By John Loizou

Darwin, Nov 19: Australia continues to send most of its unwanted used car and truck tyres to Viet Nam despite their removal from that country’s “green” waste list more than two years ago.

The shipping of the tyres ignores the Basel Convention governing the transport of hazardous waste; Australia is a signatory to the convention which was revised in November last year.

The cheap exports continue because tyres were not included when proposals for the recycling of television sets and computers were accepted at the latest meeting of Australia’s Environmental Protection and Heritage Council.

The council, chaired by Environment Minister, lawyer, conservationist and former lead singer of the pop group Midnight Oil, Peter Garrett, would not provide regulatory support for a proposal by tyre retailers to establish a national recycling scheme when it met in Perth on Thursday, November 5.

The tyre retaillers had offered to invest about US$150million to develop recycling facilities, over the next 10 years.

Australia’s export of the potentially toxic used tyres to Viet Nam – where unskilled low-paid workers strip them of their steel and cook them for their rubber – much of which is sent to China for use in asphalt – quietly tripled after Viet Nam’s Environment Protection Agency announced in March 2007 that Viet Nam no longer wanted to receive waste tyres and its major supplier – the European Union – complied with the request.

Land filling with whole tyres is largely banned in Australia and the then low value of the Australian dollar saw disreputable recycling operators undercutting costs by dumping the tyres in developing nations like Viet Nam, explains recycling advocate, the Boomerang Alliance national campaign director Dave West.

“Governments across the board have gone to sleep on this issue because it is largely unknown and they have not been under public pressure,” he says.'

Only the Australian Customs Office has the accurate figure for the exports and these are not published, reports Mr West.

But The Boomerang Alliance puts the figure going to Viet Nam at about 64 percent of all tyres to leave Australia or more than 11 million each year.

“This is equivalent to over one million kg of toxic chemicals being sent offshore – it’s absolutely irresponsible for us to expect a developing nation to deal with our pollution,” he says.

A variety of suppliers – wreckers and car yards - pay numerous unlicensed vendors to collect most of the tyres which are sold via the internet to the unknown middleman.

The toxins contained in tyres include lead, cadmium and acids, which can seep into waterways and enter the food chain.

Tyres have been linked to the spread of dengue and yellow fevers because they retain stagnant water, in which mosquitoes breed.

The Boomerang Alliance calculated that its proposed tyre recycling project would have generated about US$84 million of Gross Domestic Product each year; create new jobs; save 500,000+ tonnes of greenhouse gas a year; and generate more than $6.4 in government revenue.

Smuggling
The director of Viet Nam’s Public Security Ministry’s Environmental Police Nguyen Xuan Ly has attributed difficulties in stopping the smuggling of toxic waster into Viet Nam to lax regulations and apathy at a meeting in Hai Phong, reports Thanh Nien newspaper.

This includes industrial waste found in the northern port city, says the flagship publication of the Vietnam Youth Federation.

The official said that because specific regulations guiding the import of used machinery had yet to be written, companies had imported equipment that could no longer be used in other countries to sell in Viet Nam as scrap or to repair and use again.

Importers often lied by saying that they had permits to use the waste for recycling or that their waste had been treated.

Some businesses wrote on their invoices that they were importing lead iron, but in fact they were shipping wasted lead from used batteries.

Businesses often listed their products as those exempt from customs checks. Unfortunately, importers and exporters were never caught when they lied.

His officers had found Hai Phong-based steel maker Cuu Long-Vinashin importing equipment from a more than 40-year-old thermal power plant in South Korea, including more than 4,000 liters of diesel oil that contained chemicals poisonous to people and the environment.

The newspaper quoted Nguyen Xuan Ly’s deputy, Luong Minh Thao, as saying the Dai Dong Commerce and Production Company in Binh Duong Province, which neighbours Ho Chi Minh City, had imported thousands of tonnes of toxic materials banned in Viet Nam.

The company then resold the materials – expired paint, used lubricants and impure petrol – as materials for production in the country, according to reports by the department.

Hai Phong environment police department director Nguyen Duc Dang said several environment protection rules were understood differently by different agencies and officials and that businesses used this as a way to interpret laws to their own advantage.

Participants
Officials attending the meeting asked the Ministry of Science and Technology set a standard for imported machines, equipment and chemicals.
The Southeast Asian Times