The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [151]
But sure enough, at the local agricultural supply shop, I found one last bag of the crap still for sale, months after both the United States and Bangladeshi governments had been informed of the contamination. I couldn’t leave it in the shop for some unsuspecting farmer to pick up, so I bought that last bag for the equivalent of four dollars and carried it along on our journey. I also got the names of the local farmers who had bought some. One of those farms was my next stop.
The Bangladeshi farmer welcomed us into his modest home for tea. The walls were made of earth and the roof from thatched grass. After we introduced ourselves and explained our purpose, he enthusiastically led us to the fields to take soil samples. I was confused about why the farmer kept smiling as my translator friend explained that the fertilizer on his fields contained toxic waste illegally sent from the United States. But then she translated what he was saying: “Now that your government knows where the toxic fertilizer has been used, they will come and clean it up so we will be safe.” Standing there, I was overwhelmed with sadness and shame. “No,” I explained, remembering my meeting with the U.S. embassy staff person, “I don’t think they will come.” But I promised him that I’d deliver his cleanup request to my government and I’d use the evidence from this case to support the call for an end to global waste trafficking. Saying that to this farmer, whom I had just informed that he had put toxic waste all over his fields, made me feel like such a schmuck. What good did it do him to know that the evidence from his field would be used to strengthen a United Nations convention on waste trafficking? Of all my times traipsing around the world investigating toxic waste, that moment was the lowest.
I returned to the capital city of Dhaka with a heavy heart and a heavy bag of fertilizer. I didn’t know what to do with either. After musing on it for some days, I came up with a plan. U.S. embassies are considered U.S. soil overseas. U.S. hazardous waste law requires prior written permission to export this type of hazardous waste to another country. Although the original exporter had violated this law, I doubted the U.S. embassy would repeat the mistake, especially if they knew I was watching. So I decided to return the contaminated fertilizer to the U.S. embassy, knowing that the staff would be unable to simply throw it in the garbage.
I wrapped up the fertilizer in a nice package, addressed to the staff person I had previously met with, and dropped it off at the embassy’s front desk with a little note informing him that I was returning this U.S. waste to U.S. soil, from which re-export was illegal. Although the embassy never did formally contact me, someone in the State Department anonymously sent me a copy of a telex message sent from the Dhaka embassy to their State Department offices in Washington, complaining about the waste, wondering what to do with it, and bemoaning my meddling. They concluded that they suspected they had “not seen the last of Leonard.”
To South Africa
One of the worst cases of international waste trafficking I’ve ever worked on was in a small, heavily industrialized town called Cato Ridge in South Africa. There, a British-owned South African company called Thor Chemicals was importing mercury waste from the United States and Europe, supposedly for reprocessing. The British parent company, Thor Chemical Holdings, had previously operated a mercury processing plant in the United Kingdom, which it closed in 1987 in the face of increasing contro versy and potential government action based on excessive mercury levels in the air and in the workers. Thor relocated its mercury processing operation to South Africa in 1988.112
Thor Chemicals in Cato Ridge was a very busy plant, importing thousands of tons of mercury during the 1990s. Two of the biggest exporters were the U.S. companies American Cyanamid in New