Toxic Wastes and The New World Order.

• Author: Cohen, Mitchell

Twelve years ago, the soon-to-be infamous barge, the Khian Sea, left the territorial waters of the United States and began circling the oceans in search of a country willing to accept its cargo: 14,000 tons of toxic incinerator ash.

First it went to the Bahamas, then to the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau and the Netherlands Antilles. Wherever it went, people gathered to protest its arrival. No one wanted the hundreds of thousands of pounds of Philadelphia ash dumped in their country. Desperate to unload, the ship's crew lied about their cargo, hoping to catch a government unawares. Sometimes they identified the ash as "construction material," other times they said it was road fill, and still others "muddy waste." But environmental experts were generally one step ahead in notifying the recipients; no one would take it. That is, until it got to Haiti. There, officials were told it was the "fertilizer" they'd ordered, and four thousand tons of the ash was dumped onto the beach in the town of Gonaives.

It didn't take Haitian officials long to realize they weren't getting fertilizer. They canceled the import permit and ordered the waste returned to the ship. But the Khian Sea slipped away in the night, leaving the toxic ash on the beach. [1]

For two years more years the Khian Sea went from country to country, to no avail, trying to dispose of the remaining 10,000 tons. The crew even painted over the barge's name--not once, but twice. Still, no one was fooled into taking its toxic cargo. A crew member later testified that the waste was finally dumped, when no one was looking, into the Indian Ocean.

The activist environmental group, Greenpeace, pressured the US government to test the "fertilizer." The US Environmental Protection Agency and Greenpeace found hazardous levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic and dioxin. But no one would clean it up.

The cost of the cleanup at Gonaives had been estimated to be around $300,000. But Philadelphia lawyer Ed Rendell--then mayor of that city and now Chairman of the Democratic National Committee--refused to put up the funds, despite Philadelphia's $130 million budget surplus. [2] Joseph Paolino and Sons, the firm that commissioned the Khian Sea, refused as well.

In July of 1992, the US Justice Department--under pressure from environmental groups throughout the world--finally filed indictments against two waste traders who had shipped and dumped the ash. Similar indictments were brought against...