastes.

FEW WOULD have worried about hazardous waste import if the Harsh Vardhan steel company in Delhi had not appealed to the High Court against the wastes being included in the restricted list. "The court then clamped a ban on the import of toxic waste and sought clarification from the ministry," says Ravi Agarwal of Srishti, an NGO which impleaded itself in the case.

Srishti in an affidavit pointed out that the enviornment ministry had licensed only seven importers of hazardous waste. Yet 151 companies imported 65,000 tonnes of lead and zinc waste from 50 countries from 1994 to March 1996. The figures were culled from the customs' daily list of imports though Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai.

As the environment ministry noted in its affidavit that the list of imported waste often scrap and waste-with a common code for the consignment. Only by use of the code given by the DGFT are the apecific consignments identified and permitted. The importers thus would declare their cargo as 'heavy metal scrap' and get away even when the container comsists of lethal cargo. The ministry has also balmed the customes department for not providing adequate date. It feels that customs officials are not waare of the rules about hazardous waste management and handling.

The lack of coordination among the govenment agencies is evident in the Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board's action. It recently had to advertise in the newspapers asking waste importers for information on shipments! Even the process of listing and characterisation of wastes has not been done comprehensively and passed over the customes authorities to verify. Now if the customs officials are suspicious about a cargo they get the material checked at their laboratory or send it to the IITs.

With a no-objection certificate from the pollution control board the importers now can offload any cargo. This is not the case with the free trade zone only, and oil waste from the UAE is already coming in. The Aristocrat Trading Est. of the UAE, for instance, has ent 98 barrels of waste oil to Bipin Oil Agency, Mangrol Road, Keshod, Gujarat, and the oil impoters have sought permission for opening a recycling plant in the free trade zone. The Sharjah office of the exporters said over the telephone that it was ready to send any amount of any waste to India.

Mr X and other recycling racketeers at Kandla Port would rake in more millions once they outwit the lone customs officer with certificates fromt he polution control board. They have no worries about the air, water and food getting contaminated. Such worries are simply a waste of time - waste they connot pretend to recycle and profit on.

RAJESH RAMACHANDRAN
in Kandla and Delhi

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