Asia Tires of Being the Toxic Waste Dumping Ground for Rest of World : Environment: A global conference in Geneva could end many recycling programs in developing nations.

At a large factory on the rutted outskirts of Manila every day, huge containers disgorge an unusual cargo--thousands of dead car batteries from such places as Australia, Europe and the Middle East.

With the politically correct-sounding name of Philippine Recyclers Inc., the factory was established in the early 1980s with tax incentives from the government to reprocess the world’s discarded auto batteries by reclaiming the lead inside and using it to make new batteries.

The company has been a big success by the standards of the economically depressed Philippines, employing 280 people to recycle 24,000 tons of car batteries every year. In 1993, sales hit a respectable $11 million.

Hundreds of similar companies have mushroomed across Asia in recent years as Western companies facing costly and environmentally sensitive waste-disposal problems at home have opted to ship much of their toxic trash overseas for reprocessing.

By one estimate, more than 100 tons of plastic, which many countries regard as toxic when burned, leaves the Port of Los Angeles every day for recycling plants in Asia. With cheap labor, economies desperate for investment and little or no regulation, countries from China to Indonesia to Pakistan scramble to compete for the waste business.

But an international conference taking place in Geneva this week could dramatically change the way the world disposes of its hazardous wastes and spell the end of companies like Philippine Recyclers. Even the term recycling , the mantra of “green” movements for the past two decades, is suddenly becoming a dirty word.

“The bottom line is, we don’t want to become the garbage dump of the world,” said Philippine Sen. Orlando S. Mercado, a leader on environmental issues. “A lot of the industries, the recycling industries that are being exported to developing countries, are dirty industries. We have enough garbage of our own.”

The Geneva meeting is designed as a follow-up to the 1989 adoption of the so-called Basel convention on international shipments of hazardous wastes, which was enacted under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Program following scandalous revelations about rich countries dumping toxic wastes in the territories of poor nations. In one famous incident, an Italian company rented a farm in Nigeria for $100 and used it to dump 4,000 tons of hazardous polyvinyl chloride wastes, or PVCs.

The Basel convention banned shipments of a long list of toxic wastes, but in the view of environmentalists it left two gaping loopholes. One is that shipments can still take place if the governments involved agree, and the second, more important exception concerns material that could be recycled.

Last month, Denmark suggested a dramatic tightening of the law, banning outright exports of hazardous wastes from the world’s richest countries to all developing countries. While Italy, Spain and 77 developing countries expressed support for the ban, some of the world’s leading industrial powers, including Britain, France and Australia, announced their opposition. That set the stage for the confrontation this week.

“It seems to our government that it is one of the worst forms of imperialism for us to want to keep a way of life in rich countries by getting rid of our waste by sending it to people who have no way of defending themselves,” said Thomas Becker, an official with Denmark’s Environment Ministry. The answer, Becker said, is for the rich countries to process the waste themselves or eliminate it.

Significantly, the United States will not have a voice in the debate because the George Bush Administration never sought ratification of the original Basel convention. So U.S. officials are attending the Geneva meeting as observers only.

Earlier this month, the Clinton Administration announced that it will introduce legislation banning exports of hazardous wastes, bringing U.S. regulations in line with the Basel convention. But the proposal exempts what are termed “safe recyclable” exports, such as plastics.

“The U.S. exports only a fraction of a percent of our hazardous waste,” said Carol Browner, the Environmental Protection Agency chief. “But that fraction adds up to a significant amount. The current policy puts people in other countries at risk of dangerous exposures to toxic materials. That has to stop.”

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who heads an environmental group called Globe USA, said that it is important for the United States to set an example to the rest of the world by adopting strict limits on toxic exports. “If the convention is to be enforced, the least we can do is follow the regulations ourselves,” Kerry said.

One of the worst examples of the United States exporting hazardous materials occurred in 1992, when a U.S. firm sold Bangladesh 6,300 tons of fertilizer that contained toxic lead and cadmium wastes from copper smelting. A U.S. court fined the company that provided the waste $1 million, but the damage was already done--more than 3,400 tons had been spread on farms and could not be removed.

Asia has become the focus of the hazardous-waste debate because many other developing countries, notably in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands, have banned imports of toxic materials. Nigeria and Cameroon have even imposed the death penalty for toxic-waste importers.

China, Taiwan and India are big importers of metals for recycling, while the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand reprocess everything from batteries to scrap paper and plastics.

One U.S. company has proposed to pay the tiny Pacific island of Tonga $9 million annually to establish a toxic-waste dump on a volcanic atoll, and an Oakland firm wants to ship trash as landfill to the low-lying Marshall Islands. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, among Asia’s poorest and least regulated countries, have received offers from a number of Western corporations about opening waste-treatment facilities.

According to the environmental group Greenpeace, between 1990 and 1993, five nations--the United States, Canada, Germany, Britain and Australia--shipped 5.4 million tons of toxic wastes to Asian countries.

A resolution this month in the Philippines’ House of Representatives on the toxic-waste issue estimated imports at 15 million pounds in 1991 and 5 million pounds in the first quarter of 1992. They were mainly plastics, scrap metal, computer junk and lead scrap.

The Philippines illustrates the often contradictory attitudes of Asian governments toward toxic wastes. While the Board of Investment has given millions of dollars in tax incentives to companies to set up recycling businesses, the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources has sent a high official to Geneva to campaign for a worldwide ban on shipments of toxic wastes for recycling.

Jacob Tagorda, president of Philippine Recyclers, the country’s leading battery recycler, said a ban on battery imports would be fatal to his company as well as two other lead reprocessors.

Tagorda said his company uses technology imported from a firm in East Los Angeles and follows every applicable health and safety regulation. He acknowledged that blood tests have shown high levels of lead in some workers’ blood but said the workers are transferred to safer jobs until the levels return to normal.

Anne Leonard, a toxic-waste specialist for Greenpeace, said that tests of workers and agricultural land near lead reprocessors, not only in the Philippines but in Indonesia and Thailand, have indicated serious health concerns created by the industries, from lead levels in topsoil to pollution of drinking water.

Similarly, Leonard said that the process of recycling plastics often releases hazardous gases and exposes workers in developing countries, who are too poor to afford protective clothing, to contamination from the chemicals contained in the plastics, such as pesticides and solvents.

Another industry that has been dramatically affected by the recent debate on recycling is the world trade in “technojunk”--computers and related devices that have been overtaken by new technology and discarded.

After Greenpeace campaigners raided a Russian ship near Manila earlier this month, the Philippine government impounded two containers of computer junk sent to an Australian-owned company that separates the valuable pieces for resale.

Randell Carman, chairman of the recycling company, said he was astonished at the government’s action because the firm had been operating with government approval for eight years. Carman said cheap labor in the Philippines made the business economically more practical than it would be in Australia, but he insisted that the work was purely mechanical and not harmful to either the workers or the environment.

Nonetheless, Raquel Vasquez, director of the government’s Environmental Management Bureau, declared the shipment toxic because it contained unacceptably high levels of the element cadmium and ordered the seized goods, which had grown to four containers by the time a decision was reached, returned to Australia.

“The Philippines has learned to live by getting its basic commodities from recycling, and they are very good at it,” Carman said. “Our business is basically finished without the imports.”