By Larry Romanoff, March 19, 2023
Dumping radioactive waste into the world's seas began
in 1946 with a scientific argument
whose foundation was the vastness of the oceans. Source
Introduction
Operation Chase
Somalia Piracy
Chernobyl. Or, Maybe Not
Tarnished Philanthropy
Introduction
It is not a secret that the US and other industrialised nations have for decades made a practice of shipping their toxic waste to poor nations, either under a pretense of "salvaging and re-manufacturing", as in the case with toxic electronic waste or, often, under the guise of charity in the case of dumping a nation's medical waste onto poor nations. Canada's CBC quoted in an article from a 2008 United Nations report that the toxic waste from rich countries was "overwhelming poorer nations".[1] This essay provides a sampling of these practices.
This
topic achieved international attention on the discovery of an internal memo
signed by Lawrence Summers in 1991 when he was Chief Economist of the
World Bank, (later President of Harvard University), which said in part: "From
this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done
in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest
wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the
lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." Here
is the original text of Summers' memo, copied from Wikipedia:[2]
DATE:
December 12, 1991
TO:
Distribution
FR:
Lawrence H. Summers
Subject:
GEP
'Dirty'
Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging
MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]?
I can think of three reasons:
1)
The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the
foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of
view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country
with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think
the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage
country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2)
The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of
pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated
countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably
vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the
lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries
(transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid
waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and
waste.
3)
The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely
to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a
one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going
to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic]
cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also,
much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility
impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health
impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could
be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air
is a non-tradable.
The
problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in
LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack
of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less
effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
(signed)
Lawrence Summers
As
you can imagine, there was a great deal of scrambling to save face when this
memo became public. Wikipedia and many others have acknowledged that this was a
Summers memo, but that it "was intended only as sarcasm".
The Harvard University Magazine tells us that "the memo was
composed by a young economist who worked for him, and that Summers, after a
cursory review of it, co-signed it to stimulate internal debate."[3] Summers is
supposed to have said later that he should "read more carefully"
what he signs.
This
dumping can take almost any form. We are familiar with Japan's plans to dump
its nuclear-toxic water from the Fukushima disaster into the Pacific Ocean,
thereby likely contaminating half the world, but there is much more we don't
see in media reports. As many know, China imports large amounts of scrap metal
to be re-melted and re-refined, because this tends to be less expensive than
processing raw ore. But Chinese authorities became suspicious when they
began to receive rapidly-increasing shipments of scrap metal from Japan shortly
after the Fukushima meltdown, and were surprised to discover that hidden in the
center of the containers of ordinary scrap were piles of heavily-radioactive
scrap metal salvaged from the damaged reactor. Japan was unapologetic.
Operation Chase
One
unknown problem experienced by most militaries is the disposal of outdated
munitions and explosives. This is not a small problem, since much of this waste
is biological and chemical, and a very considerable amount contains nuclear
waste not only from weapons but from weapons processing. The Americans’ usual
method is to load an old and useless ship right to the gunwales with nuclear
(or biological or chemical) waste, sail the ship to a predetermined location,
and scuttle it. Though this kind of information never passes the media censors
in the US, the American military have done this so often they even have a name
for it – Operation CHASE – the name being Pentagon shorthand for “Cut
Holes and Sink ‘Em.” [4][5] It is extremely
difficult to locate useful information on this topic because it is so heavily
censored by both the US (and other) governments, and most articles on the topic
dramatically downplay the volume of such activities.
Decommissioned Liberty
ships were filled with obsolete munitions and sunk at sea.
In
many locations around the world, the US has sunk ships, either by opening
shuttlecocks to permit seawater to enter, or by detonating explosives, these
vessels containing everything from thousands of tons of nerve gas or mustard
gas, surplus or defective mines and bombs, radioactive waste and, on many
occasions, biological pathogens from institutions like Fort Detrick or Dugway.
In most every case, nobody knows, and those who do know would lose their lives
if they spoke of it. If America ever needed another public Congressional
hearing, it would be to reveal all the locations of these disposals and, in
many cases, the payment of immense compensation to other nations. This is
one reason countries like China, Russia, Korea, don’t want American ships
anywhere near their ocean borders. It doesn’t help to know that the waste is
dumped in “international waters” when those
waters are only 12 miles from your shore.
In
total, public records alone reveal the US military sunk at
least 100,000 tons of munitions and chemical warfare weapons in various
sections of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; almost certainly
there were more that did not make the public record. As well, this program may
have been a cover for illegal underwater nuclear detonations that were banned
by treaty at the time. In one case in 1964, the, supposedly containing a
typical load of about 8,000 tons of munitions, was towed out into the Atlantic
and sunk. However, shortly after sinking, three massive detonations occurred
that registered on seismic equipment all over the world, explosions far too
large to have resulted from the stated content of conventional explosives.
Somalia Piracy
The photo is of barrels of American nuclear waste that
washed ashore in Somalia after a tsunami.
This
oddly relates to the plague of piracy that occurred in the ocean near Somalia
after about 2010. Most readers will recall the flood of media stories of ocean
pirates in small boats venturing into the seas to hijack commercial ships for
ransom. One part of that story that somehow escaped the Western media is that
those pirates were converted fishermen, and that the main
reason they were no longer fishermen was that the seas bordering Somalia were
heavily contaminated with nuclear radiation and that fish were either
non-existent or dangerously inedible. The reason, and
the reason for the vengeful piracy, was that the US government, looking for a safe
place to store tens of thousands of barrels of highly toxic nuclear waste, discovered a
convenient depository in the ocean bordering Somalia where the Americans dumped
all those barrels, many of which were old and leaking and many of which broke
open on reaching the ocean floor, thereby contaminating everything including
the fish. The piracy was largely payback, and Somalia isn’t the only place in
the world’s oceans where the Americans have dumped toxic and lethal nuclear and
chemical waste.[6][7][8] It was Greenpeace
who first exposed this practice, and I have contacts in Somalia who confirm
this version of events.
Chernobyl. Or, Maybe Not
In
addition to the deliberate and accidental population-irradiating incidents
above, there was an interesting event that occurred in the North-Western US and
Western Canada, in the Spring of 1986. That was the time of the explosion at
the nuclear power station in Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, where the
meltdown released large quantities of radioactive particles, contaminating the
atmosphere of Western Europe and perhaps spreading farther. It was then that
Canadian government scientists discovered high levels of nuclear radiation
existing in Western Canada’s lakes and drinking water reservoirs. The
contamination was at first naturally attributed to Chernobyl, but it was then
discovered that the radiation in Canadian waters was “dirty”, consisting of
things like Cobalt and Iodine that are not found
in nuclear reactors.
Further
investigation revealed the source. Some time prior to the accident at
Chernobyl, the US military had conducted an underground nuclear test in the
Western US, in which something untoward had occurred and had damaged all the
measuring instruments. The authorities badly needed to learn what had gone
wrong, but the only path to that information was to open the hole and release
all the radiation in order to recover the instrumentation. But exposing the
civilian population to that much radiation was politically too dangerous to
contemplate, so a problem with no solution until, like the answer to a prayer,
Chernobyl appeared. After patiently waiting for the Chernobyl radiation to
spread in the earth’s atmosphere, and after some promotion in the compliant
media about the possibility of that radiation spreading as far as North
America, the US military opened the hole and released the radiation from their
failed test, contaminating the entire North West of the US and a large part of
Canada. They not only salvaged their test, but gained the
invaluable propaganda feature of being able to smugly blame that lethal blanket
of radiation on the failure of communism. Not only the answer
to a prayer but an unexpected and hugely profitable propaganda coup. Well done.
And no leakage of the truth ever reached the media, the entire event being
heavily censored in the US.
I
became aware of that event, did a bit of my own research, and wrote a letter
that was published in what was at the time called the Manchester Guardian
Weekly, a small but rather influential international onionskin newspaper.
Very shortly thereafter, I received a call from a woman, apparently in Toronto,
claiming to be a “self-employed nuclear disaster consultant”, the first time
I’d heard of such an occupation. As a credential, she told me she had been
retained as a consultant to advise the US government on the nuclear disaster at
Three Mile Island, a surprising revelation considering the massive
cover-up of that disaster. Her story was that upon reading my published letter,
the Americans called her to ask if she had leaked the information to me (as if
she would have known of a secret failed military test) and, if not, insisting she contact me to
salvage her endangered reputation by learning my sources and reporting back. It was a perfect
story, with all her details unverifiable, and one that reeked
with the stink of the CIA.
Tarnished Philanthropy
AGAPE CHINA
This
is one example of the American practice of dumping medical waste onto poorer
nations, and provides some insight into the collaboration between the US
government, American medical institutions, various NGOs, and private
individuals, to make all this happen. I was already living in China at the time
and witnessed this one personally.
According
to Chinese state authorities, Ron Brown of the AGAPE Foundation of
Peachtree City, Georgia, traveled to Wuhan in late 2004 and signed a contract
with several domestic charitable organisations in China to provide 2 million
RMB each year of medical supplies and materials, in part to assist with cardiac
surgery and treatments, but the overall purpose was stated as being “to improve the
lives of orphans and the lonely elderly”. So far, so good.
Some
time after the signing of this agreement, AGAPE shipped its first ‘donation’ of
medical devices to Shaoyang City in Hunan. I happened to be
in Shanghai at the time and was watching a TV news program which included a
segment on this first AGAPE donation of medical supplies, the container being
opened in the presence of local medical officials and a TV news crew. The
shipment included heart surgery kits, medical outfits, medical gloves,
pledgets, adhesive tapes, waste bins, catheters, sutures, syringes, and other
accessories. We watched while the Customs Officers and medical staff examined
the contents of these containers. What we saw was appalling.
The
donated “medical supplies” had been re-packed
in old boxes bearing labels for foodstuffs, electronics, and even Coca Cola and
KFC, many of which were soiled by mildew, oil, and dirt stains, and emitted
strong odors. All of the medicines, drugs, pharmaceuticals, were
past (or long past) their safe-use dates. Carton after carton
of syringes, bandages, sterile wrappings and similar items were all in packages
that had been opened and were no longer sterile. It was easy, even on TV, to
see that many of the syringes had been used, then replaced in their packages,
and one could see the cockroaches crawling around inside the supposedly-sterile
cartons. Catheters that were supposedly to be used for heart surgery, had clearly been
previously used, were in non-sterile packaging, and suitable only for
discard. The disposable syringes contained a
suspicious black fluid and had lost their sterility through exposure to the
air, while reagents and disinfectants had leaked, contaminating other items.
The
shipment contained hundreds of cartons of expired and damaged medical supplies,
all clearly used and discarded, many boxes of second-hand medical equipment
that also appeared used and damaged. There were as well perhaps 100 cartons of
childrens’ medical supplies, all of which had obviously been used and
discarded. The many wheelchairs in the container were simply thrown into a
heap, all clearly broken and unusable, many with broken wheels or no wheels at
all. It was all rubbish.
Nevertheless,
a bit later, yet another shipment arrived from the Foundation, (with a stated
value of several hundred thousand dollars), this time entering Tianjin customs, with the
same results. The shipment consisted of almost 1,000 cartons of expired and
used disposable medical devices, non-sterile supplies where all the packaging
was damaged and contents exposed to contamination, moldy and stained clothing
and filthy, used surgical clothing. Customs inspectors found medical pipes that
expired in 1998, dirty, mildewed sheets and used surgical gowns stained with
blood. Many staff on the scene reported examining children’s and other clothing
that was dirty, covered with blood, and otherwise damaged and soiled. It was
apparent from watching on TV and was also the consensus of the medical
authorities that this clothing was from people who died in accidents and
hospitals, with evidence that much of the clothing had been rescued from
dumpsters. The entire shipment was garbage. The government
closed and locked the containers and returned them to the US. These “charitable
donations” were such a shock the UK Guardian covered them in an article,
stating, “Thousands of pounds of medical equipment donated to
China will be returned to the US because it includes stained bedding, used surgical
clothes and expired medical equipment.”[9] The Chinese news
media were understated, reporting simply that “three containers of donations
sent to charitable organisations in Beijing and the northern provinces of Anhui
and Hebei were found to be of “questionable quality” and would be sent back to
the US.”
Not
to be daunted, another shipment from AGAPE soon appeared in Anhui province, another
nearly 1,000 cartons of used and expired medical material with a stated value
of $115,000. A short while later, the City Health Bureau of Inner Mongolia
received a large shipment of used, damaged and expired supplies, dirty old
clothing “and other foreign garbage”. The cartons even contained old quilts
covered in what appeared to be blood stains, used and stained gauze rolls and
bandages, and filthy boxes that could have contained nothing but infectious
bacteria. The shipment was also returned to the US. The Chinese media said, “The real situation
of these donations was amazing.” By this time, the shipments contained such
serious quality problems that China’s state council issued a warning notice on
all shipments of medical supplies from the Foundation. After receipts of the
shipments noted below, China’s State Inspection and Quarantine issued a total
ban on anything originating from the AGAPE and LDS Foundations, and informed the
US Embassy of this fact.
In
Wuhan, the Hubei province
Inspection and Quarantine Bureau was on the scene with various local medical
and charitable personnel, as well as representatives from AGAPE, to welcome a
donation of medical supplies which were to consist of cardiac surgery kits,
syringes, reagents, wheelchairs, etc. The Foundation stated its donations to Hubei
hospital were “to supply its open-heart surgery mission” in the region. The
beautifully understated Inspection report said, “Field test results were
unexpected”. Unexpected, indeed. The entire contents of both shipments,
‘valued’ at several hundred thousand dollars, consisted of used and discarded
wheelchairs missing wheels and other major parts, and cartons of expired
medications. Another shipment of ‘medical equipment’ contained around 600
cartons in which the medications had all expired by the delivery date, some
having expired almost 15 years prior. The balance of the shipment consisted of
syringes in damaged packaging that was no longer sterile, others with an
unknown dirty liquid, spider webs, mildewed and contaminated supplies, and used
medical waste. The Inspection staff quarantined the shipment on the
spot and ordered it immediately incinerated.
A
short while later, the American LDS Foundation headquartered in Utah, a charitable arm
of the Mormon Church, shipped another container to Wuhan, this one weighing ten
tons and ‘valued’ at $360,000 (but valued for their tax deductions at $4
million), that authorities described as “the largest
shipment of foreign medical waste in history”. And this was
truly medical waste – used and discarded syringes, blood-stained bandages,
damaged instruments, and worse. The shipment contained hundreds of cartons of
expired medical supplies, used and damaged second-hand medical equipment, old
and damaged rehabilitation equipment, used and non-sterile heart surgery kits,
used and stained medical outfits, used medical gloves, pledgets, adhesive
tapes, old medical waste bins, non-sterile catheters and sutures, and other
accessories. Once again, all medications had expired prior to arrival in China,
some
having reached their expiration dates 15 years prior. The shipment
contained not only expired and used supplies, but also used and discarded
bedding and clothing that were filthy, much of it blood-stained, the remainder
mildewed, torn and faded. Liquids had leaked everywhere, and all supplies were
packed in dirty, used boxes which were stained with mildew, oil and other
contaminants, making the containers appear to be garbage bins – which they
were. Experts at Wuhan Medical University who examined the shipment contents,
asserted they were simply a dumping of medical waste. The two loads were
incinerated almost immediately after opening. The LDS Foundation claimed to
have no knowledge of these events, but declined opportunities for media
interviews. Following these American misadventures, the Chinese charities took
legal action to sever their contracts with AGAPE, and China’s national
government instituted a total ban on all non-factory shipments of medical
equipment and supplies from the US and the West, with heavy fines for any
violation.
After
some investigation, medical authorities concluded that AGAPE had scoured the US
for medical waste from sources scattered throughout the country, those sources
then shipping their medical waste directly to China while AGAPE took the tax
deductions for the claimed values. India reported similar issues of not only
medical waste but electronic waste that was economically useless, could not be
recycled, and was dangerous or expensive to destroy. India estimated at the
time more than half of the small-scale waste products in the country had
originated in the US and Europe, disposed of by shipping to India as
‘charitable donations’, a major portion of this product being potentially
lethal medical waste. It was not only cheaper to ship these categories of garbage
to China or India than to deal with them locally, but the Western charities
profited hugely from these schemes since they could charge disposal fees to
local US firms. In the case of electronic components, these charities
could charge an American firm $20 to dispose of a PC or equivalent amount of
computer trash, then ship it to a poor country for less than $2, and pocket the
difference. A similar case was true for medical waste. In fact, such
imports had been banned in China and other nations years earlier, but the huge
profits made these collections and shipments too enticing for American
charities to resist, resulting in a huge illegal market for the dumping of
medical and other hazardous wastes.
A
reporter informed us that AGAPE entered a figure of only $30,000 for the value
of its first China “donation”, but claimed an air transport cost of $400,000 –
even though the shipments were made by ocean container! AGAPE explained that
the apparently low value of the goods in these shipments was due to their being
priced “at cost”, and passing into China duty-free. Otherwise, they claimed,
the “real” cost would have been many times higher. Then, in a surprising
accounting maneuver which I don’t even pretend to understand, Brown claimed
that $800,000 of total surgery costs in “Asia” would entail a much lesser
expense for materials – perhaps only 10%, with the balance being transportation
etc. Then, working backwards, he created an assumed cost for transportation
(for the supposed $30,000 value of medical waste) of US$400,000, claiming this
amount as a tax credit in keeping with his Foundation’s tax-exempt status as a
US charitable organisation. This scam was almost certainly done with the active
participation, and quite possibly the encouragement, of the US State
Department, since many of these so-called charities are primarily political
NGOs fronting as something more innocent, many of them, like Bob Fu’s China
Aid, having direct and open links to the White House.
These
offensive practices imposed a significant financial burden on the other
nations, since most of this hazardous waste was both dangerous and expensive to
de-contaminate and destroy locally. The local Chinese charities suffered
financially to the extent of millions of dollars by having to absorb port fees
on shipments plus all logistics costs, tax and customs clearances, inspections
and medications tests, and many other procedures, as well as the heavy costs of
either returning the containers to the US or the local destruction of the
contents. Even more, the Chinese charities paid the travel
expenses of AGAPE and other US charity executives to China, including their
airfares and hotel accommodation plus living expenses while in the country, all
in anticipation of genuine medical donations. Of course, the
Americans know nothing of this, since the US media censor all such stories and
neither Google nor Bing seem to yet have discovered it. By contrast, Baidu
serves up about 150,000 pages on this topic of AGAPE, the LDS and other
American Charities and Foundations. When confronted
with this mountain of appalling evidence, Ron Brown, director of the Agape
Foundation, stated that “one of the containers had been delayed in shipment”, causing
“some supplies to expire”. Brown asserted that local Chinese authorities had
destroyed usable supplies along with expired ones, noting that the reasons
behind this were “dubious”. When asked why the Chinese would refuse (and
incinerate) donations of good medical supplies worth millions of dollars,
Brown’s response was to say, “The key is that we reduced paying bribes to
them.” Charming.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been
translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150
foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well
as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired
management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions
in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export
business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University,
presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff
lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally
related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia
McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
*
NOTES
[1] Rich countries' toxic
waste overwhelming poorer nations: UN
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/rich-countries-toxic-waste-overwhelming-poorer-nations-un-1.709520
[2] Summers memo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
[3] Toxic Memo
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2001/05/toxic-memo.html
[4] Operation CHASE
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1967/september/operation-chase
[5] Operation CHASE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHASE
[6] Root Causes of Somali
Piracy: Nuclear Dumping and Seafood Looting
https://transparencysolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Nuclear-Waste-Dumping-Claims.pdf
[8] Somalia used as toxic
dumping ground
https://theecologist.org/2009/mar/01/somalia-used-toxic-dumping-ground
[9] Charities to return dirty
medical equipment to US
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/10/china.mainsection
Source of the featured image:
https://www.tampabay.com/news/military/veterans/the-atomic-sailors/2157927/
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2023
