After a more than three-month voyage to remote Asia, containers of industrial waste suspected to be poisonous dust, coming out of the chimneys of metallurgical factories, are expected to arrive in the early hours of tomorrow morning, at the port of Durres, loaded onto a ship bound by Gioia Tauro in Italy. The powder, known as EAF, contains high percentages of metals such as lead and chromium and other cancer-causing chemical waste.
The shipment was launched in July from the Albanian port as part of an export agreement of the Albanian company “Sokolaj”, which had purchased the waste from kurum, a steel and iron producer, at the premises of the former metallurgical combine in Elbasan.
Suspicions about their dangerous content were raised by the NGO ‘Basel Action Network’, following a whistleblower it had received from Albania. Sokolaj company did not declare them as hazardous waste when they were collected in an open environment in the Port of Durres before being loaded into containers.
In this case, a double investigation is being conducted by the Durres Prosecution office in Albania and by the European Union Anti-Fraud Office, OLAF, in Brussels. The alert from the Basel Action Network prompted Thailand, the host country, to refuse to unload containers at its ports, and it was announced that the ships would be returning to Albania.
At that time, in August, the Albanian Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment came out with a joint position stating that “Albania cannot accept a priori the return of such charges, much more only on the basis of suspicions and speculations, without the realization of exhaustive analyses and reliable and verifiable legal evidence”.
It is not clear how the ship will be able to reach the ship tomorrow. According to Albanian authorities contacted by VOA, as long as the case is under investigation, it is up to the prosecution to determine the procedures to be followed.
The Basel Action Network called for “containers to be opened publicly and in the presence of independent groups such as BAN and samples to be shared so that they can be analyzed in parallel in different laboratories,” said BAN Group Executive Director Jim Puckett.
Today at the entrance of the Port of Durres, the Democratic Party organized a protest, with participation and environmental experts.
Democratic MP Oerd Bylykbashi pointed the finger of responsibility on the Albanian government: “No one knows what is happening with these toxic waste that will poison the lives of our citizens, our children. No one should try to sell this as a shopping history among privates. Each of the responsibilities that belongs to them, and the most dangerous, is those who run this country.”
Environmentalists, casting strong shadows of doubt over the danger of the waste load, said they should not be accepted as long as they are not known exactly. /VOA