The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [152]
Thor’s operations in South Africa were even worse than in England. Within a year of starting operations, the local water board found high levels of mercury pollution in a nearby river. In 1989, a U.S. journalist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch named Bill Lambrecht became interested in the case. He visited Cato Ridge to test the waters himself. Lambrecht found mercury levels in the Mngeweni River behind the plant of 1.5 million parts per billion, 1,500 times higher than the U.S. level for toxicity.114 The Mngeweni flows into the Umgeni River, which continues through populated areas, irrigates agricultural and cattle grazing lands, is used for washing and playing, and feeds into the drinking supply of the big coastal city of Durban. As far as forty miles downstream, near Durban, mercury levels were found to be 20 times the U.S. limit.115
Thor’s workers began immediately complaining of a metal taste in their mouths, black fingernails, skin problems, dizziness, and other signs of mercury poisoning. At one point, nearly one-third of the workers were found to have mercury poisoning. Thor documents, leaked to the South African organization Earthlife Africa, revealed that some workers had mercury concentrations in their urine hundreds of times higher than limits set by the World Health Organization. In 1992, three workers fell into mercury-induced comas and eventually died. The situation garnered international attention when Nelson Mandela visited one sick worker’s bedside in 1993.116
Local environmentalists in South Africa, including Earthlife Africa and the Environmental Justice Networking Forum, joined forces with Greenpeace International to publicize and stop this disaster. Protests and letter writing campaigns were organized to pressure the waste exporters and Thor in both the United Kingdom and South Africa. In the mid-1990s, the South African government ordered the closure of the plant. However, a massive amount of mercury waste was left at the site.
I visited Cato Ridge in 1996 to work with local activists concerned about the potential incineration of this toxic waste. My host, the indomitable Durban-based environmental justice activist Bobby Peek, pulled over his car and led me on a trail that allowed us to get right alongside the factory fence. With no workers on site, not even a security guard, it was easy to get unobstructed views. We saw holding ponds of mercury waste—like uncovered swimming pools—sure to overflow in the heavy rains, as well as storage sheds, which, Peek said, contained even more barrels of waste. There was so much untreated mercury on the site that local environmentalists suspected that Thor may never have intended to process the waste at all. Even worse, we followed a drainage stream out of the factory to the spot where it joined the larger river. The mercury discharge from the plant was so heavy that actual streaks of silver lined the drainage ditch, reminding me of the mercury balls from broken glass thermometers that my mother warned me not to touch as a child.
It wasn’t until 2003 that Thor—now renamed Guernica Chemicals—finally agreed to contribute 24 million rand ($2.5 million at the time of writing) toward cleaning up the plant. This was less than half the estimated costs to clean up about 8,000 tons of mercury waste left on site.117
As I write this, cleanup still hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, mercury contamination continues to be a problem beyond the factory fence. In October 2008, the South African Medical Research Council released its report detailing extreme mercury levels in community residents near a local dam, Inanda, whose lake is Durban’s main drinking water source. It also reported that 50 percent of the fish sampled from