The Hindu : New Delhi News : Foreign waste being dumped in India

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 01, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Foreign waste being dumped in India

By Anjali Dhal Samanta

NEW DELHI, JULY 31. Domestic waste from European countries is illegally finding its way into India under the garb of "paper waste'', keeping their own backyard clean. While import of paper waste -- recycled here -- is not banned in India, mixed household waste is entering the country with the containers usually marked as "green category'' or "paper waste".

Violating a host of international agreements -- including the Basel Convention that covers "household and other wastes'' and prohibits their trans-boundary movement -- import of domestic waste from European countries appears to be turning into a lucrative business.

As recently as January of this year, one such container -- marked as "paper waste'' -- consisting of domestic waste was intercepted at Nhava Sheva port by Customs officials.

Part of a consignment of 11 containers en route to India, it was discovered by Customs officers and employees of the Inspectorate for Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment in Rotterdam, Netherlands. According to sources, since this was in violation of the European Regulation on the supervision and control of shipments of waste within, into and out of the European Community, the Dutch Inspectorate had requested the company to return the waste materials to their State of dispatch -- Ireland.

However, by mistake one of the containers arrived at the Nhava Sheva port.

"Though it was marked as `paper waste' which is not banned in India, it was full of household waste like plastics, bottles and cans. It smelt of garbage even though it had been several months since it had been despatched from Ireland.

The party that came to claim the waste said that they had not ordered what was in the container.

"But that is expected. They are not likely to admit that they were accepting such waste since it is banned,'' said environmentalist Claude Alvares who with fellow Supreme Court Monitoring Committee member, Dr D.B. Boralkar, inspected the container before it was re-transported to Rotterdam on June 5. The Supreme Court Monitoring Committee -- set up by the Supreme Court to monitor the implementation of its recent Order on Hazardous Waste -- has been apprised of the matter.

Alarmingly, this is not an isolated incident. In December last year, about 40 containers of domestic waste en route to India from Ireland were intercepted by the Netherlands Inspectorate for the Environment, an outpost of the Seaport Project set up by six European Union countries for the purpose of implementing the provisions of the Basel Convention on Trans-boundary Movement of Hazardous and Other Wastes.

According to sources, while the invoice for the containers indicated that the materials were "paper waste'', the Inspectorate in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discovered that the commodity was not paper waste but "smelly garbage: paper/cardboard, PET bottles, plastics, beer cans, food cans, milk cartons (tetra pack), textile and food rests. It smelt like household waste and also had black files''.

When contacted by the Inspectorate about the matter, the Ministry of Environment and Forests here informed that "it had not approved the import of any garbage from any country''.

According to sources in the MoEF, another similar complaint was received in January.

"We wrote to the Chief Commissioner of Customs (Imports) in Nhava Sheva and told them to be on the alert. But nothing came out of it. Since we have been sending the waste back, we hope this will stop soon as it is very expensive for them to ship it all the way back,'' said an official.

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