Flying Dutchman of Garbage

Hardly anyone noticed when the Dutch vessel Stella Maris steamed out of Rotterdam harbor last month with 600 tons of poisonous chlorified aliphatics on board. It had carried many similar cargoes before, and AKZO, the giant Dutch chemical complex that chartered the Stella Maris, routinely announced that the chemical wastes would be dumped far out at sea--900 miles from Holland and 600 miles from Norway. But somehow, a telex message informing Norway of the plan was garbled en route; instead of 600 miles, the printout read 60. As a result, the Stella Maris became an international issue and something of a latter-day Flying Dutchman: wherever it tried to dump its cargo, it was shooed away by local authorities.

Norway expressed "deep concern" about the ship's course. Though the telex mistake was cleared up, the Stella Maris was shadowed by an Irish pocket destroyer that apparently had not received word of the error. Then the Stella Maris changed course for a point about 800 miles south of Iceland, the same dumping grounds, said AKZO pointedly, "where the Americans used to dump their chemical garbage and sometimes their radioactive refuse." But before dumping, it headed for the nearby Faroe Islands to take on fuel --only to find that the islanders had blocked the port with their own ships to prevent dumping anywhere near their home. Eventually the "Ship of Shame," as the British papers dubbed it, was ordered to sail back to Rotterdam, where it docked two weeks ago in the early morning hours to avoid the fate of another refuse ship, which protesters had decorated with paintings of human skulls. The chemicals that caused all the trouble will be stored in the Rotterdam area and eventually destroyed in a special furnace that AKZO is building at a cost of $3,000,000.

Changed Name. The episode served one useful purpose--focusing public attention on chemical dumping in international waters. As AKZO officials rightly pointed out, many other companies are doing exactly the same thing. Some 2,000,000 tons of chemical wastes a year are dumped at sea by ships sailing from Dutch ports alone, and Dutch, German, Belgian and Swiss industries are suspected of adding another 5,000,000 tons to the total. Last week a German tanker left Rotterdam loaded to the gunwales with hydrochloric acid, which it poured into the Atlantic. At about the same time, the British freighter Topaz took on 1,300 tons of radioactive wastes from Belgium, Holland, France and West Germany at the Belgian port of Zeebrugge. The wastes, with a half-life of three months, were discharged into the Bay of Biscay. The Stella Marts, meanwhile, has changed its name to the less noticeable Constance, and will continue to carry chemical wastes.

Such dumping creates hazards far beyond a ship's wake. It reduces fish populations and can jeopardize entire marine ecosystems because chemical potency is magnified as it passes up the food chain to larger and larger fish. Next month France, Britain, West Germany, Belgium and Holland will take up the problem at The Hague at a preparatory meeting for a United Nations Conference on the Human Environment to be held in Stockholm next year. Among proposed controls: a registry of elements discharged into oceans and global monitoring of ocean pollution. As the U.S. sees it, rather than trying to police polluters, which would take a special U.N. navy to accomplish, it would be better to create uniform standards among maritime nations; the nations would then be expected to enforce the standards themselves. An Administration-approved bill now pending before the House would control offshore dumping by stringently regulating what wastes leave U.S. ports. One catch: most of the proposals concern dumping near the shore (there is a separate agreement on discharging oil at sea, a practice that will probably be banned entirely by 1975, or 1980 at the latest). At present, neither the U.S. nor any other nation has taken a stand on protecting the oceans beyond the twelve-mile limit, which many countries do not recognize anyway (see THE LAW). Small island nations like Japan and Britain, in fact, have made it plain that they will fight any prohibition on mid-ocean dumping because they simply have nowhere else to bury their wastes.

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