Asia’s Toxic Formula for Waste

KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan —  The nearly 3,000 tons of mercury-contaminated concrete originally came from a chemical plant here in the industrial southern tip of Taiwan.

When it arrived in Cambodia in December and was dumped--with no warning labels--in a treeless, red-dirt field outside the port city of Sihanoukville, local villagers thought it might be some kind of international aid.

People fought for the large plastic shipping bags, which made perfect floor mats and tarpaulins. Some took home armloads of crushed concrete, hoping it might be fertilizer for their gardens.

But elation turned to panic when a worker who had helped unload the cargo from a Taiwanese ship died after suffering intense headaches, dizziness and vomiting. A teenage villager died after sleeping on one of the plastic shipping bags.

Wild rumors coursed through the streets of Sihanoukville, also known as Kompong Som, that the material was “radioactive,” and in the mass hysteria that followed four people died in traffic accidents and another fell from a window to his death.

For environmentalists, it was a nightmare come true: an industrialized nation’s poisonous waste ending up in an impoverished neighboring state. What to do with thousands of tons of hazardous materials produced by Asia’s emerging industrial powers poses one of the main environmental challenges of the next century.

“In Asia,” said Seattle-based toxic waste specialist Jim Puckett, “some countries have taken steps to protect themselves. China, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh, for example, have hazardous-waste import bans. But it is still a region that collectively has not dealt with the issue of waste trade, nor has it adequately dealt with the problems of rapid, dirty industrialization.”

Highly industrialized Taiwan annually produces about 1.6 million tons of hazardous waste, including solvents from its booming electronics industry, petrochemicals from some of the world’s largest plastic resin plants, heavy metals and contaminated medical supplies. However, government environmental officials, who only recently developed the capacity to track waste, report that only about 550,000 tons end up each year in legal landfills or disposal facilities.

“The rest is missing, scattered everywhere in illegal dumps,” said Eric Liou, a member of Taiwan’s National Assembly who heads the private Environmental Quality Protection Foundation. Liou’s group has identified 140 illegal waste sites, including some in the island’s stream and river beds.

In the Cambodia toxic-waste case, an embarrassed Taiwanese government fined Formosa Plastics Group for illegally exporting the waste from the company’s Jenwu plant here in Kaohsiung County, where the shipment originated in November.

Tests by Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Agency on waste samples brought back from Cambodia by activist groups showed a mercury content of 0.284 parts per million, higher than the 0.2 parts per million of mercury considered hazardous under international classification standards.

“This is a really outrageous case that has severely damaged our international image,” said Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Tsai Hsung-hsiung in an interview.

Company Blames Activists

The president of Formosa Plastics Corp., the main subsidiary of Taiwan’s largest industrial group and one of the world’s leading petrochemical companies, claims that the fault lies with his nation’s environmentally militant citizens. They forced the company to remove the waste, which he maintains is harmless, from a landfill in southern Taiwan where it had been legally placed after undergoing processing to reduce the danger of mercury poisoning.

“When we got information about people dying in Cambodia, we didn’t believe it,” said company President C. T. Lee. “In 20-30 years of operation in our mercury-process caustic-soda plants, we never had a problem with anyone.”

At one point in a two-hour interview, Lee produced a paper asserting that common household Mercurochrome used to treat cuts and scrapes is many times more dangerous than the material shipped to Cambodia.

Autopsies were not performed on the 30-year-old dockworker and the 16-year-old villager who died in Sihanoukville. Their symptoms were consistent with poisoning. But a preliminary examination of the cases by the international group Doctors Without Borders showed that there were complications in both cases that could have contributed to the deaths.

Chastened by the experience in Cambodia, Lee vowed never again to send his company’s waste to “underdeveloped countries.”

Waste Expert Not Surprised

U.N. officials said the Taiwan-Cambodia case demonstrates the need to limit the cross-border flow of toxic materials. According to the United Nations, industries worldwide produce more than 440 million tons of hazardous waste a year, about 10% of which enters international trade.

“If there is little or no control, the hazardous waste will take the path of least resistance,” said Pierre Portas, program officer with the U.N. Environmental Program. “One of the most critical elements to make sure that these sort of cases will not happen again is through international cooperation.”

The key elements in this deadly formula are a recently industrialized state (Taiwan) with an active, highly politicized environmental movement; an impoverished, pre-industrial and politically unstable country (Cambodia) desperate for money; and a region (Asia) that lags behind the rest of the world in monitoring and regulating traffic in hazardous waste.

“If somebody had asked me before the event, what was the most likely waste-trade scenario within Asia, I would have probably come up with . . . Taiwan to Cambodia,” said Seattle-based specialist Puckett, whose nongovernmental Basel Action Network monitors an international convention governing traffic in toxic waste.

One reason for this scenario is Taiwan’s outcast status in the world community, a consequence of policies followed by the United States and other countries that recognize only the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate Chinese state. This essentially locks Taiwan, a major industrial power with 21 million people, out of international agreements that regulate cross-border traffic in hazardous waste.

Neither Taiwan nor Cambodia is party to the 121-country Basel Convention, which Puckett’s group monitors. The United States is the only major industrial country to have not ratified the agreement, mainly because of congressional objections to a convention amendment that would ban waste trade from developed to developing countries.

Corruption also plays a role in the dumping of toxic waste. Unconfirmed reports by opposition figures in Cambodia allege that local Cambodian officials accepted $4 million in bribes from the Formosa Plastics contractor that transported the waste. Thirty Sihanoukville customs officials were suspended from their jobs after the incident.

Another element in the problem is the rise in environmental activism in Asia. A decade ago in Taiwan, for example, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party sidestepped martial law restrictions on political activity by espousing environmental causes. Now that Taiwan enjoys a full democracy with elected officials at all levels of government, environmental issues dominate the political agenda. Citizens routinely reject proposals for landfills, incinerators and other systems to dispose of the waste.

Scrambling for Dump Sites

This leads to what is known internationally as NIMBY--the “Not in My Backyard” syndrome that now characterizes the political scene in Taiwan, South Korea and, to a lesser extent, Japan. As a result of these pressures, industrial countries scramble to find other sites to dispose of waste rather than local landfills.

This was the situation Formosa Plastics first faced when it attempted in 1993 to dump the mercury that ended up in Cambodia. The waste is a byproduct of a process, still widely used in Europe and the United States, that employs nonorganic mercury as a “conductor” to produce caustic-soda ash, which is needed to make soap, paper, glass, synthetic fibers and even certain spices.

After using this process for more than 20 years, Formosa Plastics switched in 1989 to a safer approach--here and at its plants in Baton Rouge, La., and Point Comfort, Texas--that does not use mercury to produce caustic soda. But the company still was left with at least 14,000 tons of mercury-contaminated brine sludge.

In March 1993, Formosa Plastics transported the material eventually destined for Cambodia to the legal, Taiwan EPA-approved Dasu landfill 20 miles from its plant. However, after trucks deposited the waste--now processed into large “cakes” of concrete--citizen groups successfully forced the company to remove the material.

The company moved the waste to its large Jenwu plant and spent years trying to find another place to dispose of it.

“We just couldn’t find another legal landfill in Taiwan,” said Lee, the Formosa Plastics president. “Finally, to avoid more problems, we decided to send it abroad. But we had already processed it [by converting the mercury to more stable mercury sulfide and mixing it with cement], so we considered it to be nonhazardous waste.”

According to Tsai of the Taiwan EPA, the Formosa Plastics executive is not telling the whole story. Last October, according to the agency, Formosa Plastics applied to ship about 5,500 tons of unprocessed “liquid sludge containing mercury to Cambodia.”

This request was rejected, Tsai said, mainly because of the Taiwanese government’s doubts about Cambodia’s ability to handle the waste.

On Nov. 19, according to Tsai, Formosa Plastics sent a request to ship a different batch of waste--this time “stabilized, solidified sludge”--to Cambodia. But before the Taiwan EPA had time to respond, a contractor hired by Formosa Plastics loaded the concrete, which had been crushed so that it could be placed into the plastic bags for shipment, into a ship and sent it off to the Southeast Asian country.

Because of this timing on the part of Formosa Plastics, the Kaohsiung County EPA determined that the company had violated the country’s waste disposal laws and fined Formosa the maximum allowable, the equivalent of about $5,000.

Poorest Regions Targeted

The case shows why, increasingly, countries such as Taiwan look to their poorest neighbors as dumping grounds.

“Just look at the region,” said Plato Yip, spokesman for the Friends of the Earth environmental organization in Hong Kong. “Some of these countries like Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam are not at all equipped to handle these toxic wastes, including nuclear wastes and medical wastes. But it has become something like a free trade in the region that boils down to who wants the money and who has the waste.”

For example, in its desperation to find a place to store low-level radioactive waste produced by its three nuclear power plants, Taiwan Power Co., the island nation’s monopoly electric utility, signed a 1997 contract with North Korea to stash the waste in an abandoned mine shaft in that country’s mountainous center.

When that idea alarmed others, especially the United States and South Korea, Taiwan Power proposed shipping the waste to the Marshall Islands. But that idea also has faced international opposition.

“Actually for low-level or even high-level nuclear waste there is no technical problem dealing with it here in Taiwan,” said Michael Lin, director of the Taiwan Power department responsible for disposing of the waste. “The key factor is the politicization that has been going on in Taiwan for the past 10 years.”

Faced with opposition at home, the power company is still looking outside the country for a site to dump 98,112 drums of radioactive waste stored at a facility that is nearly full.

“Democracy has its advantages, but there is too much democracy in Taiwan,” Lin complained.

Other Taiwan industrialists agree. In a paper he wrote for a recent conference in Taipei, the capital, on the hazardous-waste disposal problem on the island, Taiwan Cement Corp. President Leslie Koo, one of the island’s leading businesspeople, complained that “environmental movements in Taiwan have been getting more and more complicated and have suddenly become a platform for politicians and gangsters to quickly gain their fame and fortune.”

Meanwhile, here in Kaohsiung, county EPA director Ting Sun-lung warned that other countries may soon face the same problems confronting Taiwan--an ocean of dangerous waste and a population unwilling to deal with it, instead just wishing it would go away.

“Taiwan is facing the bottleneck right now,” Ting said somewhat tiredly during an interview in his small office. “But sooner or later, China will have to face this same problem. All the other countries in Asia will have to face the same problem.”

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Tracking Toxic Waste

Formosa Plastics Corp. shipped nearly 3,000 tons of mercury-contaminated concrete from a landfill in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, to Sihanoukville, Cambodia, where it arrived in December. Environmentalists fear that Asia’s industrial nations increasingly will send their toxic waste to poorer neighbors.