Environment : Europe Has Toxic Troubles : * Waste dump woes in the United States pale beside those on the Continent, and the situation is getting worse.

Christian Kinard, who moved his wife and two children to this picturesque rural village nine years ago to escape the noise and pollution of Brussels, began to think he had made a mistake when “this horrible smell filled my house whenever I opened the window of my living room.”

For Kinard’s neighbor, Marcel Van Luyten, the trouble was in his back-yard well, where his once crystal-clear spring water turned a nauseous yellow-orange at just about the same time his trees, vegetables and rabbits began dying.

Neither had to look far for the cause. At a rate of up to one every three minutes in the mid-1980s, trucks had been dumping noxious potions of industrial waste into an old sand quarry a mile or two away from the little village of 650 people. The dump was open on top, and all that lay between it and the ground water was a layer of sand.

Mellery’s dangerous brew, which included such potent carcinogens as benzene, has not killed anyone or even, as far as can be proved, made anyone sick. But townspeople are convinced that there is a link between the landfill and everything from skin disorders to two cases of birth defects, and a national health institute found chromosomal irregularities in 40 of the 51 residents it tested.

That the Mellery landfill was allowed to happen reflects an unhappy fact about not only Belgium but most of Western Europe: As terrible as is the toxic waste problem in the United States, Europe’s is far more serious still.

Thousands of potentially leaky and dangerous dumps dot Western Europe’s charming rural landscape. Just in Wallonia, the French-speaking half of tiny Belgium, Environment Minister Guy Lutgen fears that there may be another 400 Mellerys, although not all may be so noxious.

“The United States has up to 10 years more experience in dealing with toxic dumps,” says Jean Marbehant, chief of environmental policy in Lutgen’s ministry, which ordered the Mellery landfill closed in 1989. “With the help of countries such as the U.S. and Japan, we would still need two or three years to catch up.”

Europe has nothing like the U.S. Superfund, the 11-year-old program that, at a cost of $10 billion so far, has completed the cleanups of 70 of America’s worst toxic waste dumps and begun work on another 309.

Nor, for now, does most of Europe even keep track of what is being dumped into its landfills. “I’m constantly shocked at the level of the debate here,” says Jim Puckett, an American who is Greenpeace’s waste trade coordinator in Amsterdam.

Recently, however, Europe has shown signs of confronting the problem.

The 12-nation European Community is considering a bewildering array of regulations to control the generation, transportation and disposal of hazardous industrial wastes. None is more potentially far-reaching than a proposal to hold chemical companies and other toxic waste generators legally liable for the effects of their wastes on the public health, even if it is someone else’s leaky landfill that exposes the public to those wastes.

Some countries, notably the Netherlands, have already imposed stiff regulations of their own. One effect has merely been the export of hazardous wastes to places with weaker controls; many of the trucks that unloaded their poisonous cargo into the Mellery sand pit, for example, bore Dutch license plates.

To prevent a repetition, Wallonia has passed one law requiring that toxic wastes be treated before they are dumped and another that bans the import of some hazardous wastes. The European Community, even as it presses for tougher regulation of toxic waste dumps in its 12 member countries, has challenged the import ban in the European Court of Justice as a restraint of trade.

“Sometimes we can’t figure out the EC,” says Wallonia’s Marbehant. “At the same time that they’re trying to regulate waste dumps more tightly, they’re trying to make it harder for us.”

Without protections such as Belgium’s, Greenpeace’s Puckett fears that waste will cascade from the rich countries such as Germany and the Netherlands to their poor cousins--Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Any hit parade of Western Europe’s most infamous dumps would have to include the following:

* Almaden, Spain. Greenpeace says at least 25 chemical companies from 11 countries, including the United States, dumped 11,000 tons of mercury-laced wastes during the 1980s in a mine in this remote district of central Spain.

* Montchanin, France. Admired by experts in the 1980s as Europe’s most modern facility, the dump was closed in 1988 after dioxin, a potent carcinogen contained in waste smuggled from Germany, leaked into the city’s soil, air and water.

* Vorketzin, Germany. Since 1974, West Germany has dumped millions of tons of wastes at this site in the former East Germany, creating a 50-foot-high mountain of garbage. Nearby ground water has been contaminated with ammonia, nitrates and phosphates.

The cost of protecting the public from the poisons at these sites, and at thousands of others in Western Europe, could be astronomical. At Mellery alone, the Wallonian government expects ultimately to lay out nearly $6 million--or one-fifth of one year’s environmental budget.

“It’s worse than in the United States,” says Henri Aboutboul, director of chemicals for Waste Management Europe, a subsidiary of the giant Chicago-based firm that is prospecting in Western Europe for a piece of the cleanup action. “The cost far exceeds the ability of any government to pay for it.”

West Germany alone had 50,000 sites that could use some remedial work, says Aboutboul, and unification with East Germany added another 15,000 to 20,000. In all of Western Europe, he estimates, the cost of a proper cleanup is from $200 billion to $500 billion.

Even the European Community does not have that kind of money. But it does have the authority to make industry pay for cleanups wherever the responsible parties can be identified.

The pending liability regulation, which would hold the generator of toxic wastes strictly liable for any damage, “is to apply the principle that the polluter must pay,” says Carlo Ripa di Meana, the EC’s environmental commissioner. Only this approach, he says, will force companies to minimize their production of hazardous wastes and take care that whatever wastes they produce are shipped and burned or buried safely.

Industry argues that it is incentive enough to be legally responsible for wastes while they are in the “operational control” of their producer. “When you kill a person in your car, is Mercedes responsible?” Guy Thiran, technical affairs adviser for the European Chemical Industry Council, asks rhetorically.

“This is quite a radical change for Europe,” says Simon Carroll of Greenpeace’s Brussels office. It would bring European law close to the American, he says, although it would not allow for the enormous punitive damages that U.S. courts sometimes award.

In other respects, the EC regulation would actually outstrip U.S. practice. James Cameron, director of the Center for International Environmental Law in London, notes approvingly that it would hold toxic waste generators responsible for damages not only to individuals and property but also to “the environment” generally.

And as in the United States, Cameron says, liability could also be assigned to waste transporters and inadequate waste disposal facilities--and even to banks that lent them money.

“For industry, the prospect of Greenpeace taking them to court, or mobilizing a community to clean up their dump and then sending them the bill, is terrifying,” Cameron says.

Further, the proposed regulation would set up an insurance fund, fed by taxes on toxic waste generators, to be used if no responsible party for an abandoned waste dump could be found. To Greenpeace’s Carroll, that approach echoes the U.S. Superfund, which is replenished by a combination of industry levies and congressional appropriations.

The EC proposal is not law yet. Although it has cleared most of the EC’s many bureaucratic hurdles, it must still be approved in final form by the environmental ministers of a majority of the 12 EC nations. Then the 12 national parliaments must enact it into law.

Regardless of when the regulation finally takes force, it will be too late for Mellery because, unlike U.S. law, it is not retroactive.

The Mellery landfill, operated by the small Belgian firm Sablieres Reunies on land leased from local farmers, covers about 20 acres and is up to 50 feet deep.

After closing the dump in 1989, the Wallonian government hired a contractor to clean it up. “We figured we would just make matters worse by digging up the waste,” says Bernard Deltour, a legal adviser in Wallonia’s environmental ministry. “Besides, what would we do with it after we dug it up?”

The contractor installed a network of underground pipes to collect fumes and burn them before they could reach the open air. The firm says that operation has slashed the benzene level in town from 20 times the level in Brussels to one-tenth of that level. Next on the agenda is a pump to extract contaminated ground water before it can reach the town.

Kinard, a tax adviser who heads the Mellery citizens who organized against the landfill, is grateful that he can now safely open his living room window. But the damage to the town and its people, he says, can never be undone.

“Who,” he wonders, “would want to move to Mellery today?”

Researcher Isabelle Maelcamp in Brussels contributed to this story.

Waste Land Twenty-nine of Europe’s most hazardous waste dumps, as identified by the environment activist group Greenpeace.

Austria

1- Fischer Deponie, near town of Wiener Neustadt

2- Floepzersteig, in Vienna

Belgium

3- Mellery (south of Brussels)

4- Hoge Maey, in Antwerp

Britain

5- Rechem, in town of Pontypool, South Wales

6- Walsall (that’s a town in the West Midlands)

Denmark

7- Klintholm, on island of Fun, town of Nuborn, in northeast part of country

France

8- Montchanin (a town southeast of Paris)

9- Menneville (a town in the Nord Pas-de-Calais)

Germany (former West)

10- Georgswerder (near Hamburg)

11- Muenchehagen (in Lower Saxony), 30 miles northwest of Hanover

Germany (former East)

12- Vorketzin (near Berlin)

13- Schoeneiche, 20 miles southeast of Berlin

Ireland

14- Kinsdale Road, in Cork (southern Ireland)

15- Kyletalisha (county of Laois in the Irish Midlands, 4 miles from Port Laoise, 70 mi. southwest of Dublin)

Italy

16- Farmoplant (in Massa)

17- Ecomovil, in Santa Anastasia (near Naples)

Greece

18- Schistos (in or near Piraeus)

19- Ano Liosia (in or near Athens)

Luxembourg

20- Ronnebierg, near town of Differdange

Netherlands

21- Nekkerkerk, near Rotterdam

22- Afval Terminal Moerdijk, near town of Moerdijk

Norway

23- Rayon site (near Valberg)

Spain

24- Almaden, near Ciudad Real

Sweden

25- Stockvik, near Sundsvall

Switzerland

26- Koelliken, near Aaragau district, near town of Aarau

27- Baerengraben, near Koelliken, between Zurich and Basle along Rhine River

28- Bonfol (60 km from Basel near France)

29- Lonza, in town of Visp