The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [153]
Some of the workers have taken legal action against Thor in search of both compensation and justice. In 1994 and again in 1998, a number of injured workers, plus representatives of three workers who had died, took legal action in the United Kingdom against Thor’s British parent company, Thor Chemical Holdings (TCH). The workers claimed that the parent company was negligent in designing and overseeing such a clearly unsafe facility and was responsible for the illnesses and death of the workers. In both cases, TCH attempted to wriggle out of the legal action, initially trying in vain to have the case moved to South African courts, where it presumably could have more influence over the outcome. In both cases, TCH ended up settling out of court; in 1997, it paid 1.3 million British pounds (more than $2 million), and in 2003 it paid another 240,000 British pounds (more than $300,000 at then current exchange rates).119
To Haiti
I have a small jar of grey powder on my desk. It usually goes unnoticed amidst the piles of paper, but every now and then someone asks about it. It’s from Haiti. Actually, it’s from Philly. It’s Philadelphia’s municipal incinerator ash that I got in Haiti. “Huh?” you might say. It’s a jar of the most famous incinerator ash in the world.
You see, for years the city of Philadelphia had burned its trash in a municipal waste incinerator. Like many incinerators, its operators didn’t have a solid plan for disposing of the mounds of ash it churned out, which they just piled ever higher in an adjacent lot. In 1986, the city hired Joseph Paolino & Sons and paid them $6 million to get rid of the ash. Paolino & Sons turned around and hired another company, Amalgamated Shipping, which owned a cargo ship named the Khian Sea. Amalgamated loaded 14,000 tons of the ash onto the Khian Sea, which headed for a dump site in the Caribbean.120
At the time, I worked with Greenpeace’s Toxic Trade Team, which tracked international shipments of waste, alerting target governments about the hazardous contents. Thanks largely to our warnings, the ship was turned away by the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guinea-Bissau, and the Netherlands Antilles. (In gratitude, some very nice bottles of rum were sent from several of these embassies to our Washington, D.C., Greenpeace offices.) The Khian Sea continued to sail the region in search of a dump site.
In December 1987, the Khian Sea arrived in Gonaïves, a tiny, dusty, and very poor port town in Haiti. It had in hand a permit signed by the Haitian government to import “fertilizer.” Anxious to be finished with its nightmare voyage, the crew began unloading the ash onto the beach immediately. But when Greenpeace alerted the Haitian government to the real contents of the cargo, government officials ordered the ash reloaded and removed. The crew stopped unloading but left 4,000 tons of ash on the open beach and took off.
The remaining 10,000 tons was definitely the best-traveled pile of ash ever. The voyage ultimately lasted for twenty-seven months, visiting every continent except Antarctica. Our Greenpeace team continued to track the Khian Sea, warning each country it approached. During the saga, the ship got a paint job and changed its name from the Khian Sea to the Felicia, then to the Pelicano, but it couldn’t shake us. At one point in its journey, the ship returned to Philadelphia in defeat, hoping to return the ash to the original contractor, Paolino & Sons. But Paolino & Sons refused to let the ship dock at its pier in Philly. By strange coincidence, the pier caught on fire that very night and was destroyed, preventing the ship from docking. Finally, in November 1988 the ship appeared in Singapore with its cargo holds empty. The captain refused to disclose where the ash had been dumped. Eventually an enterprising lawyer, Howard Stewart, from the Environmental Crimes division of the Department of Justice tracked down