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International Dumping of Toxic Waste

An international ship that dumped 500 tonnes of toxic waste in the Cote d’Ivoire caused at least a dozen deaths and sent more than 100,000 people to the hospital, leaving behind not only illness but a costly mess to clean up.

The country is now faced with cleaning up and rehabilitating at least 15 highly contaminated sites around the city of Abidjan, where roughly 5 million people live. The ship, which came from Estonia, unloaded the waste into trucks, which then dumped the material at sites around the city. The waste included such highly toxic materials as petroleum distillates, hydrogen sulphide, mercaptans, phenolic compounds and sodium hydroxide.

The act was not only criminal, it was lethal, killing about a dozen people. Exposure to the waste also caused such symptoms as nausea and vomiting, headaches, skin lesions, respiratory problems and nosebleeds. The World Health Organization sent an international team of public health and environmental experts to help respond to the crisis. A private company is now shipping polluted waste to France for decontamination, but the clean up is far from over.

For more information about this story, please visit the UN site or Greenpeace.

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org