A Day In The Life Of Mother Earth : ‘Schoenberg is and remains a time bomb that must be defused.’ Matthias Voigt, <i> environmentalist</i> : European Dumps

* The Problem--Toxic Waste

* The U.N. View--”Thousands of chemicals are used in construction, industry, food production and agriculture; their improper use severely damages the environment and endangers human health and future generations.”

* The Case Study: Schoenberg--Europe has a growing problem with toxic waste dumps, and high on the hit parade of such sites is this one in former East Germany.

Petra Piechocki’s job as mayor of this time-worn little village along the old inner German frontier may be only part time, but the problems that go with it consume her life.

In an office strewn with papers and decorated by two children’s drawings carefully scotch-taped to the faded beige wallpaper, she sits impatiently and talks about the one problem in her village that interests people across Europe.

The Schoenberg dump.

“You can’t smell it today,” she says. “The wind’s taken the odor further east. But go over to Dassow. I’ve just come from there. You can smell it there real good.”

Selmsdorf, for centuries just another farm village in the sleepy backwater of western Mecklenburg, sits only a few hundred yards from the Continent’s largest garbage dump--a huge and growing mountain of domestic and industrial toxic wastes that rises behind the local school.

The dump, named after the larger town of Schoenberg a few miles east of the site, is a foul-smelling, brown canker amid the region’s gently rolling green hills.

Since the delegation of Communist officialdom came 13 years ago to tell residents how lucky they were that their village--less than a mile from the old inner-German frontier--had been chosen as the site for such an ambitious endeavor, life has never been the same.

On days when the wind doesn’t blow and the fog from the Baltic hangs thick over weather-beaten houses, the stench is overpowering. “We have no scientific proof that it’s dangerous, but you just have a feeling--call it an instinct--that it can’t be all right,” Piechocki says.

When the smell isn’t there, the noise is. Heavily loaded trucks headed for the dump often prefer to lumber along the village’s old cobbled main streets in order to avoid heavy traffic on the highway that skirts around it.

Down at one of the village’s two drinking holes, bartender Detlef Hitzigrat complains that the trucks are tearing up the streets. He applauds the dump’s management for agreeing to pay to reconstruct the village church, but he grouses about the streets and criticizes the mayor for not getting heavy traffic diverted. “We’ve put up signs to stop the trucks, but they just keep coming,” he says with a hint of exasperation.

Despite the shadow it casts, the people of Selmsdorf are split about the site.

In a region where unemployment runs at around 20%, the dump is Selmsdorf’s only real employer. What is more, the pay is good, and extras, like a subsidized cafeteria, make it a financially desirable place to work.

The village’s two collective farms went bust shortly after unification, and those who don’t work at the dump now have to commute as far as Hamburg, 70 miles away, to find a job. “Those in the village who work at the dump see things differently, but for me the site isn’t safe enough,” Piechocki says.

Others share her concern.

Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, about 4,000 protesters marched through Schoenberg and Selmsdorf demanding that the dump close. But opposition in Selmsdorf was quickly buried by more pressing concerns of economic survival.

The Schoenberg dump is a child of the now-infamous East German business dealer named Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, the man who procured hard currency to keep Erich Honecker’s Communist regime afloat.

Schalck’s business instincts were perfect.

No special technology was required of the Communist country to compete in this market. Indeed, he could offer his customers a dream deal: a vast dumping area, low prices, no protesters and no questions about the nature of the waste. Schoenberg quickly became a prominent destination for what was last year in Europe a $25-billion cross-border trade in waste.

“If you wanted a low-cost, difficult disposal, you could always get a lower bid from Schoenberg,” notes Harvey Yakowitz, a toxic waste expert at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

For over a decade, municipalities and industrial concerns from West Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe collectively dumped more than 10 million tons at Schoenberg.

Certainly much has changed at Schoenberg since the collapse of communism and Schalck’s hard currency-earning empire. Controls on waste deliveries are tighter now, as the tougher western German standards are imposed. Heyo Stormer, one of the site’s senior managers, notes that $33 million was spent last year on site improvements and another $42 million is planned for this year.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is the waste. It keeps coming.

On an average day, more than 200 trucks and 40,000 tons of waste will pass through the entrance gates before they close. Five of those trucks alone will have hauled domestic trash nearly 600 miles from the picturesque little Bavarian town of Starnberg.

Why so far? “There’s no dump here, and no site closer than Schoenberg would take us,” explained a Starnberg city official, Herbert Schwarz. Local protests have blocked Starnberg city plans to build a dump locally.

And so the trucks come.

The column of vehicles waiting to enter the dump isn’t long today, but there’s still a wait. The crew running a small chemical laboratory to test the contents of each arriving load is on its coffee break and so the truckers talk among themselves.

Two have carried loads of “bio”--biological waste--350 miles from the large German chemical company Hoechst in Frankfurt. A third is unsure what he has brought 400 miles from “beyond Amsterdam.”

For Stormer, the day has turned into a series of meetings that keep him at the site, first with internal staff to go over expansion work under way at the dump, then in the afternoon with a state government engineer. Between these sessions, he ushers two visitors into a comfortable conference room and plays a 16-minute video about the Schoenberg dump.

It is a soaring endorsement of Europe’s largest dump that begins with aerial shots of brilliant green hillsides and yellow rape-seed fields that carpet the region in spring. The narrator stresses the dump’s “air-tight” safety measures.

Stormer says some 600 copies of the video now circulate among schools and interest groups throughout Germany. It is also seen by the 4,500 people--environmentalists, politicians, waste disposal experts, teachers and schoolchildren--who tour the dump annually.

But Stormer is clearly not interested in giving visitors too close a look at the site.

A tour of the dump itself is suddenly curtailed. Time is short and, he stresses, the dump is dangerous to walk around. Members of the site staff gradually become defensive, then unpleasant, when questioned about procedure. A curtain comes down. The visit ends.

This defensive attitude stems in part from Schoenberg’s history, its location and its size--elements that, collectively, have raised doubts about safety that refuse to go away.

Stormer feels misunderstood. “Everyone thinks it’s OK to produce trash, but no one wants anything to do with it afterwards,” he says. Still, the doubts surrounding Schoenberg are considerable.

In eastern Berlin, Greenpeace environmentalist Matthias Voigt, 29, is working to close the site.

“Technically the dump is good, but only the new part,” he says. “During the East German era, conditions were bad and it was always the worst stuff that went there. Who knows what’s in the old (part of the) dump?”

In the days before East Germany’s 1989 popular revolution, Voigt could only watch work at the dump surreptitiously through binoculars from Schoenberg.

Shortly after the collapse of the Communist regime, environmentalists conducted their own preliminary tests around the site. They say they found not the impermeable clay described in a controversial, 1970 East German report but porous sand through which highly toxic wastes could easily seep into the ground water.

“Schoenberg is and remains a time bomb that must be defused,” insists Voigt.

A statement made last February by the Mecklenburg-West Pomerania state environmental minister, Petra Uhlmann, that the levels of lead and chloride pollutants in the ground water around the dump have exceeded accepted norms since 1986, only stoked local concern.

Officials at the Schoenberg dump deny their site is the cause.

Uhlmann has ordered new geological tests but refuses to shut the dump, arguing that much of the waste would only be diverted to even more questionable sites.

Talking above the noise of his two small children, 32-year-old blacksmith Christian Arendt sits in the cramped living room of his modest Schoenberg home and calls the dump the biggest threat in the region’s history.

“My family’s roots here go back 200 years,” he says. “I want my children to grow up here too, but what happens in 10 years if all that stuff reaches the ground water?”

A few miles west, just across the old inner-German frontier in the old Hanseatic port city of Luebeck, Maria Krautzberger is also worried. As the new head of the city’s Office of the Environment, she has inherited “the Schoenberg problem” that has concerned Luebeck city fathers since it was first built. With the ground water flowing slowly toward the west, any serious pollution would eventually affect Luebeck.

Relations between the city and the authorities responsible for Schoenberg have improved since the border fell, but not a whole lot.

Although no longer in a foreign country, eastern German officials resent what they see as western meddling. At the same time, Luebeck authorities express frustration at eastern inaction.

Meanwhile, Selmsdorf’s mayor Piechocki fights her own battles.

She has high hopes for a modest industrial park that has begun to take shape just west of Selmsdorf and says she has only one goal.

“In 10 years, I want to be able to go through this village with my son and be able to hold my head up and not be ashamed of what has happened,” she says. “I want to be able to say I’ve done all I can to prevent an expansion of the dump.”