A visitor to Gonaives, on Haiti's northern coast, would likely write it off as a typical down-at-the-heels Third World port town. Like most everywhere else in Haiti, it is desperately poor, with dilapidated colonial buildings and hordes of people. The visitor might never guess the city's most distinctive and bizarre characteristic: its history as a garbage dump for the city of Philadelphia.Over a decade ago, thousands of tons of that city's toxic ash were dumped onto Gonaives's beaches, and over time, winds and tides have washed it into the bay and onto the streets of the congested downtown. Trucks have hauled other refuse inland, dumping it in a hillside pit above a cluster of houses. The media, which once made the saga of Philadelphia's wayward garbage shipments into an international controversy, have long ago packed up and gone away.
Other countries that have tried to dump their waste in Third World countries have all been forced by international reprisals and the weight of popular opinion to bring it back home. Italy has retrieved toxic waste >from Lebanon and Nigeria; Germany from Albania and Romania; South Korea >from China. But not the U.S. Lenient regulations here require only that a company notify the EPA before shipping hazardous waste. If the company is caught abroad violating foreign laws, the U.S. is not likely to prosecute.
A case in point is Gonaives, where a load of Philadelphia's toxic incinerator ash has languished since 1988. When the U.S. Army landed in Haiti in 1994, a group of environmentalists approached the American commanders and begged them to remove the waste from Gonaives. The Army never even bothered to reply.
Now, suddenly, the issue has been revived; not by the Clinton administration, and certainly not by Philadelphia's government, but unexpectedly by a little-known unit of New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani's city government�a group called the New York Trade Waste Commission, which he created to get the mob out of the trash business and open it up to competition.
The commission checks out every company that wants to haul garbage in New York. When looking into a firm called Eastern Environmental Services, Inc., it found a principal of the company with links to the decade-old Haiti debacle. The commission then made the company's request for a license conditional on the cleaning up of Philadelphia's Haitian ash pit.
The story of this particular pile of toxic waste begins in the mid 1980s, when the city of Philadelphia was facing a growing crisis about what to do with tons of incinerator ash. At first, it tried to bury the waste in landfills outside the city, as far away as Ohio and the Carolinas. Failing that, Philadelphia looked to dump its ash abroad. In 1986 Joseph Paolino & Sons, a carting concern, took over a $6 million contract to "properly dispose" of 15,000 tons of incinerator ash, which contained lead, cadmium, barium, arsenic, mercury, dioxin, and cyanide. Paolino contracted out to Amalgamated Shipping of the Bahamas to transport the ash. Amalgamated then chartered the cargo ship Khian Sea, with the help of a firm called Coastal Carriers, to carry out the order.
The Khian Sea left Philadelphia loaded with 14,000 tons of incinerator ash in August 1986�it was the beginning of what would become a two-year journey. It tried unsuccessfully to get rid of the ash in the Bahamas. When that effort failed, the ship traveled around the Caribbean trying to find someplace else to dump its load. On October 26, 1987, the Haitian Department of Commerce issued an import permit to the Khian Sea, allowing it to dispose of the ash. The permit allowed the ship to land in Gonaives, where in January 1988 some 100 laborers started to unload the ash onto a beach just across a cove from the city.
Later that month, the Haitian government reversed the permit and ordered the ash out of Haiti, with the commerce minister declaring, "All means will be taken so that quantities dumped will be reloaded and the boat will be dealt with according to the law." But before anything could happen, the Khian Sea slipped away in the middle of the night, leaving 2000 to 5000 tons of Philadelphia's incinerator waste in a pile on the beach.
After the Khian Sea left Haiti it sailed up the East Coast and into Delaware Bay, near Philadelphia, where it dropped anchor in March. The ship was not permitted to unload the remaining ash in the city, and in May, against Coast Guard orders, the Khian Sea departed Delaware Bay. Still burdened with over 10,000 tons of Philadelphia toxic waste, it sailed to Europe, landing in Yugoslavia for repairs in July, and there changed its name to the Felicia�the vessel supposedly had been sold. Then it headed for Suez, where it claimed its next destination was the Philippines. Tracking the ship, Greenpeace alerted every country on the Indian Ocean of its possible arrival.
All countries refused it permission to land.
Finally, in November 1988, the Felicia appeared off the Singapore coast with a new name, the Pelicano, and its holds empty. Somewhere between Suez and Singapore it had unloaded its cargo at sea. In the U.S., two executives of Coastal Carriers, the firm that operated the ship, were convicted in connection with this dumping. They were found guilty of perjury after denying the dumping before a grand jury.
Meanwhile in Haiti the ash lay on the beach, blowing over the city of Gonaives and filtering into its bay. According to Greenpeace, which analyzed the ash, "it may contain as much as 210,000 pounds of toxic heavy metals, including hazardous levels of lead and cadmium that exceed legal limits and high levels of mercury and arsenic. The ash also carries significant levels of the most potent toxic chemicals known�dioxins and furans." Local protests broke out, and the government made vague promises to do something about the waste.
The voyage of the Khian Sea would become a symbol of the recklessness of the international waste trade. Its voyage helped push the international community into adopting the principles of the Basel Convention, which bans the export of hazardous waste from industrial countries to developing nations. Over 100 nations�including the U.S.�signed the treaty. It took effect in the mid '90s but was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. Nonetheless, there is a continuing effort by Greenpeace International and the Haitian Collective for the Protection of the Environment and an Alternative Development (COHPEDA) to get the U.S. to bring back the Philadelphia ash.
About a year ago, Kenny Bruno, who has tracked the ash scandal for Greenpeace since early 1988, got a call from a staff attorney at New York's Trade Waste Commission. In making a background check on a company called Eastern Environmental Services, this attorney came across what appeared to be a prior affiliation with Joseph Paolino & Sons, the Philadelphia carting company connected to the Khian Sea. And, as Bruno remembers, the commission wanted Eastern to wipe away any lingering unsavory impressions from the Haiti debacle. Bruno subsequently met with members of the commission to advise them on how best to deal with the toxic ash.
Eventually, the New York commission approached the federal EPA regional office in Philadelphia. According to a May 1, 1997, EPA memo, "the NYC hauling market is apparently lucrative enough that Paolino is seriously considering an agreement whereby his company would arrange for excavation of the ash and transport to the U.S. for disposal at one of the Eastern landfills, possible the Bender landfill near Harrisburg." The memo continues, "Based on the status of current negotiations, it appears that about two thirds of the costs of the project would be covered by Paolino."
Based in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, Eastern Environmental describes itself as a "non-hazardous solid waste management company." According to the firm's registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company was reorganized in 1996 with a management team headed by Louis D. Paolino, and embarked on an aggressive program of expansion through acquisitions, securing 17 solid- waste outfits in one year. It added firms in southern New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, northern Maryland, southern Florida, and the New York City area, where in August it won a license to haul trash. It owns landfills in Illinois, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Florida. Total revenues reached $79.6 million in 1997, up from $40 million the previous year. Most of its business is collection and transportation of trash for 135,000 residential consumers and 30,000 business customers, primarily along the East Coast.
Louis Paolino, the CEO and a principal stockholder, is the son of the late Joseph Paolino, who ran Joseph Paolino & Sons until his death in 1984. Newspaper accounts listed Louis as executive vice president of that company in 1986. However, according to Trade Waste Commission sources, there is no connection between Joseph Paolino & Sons and Eastern Environmental Services. The commission declined to comment publicly on the Haiti deal, and Paolino did not return repeated calls to the firm's office.
Joseph Paolino & Sons was fined in 1995 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for possessing radioactive materials without a license, and in October 1991 pleaded guilty in Philadelphia federal district court to charges of cheating employees out of benefits by keeping two sets of books, underreporting workers' hours, and refusing to pay union-scale wages. It currently has no address or phone number in Philadelphia, and sources in the mayor's office there say it is believed to be out of business.
When confronted with Louis Paolino's connection to the Haiti debacle, Eastern Environmental protested vehemently at first, according to commission sources. But faced with the threat of losing a lucrative license in the New York City trash market, the firm eventually came up with a cleanup plan�in early 1997. It agreed to pay $100,000 to remove the ash from Gonaives and transport it back to Pennsylvania�two-thirds of >the total cost. The toxic waste is set to be buried in the company's Bender landfill outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Disposal in the landfill represents another $250,000 or so of in-kind costs to the company. An independent environmental group in Cambridge will make a new analysis of the ash to be sure it conforms to landfill standards.
The deadline for completion of the deal is April, and it's up to Haiti to arrange for the removal and shipping. Ironically, that country's minister for the environment recently resigned. With no one running the agency, and the government in general disarray, the project has languished. In a statement to the Voice, however, the Haitian government has expressed its "major concern" about getting the mess cleaned up.
Both the city of Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania have endorsed the idea of returning the ash. However, Philadelphia has consistently refused to spend any money. Its position is that the city has no responsibility for an act undertaken by two private companies over a decade ago.
"For 10 years Philadelphia has effectively said, 'We don't care. It's not our problem,' " said Greenpeace's Bruno. "And it's taken New York City, which had nothing to do with the original scandal, to force some accountability, and still Philadelphia refuses to spend a dime. That's just disgraceful."
Research assistance: Marcia Carroll, Environmental Background Information Center