Frontline is made possible by the financial support of viewers like you, and by the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting.
Let me ask you a question, okay?
All right, so now you have 2,000 tons of a pesticide that's been produced in America,
okay?
Still on sale in the rest of the world.
Now what do you want it to do?
You want it to be buried in America, or do you want it to be sold in a third world country
so 2,000 tons less of that product is produced worldwide?
Which would you prefer?
Tonight, a Frontline special report on America's toxic trade.
How much waste is traveling south?
Well, it's hard to say.
Journalist Bill Moyers reveals America's dirty secret, hazardous exports to the third
world.
Ford Motor, Exxon, General Motors, aside from the government, they all sold this material.
This waste is on the move, crossing oceans and international borders, turning the earth
into a global dumping ground.
From the network of public television stations, a presentation of KCTS Seattle, WNET New York,
WTBT Miami, WTVS Detroit, and WGBH Boston, this is Frontline, a special report.
Global Dumping Ground is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and
KQED San Francisco.
The Keon Sea, a toxic flying Dutchman, is wandering the Caribbean.
Right now, I am on the Caribbean, waiting for orders.
I don't know what will be my final destination.
The captain is looking for a place to dump 13,000 tons of incinerator ash.
His cargo is the byproduct of Philadelphia's municipal garbage, and it's laced with lead,
chromium, and other toxic heavy metals.
In February of 1988, the Keon Sea leaves Philadelphia, bound for the Bahamas.
At night entry, the ship sails on to Bermuda, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Panama,
and finally docks in Haiti.
When the crew begins offloading some of the ash, a representative of the owners tries
to demonstrate that the ship's cargo is harmless.
This is how worried I am of its toxicity.
Haitian officials are not impressed.
They order the ship to weigh anchor, and it does, leaving behind 3,000 tons of ash.
The Keon Sea heads back toward Philadelphia, then turns east, sailing across the Atlantic,
the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean.
After 18 months at sea, the ship is sighted at anchor off Singapore, its hold empty.
The Odyssey of the Keon Sea focused the world's attention on a new global threat, the international
traffic in hazardous waste.
Much of that waste comes from us, the United States.
We generate 500 million tons of hazardous and toxic waste every year, ten times any
other nation.
It's a growing business, and it's reaping millions of dollars in profits.
In this program, the result of two years of research by the Center for Investigative Reporting,
will follow a toxic trail around the globe.
Much of that trade is legal, but not all by any means.
Case in point, a discovery in the southern African nation of Zimbabwe involving the shipment
of these barrels that led investigators to this warehouse in Mount Vernon, New York.
It was a classic con game, a multimillion dollar scam with a toxic twist.
The con men, these two brothers, Jack and Charles Colbert, are now in federal prison.
There they talked with my colleague, producer Lowell Bergman.
We're basically pioneers in not the recycling, but in the surplus chemical business.
We were, in a sense, innovators ahead of the times, because what you had was a whole definition
in the environmental area that isn't really defined yet.
And we were the victims of that.
The business created by Jack Colbert and his brother Charles, a law school graduate, involved
100 countries, mostly in the third world, and it made the brothers very rich, generating
over 180 million dollars in sales.
We did between 8 and 10 million dollars a year for 15 years.
In some years we did as much as 15 or 20 million dollars.
The Colbert's discovered that they could take barrels of chemicals, banned by the U.S. government
for sale in this country, or classified as hazardous waste here in the U.S., and then
turn around and sell them overseas for a profit.
Charlie Colbert remembers their first deal.
Because somebody called me up and gave me five truckloads of material from a military
base and we ended up selling it for 80,000 dollars.
That's why we were in the surplus chemical business, and that's why it was symbiotic
for both us and the society.
Symbiotic for us and the society.
What do you mean?
It was beneficial to us because we found a way to be competitive, and it was beneficial
for the society because we were helping solve a problem.
Instead of chemicals going in the ground and costing a lot of money for disposal, they
were being reused a second time.
And most of the chemicals-
Not being reused a second time.
They were being used.
Used a second-
They had never been used the first time.
That was the whole thing.
I mean, if material isn't used, okay, it's virgin material still on the drum, why bury
a drum of good product?
But what Jack Colbert calls good product, the Justice Department calls toxic waste.
The Colbert brothers were to toxic waste, what the James brothers were to bank robbery.
They were the best known, at least among the people who enforced the environmental laws
in this country, violators of those laws.
James DeVita, a former assistant United States attorney, prosecuted the Colbert brothers'
case.
He says the Colbert's catalog of products came from corporations that did not want to
pay the high cost of disposing of their surplus chemicals, chemicals that would otherwise
be classified as toxic waste.
So they bought toxic waste at a discount-
Or got it for free in many instances.
Just to get rid of it.
Yeah.
And then they sold it at a profit.
Exactly.
I mean, look at this, weren't you looking at a loophole-
In fact, the Colbert brothers advertised for chemicals that, quote, were no longer approved
by the EPA in the United States.
There was a lot of products that were not approved by the EPA that are still in use
in the entire world.
Now, you're going to come out and you're going to say that our EPA knows better than 165
other countries in the world?
Is that what you're saying?
So you don't feel any moral responsibility, whether or not it was illegal, for shipping
these chemicals overseas?
You're asking me a question.
Am I sorry that I sold chemicals to the third world?
No.
Let me ask you a question, okay?
All right, so now you have 2,000 tons of a pesticide that's been produced in America,
okay, still on sale in the rest of the world.
Now what do you want it to do?
You want it to be buried in America, or do you want it to be sold in a third world country?
Which would you prefer?
And the supply available to the Colberts of old, banned, and unwanted chemicals that would
have to be buried here as expensive hazardous waste had no limit.
After all, who would pay to dispose of banned pesticides like DDT when someone was willing,
legally, to take them off your hands?
The list of suppliers to the Colberts included state agencies, the federal government, including
the Pentagon, and...
Ford Motor, Exxon, General Motors, aside from the government, most of the major corporations,
DuPont, ICI, Selenese.
They all sold this material.
John Edison in New York, Detroit Edison, you know.
Jack Colbert says he was just a middleman, providing a service to corporate America.
What I've done is marketing.
See, DuPont and a lot of these companies could have sold the material overseas themselves,
but the thing is they're not set up with the marketing for it.
But it was the Colberts' marketing practices that proved to be their downfall.
The Colberts would advertise worldwide, and in response to orders paid for in advance,
ship what they claimed were pure chemicals at bargain basement prices.
It was this order from the southern African nation of Zimbabwe that would send them to
prison.
The order was for $53,000 in dry cleaning fluid and solvents.
But the federal government would prove that the Colberts knowingly ship not dry cleaning
fluid, but these drums instead, filled with a toxic waste.
The Colberts say they themselves were defrauded by one of their regular suppliers, this now
defunct waste disposal company in Cleveland, Ohio, with its own history of fines and fires.
I mean, I paid Alchemtron different prices for different drums, and no matter what I
paid Alchemtron, I got the same thing.
I got garbage.
What they called garbage was really toxic waste and cost the Colberts 60 cents per gallon.
They turned around and charged $2.60 per gallon to the customer in Zimbabwe.
What the Colberts did not know was that the company in Zimbabwe got the U.S. dollars to
pay for the chemicals from a U.S. foreign aid program, taxpayer money.
There's an emblem on the mural that says poison.
The other emblem, ironically, is the AID emblem, which we place on commodities that are financed
by the U.S. government.
And what does it say?
Hands clasped, United States of America.
It was this symbol that would result in Al Rossi, who works for the Inspector General's
office of the Agency for International Development, being assigned to investigate when the customer
in Zimbabwe complained that Colbert chemicals turned out to be 200 barrels of poison.
As you can see in the photograph, the barrel appears to have been eaten out from the inside.
That's to say that the material, in addition to being toxic, was very corrosive.
This recycled chlorinated salt mixture.
Toxic.
Toxic.
Hazardous.
Hazardous.
Dangerous.
Dangerous.
Rossi tracked the shipment of toxic, corrosive chemical waste that arrived in Zimbabwe back
to New York to Jack and Charles Colbert, who were doing hazardous business here as well
as overseas.
Rossi would soon learn that he wasn't the only one on the Colbert Brothers Trail.
In effect, they were on a lot of most haunted lists.
The environmental agencies in the Northeast Corridor, state and federal, had either investigations
or open files on the Colbert's.
And their concern was, how do we stop these people?
How do we get them off the streets?
The trail from Zimbabwe led Rossi to this warehouse just north of New York City, the
Colbert Brothers headquarters.
Here he discovered why the Colbert's business had attracted so much attention.
They would acquire this material, they would store it in a warehouse.
They would attempt to sell off whatever they could from what they acquired, and what was
left over, they would leave in the warehouse, and they would abandon the warehouse.
Leaving the toxic waste in the warehouse?
Leaving the toxic waste material in the abandoned warehouse.
The Colbert's warehouses of abandoned waste had become a clear and present danger to the
local authorities.
Henry Campbell is a fire chief in the town of Mount Vernon, where the Colbert's had set
up shop.
In May of 84, they had a spill outside, a chemical spill of a pesticide, insecticide,
that ran down into the sewer.
How many of your men were hospitalized?
31 police and fire officers.
31?
The Colbert's stored chemicals in 80 warehouses from Texas to the Canadian border.
After one fire in this warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, authorities found explosive materials,
materials they had to get rid of themselves.
Never had a fire, we never had a chemical accident, and there were no tests that showed
that any material was anything but virgin material, out of all the accusations.
Accusations against the Colbert's expanded to include arms dealing, as well as a slew
of civil complaints from customers in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Everybody was happy.
People weren't complaining.
The paint was paint, the solvents were solvents.
What about India?
India.
In India, we had nothing to do with it.
As a matter of fact, somebody in Zimbabwe wasn't happy.
All right, well, Zimbabwe, of course, I don't know what happened.
Never knew the material was the wrong stuff.
I would have never shipped it.
In 1986, the Colbert's were brought to trial after Al Ross's investigation of their shipment
to Zimbabwe.
They were convicted of 27 counts of mail and wire fraud and obstruction of justice.
In July of 86, they were sentenced, each brother was sentenced to serve 13 years.
They were remanded that day and taken directly to prison.
If the federal government had not been involved, if taxpayer dollars had not been used in Zimbabwe,
do you think it's conceivable they would have gotten away with this?
Yes, I do.
In fact, the conviction of the Colbert's was the exception rather than the rule.
The prosecutors, to get the Colbert's off the streets, had to use the mail fraud statutes,
not environmental law.
To date, just the cleanup of the Colbert brothers' warehouses has cost U.S. taxpayers tens of
millions of dollars.
And that hazardous waste they shipped to Zimbabwe, no one is sure whether it simply evaporated
or was dumped.
One thing is certain, Zimbabwe has no facility for handling toxic waste.
It's not just con men like the Colbert's who are shipping harmful waste overseas.
The legal export of waste is approved, even encouraged by our government.
In fact, there's very little control.
If you want to ship hazardous waste overseas, you simply have to contact an official at
the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington named Wendy Greeter.
Under our regulations, exporters of hazardous waste who propose to make international shipments
must notify the EPA in advance of those shipments.
EPA then takes that information and sends it to the government of the receiving country.
Greeter's concern is that if the receiving country agrees to accept the shipment of the
hazardous waste, she can do nothing to stop it.
I get calls all of the time from all over the country with people interested in sending
toxic waste, garbage, municipal incinerator ash, and now uranium contaminated soil.
We had a proposal to send millions and millions of drums of all kinds of stuff, creosote,
solvents, paint waste, pesticides, contaminated oil, to the Congo for disposal.
We made our notification, obviously with some concern, but we were obligated to do it.
The Congo came back and said yes, and we had to issue a consent to the exporter.
You did not have the authority to say no, even though you had doubts about the sending
of this stuff.
That's correct.
You had to say yes.
We had to say yes.
Finally, this is a plan that someone made an independent decision about in the Congo,
never telling the president.
When the president heard of it, he immediately called the whole thing off.
Wendy Greeter can only regulate what is defined as hazardous waste by this law, the Resource
Recovery and Conservation Act.
Donald Clay, an assistant administrator at the EPA, is in charge of defining hazardous
waste under that law.
Is a regulatory cuckoo land of definition.
By Ricker you mean?
Resource Recovery and Conservation Act, which is our basic hazardous waste statute in the
United States, is very complex.
We believe that we have five people in the agency understand what hazardous waste is.
What's hazardous one year isn't hazardous, it wasn't hazardous yesterday, it's hazardous
tomorrow, because we've changed the rules, and so we've now added more expansive.
Some rules have to be adopted by states before they're hazardous.
You have a waste that in one state is hazardous and when it moves to another state it's not
hazardous because they haven't adopted a rule yet.
It's a legal statutory framework rather than a logical based on concentration and threat
type of thing.
The law Donald Clay says is so illogical exempts from regulation some very hazardous waste
like used lead acid batteries.
Over 70 million batteries like the one under the hood of your car are discarded in the
United States every year.
In this country they are considered dangerous, so the U.S. has a sophisticated system for
gathering and then recycling them.
The acid and lead in the batteries are toxic, hazardous, and corrosive.
In fact, lead is considered the number one toxic threat to children by the American Academy
of Pediatrics.
But under EPA rules, if the battery is not broken it is not classified as hazardous waste.
So when the world demand for lead goes up, when money can be made, millions of lead acid
batteries leave the country unregulated and no one is notified or warned.
They wind up in recycling plants in Canada and Mexico and Brazil.
And they go west to Asia, to South Korea, India, mainland China.
Millions of lead acid batteries wind up on the island nation of Taiwan.
Jammed with 20 million people, Taiwan has sustained massive economic growth with the
help of cheap labor and no environmental regulation.
The boom has made its mammoth port the third largest container facility in the world.
And it was here that we found shipments of batteries arriving from the United States.
Most of these batteries are sent nearby to the largest lead smelter in Asia.
Dr. Michael Rabinowitz, a geochemist from the Harvard Medical School, is a leading authority
on the toxic effects of lead.
Dr. Rabinowitz was in Taiwan trying to determine an international standard for lead levels
in human beings.
In the case of workers, you can have a nerve damage, usually peripheral nerve damage.
Also kidney damage, high blood pressure, gout, nephritis, a leaking of the kidney so protein
and sugar appears in the urine.
Some workers, depending on what else they're exposed to, will develop kidney cancers.
And says Dr. Rabinowitz, the workers have lead levels that put them at high risk for
developing nerve problems as well, the result of conditions that would not be allowed in
the United States.
Lead's toxic effects are most noticeable in the behavior and learning ability of young
children.
At this school, downwind from that lead smelter, Dr. Rabinowitz found dangerous levels of
lead in these children.
Children who live near the smelter up in northern Taiwan, it's interesting.
These children seem to have lower IQs according to how much lead they're exposed to.
The children Dr. Rabinowitz is talking about used to attend kindergarten here at what was
a preschool.
It was evacuated.
This was the source of the children's contamination.
The ACME battery recycling plant, which imports lead acid batteries from the United States.
The contamination was not limited to the children.
Out of 64 workers who came to our examination, totally 31 who can be, make a diagnosis of
that poisoning.
Dr. Wang Zhengde is one of three occupational safety and health doctors practicing in Taiwan.
It was his investigation that exposed and documented the health threat posed by the
battery plant to the workers and children.
This plant is producing damage to both workers and also the community people.
To the workers, very severe, to the community people, it depends on your opinion.
I consider IQ is one of the most important thing.
We are lack of resources other than people.
We have to take care of our people.
In February of 1990, Dr. Wang released his report on the poisoning of the workers and
children.
There was an outcry in Taiwan.
The ACME plant closed, reopened, and closed again when we came for a visit.
And these two local residents told us that when the plant was running, it didn't just
devastate people.
There is a bad smell here.
The water is not good.
All the plants are dying and the vegetables do not grow.
The businessmen are greedy.
They only want to make money, they do not care.
In 1989, a Blue Ribbon Commission predicted that if Taiwan continues to ravage its environment,
it will be uninhabitable by the year 2000.
For many, the polluted future is now.
Whole school, yes, whole class is here.
In some area, because they burned scrap metal.
In some school, they still didn't even use a mask in the daytime, in the classroom.
It caused too much problem for them, you know.
Dr. Eugene Chin is head of Taiwan's new Environmental Protection Agency.
He says that an especially noxious form of air pollution has developed in his country.
It's been traced to this industry, the processing of tons of scrap of non-ferrous metal garbage.
Seventy percent of this scrap junk comes from the United States, where it is not classified
as hazardous.
This, says Dr. Chin, is recycling at its worst.
Definitely, the scrap metal business is no good for our country's health, for the people,
because it caused so much problem in the air pollution, water pollution, and it's very
serious damage to our rivers.
This is Dr. Chin's primary target, the scrap processing zone.
Processing this waste is a form of mining for metals from aluminum to gold.
It's an industry made hazardous by the way it handles the waste.
Burning the insulation around cable to get to the copper wire, putting dioxins and other
poisons into the air, it's an industry that thrives on the absence of environmental controls.
Taiwan got no natural resources, no pure metals, no copper, no aluminum.
Even in Taiwan, Joseph Chin is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and until recently, the biggest
supplier of what is known as breakage, non-ferrous scrap from the U.S. to Taiwan's processing
zones.
People call me the king of scrap metals from the far east.
Despite the new EPA in Taiwan, Joe Chin says a variety of hazardous materials is still
entering the country here at the processing zone, everything from PCBs to asbestos.
A large part of this waste is computer scrap, crushed computers, computers from manufacturers
in the United States like IBM and Hewlett Packard.
They've acknowledged that they were shipping here through people like Joe Chin to avoid
the high cost of disposal back home.
Company in the United States support to pay the money and dispose them.
Instead of spending money to dispose them, they sell it to Taiwan and make it their profit.
So they don't have to worry about it?
No.
What was a drain on their money becomes profitable.
Yes.
Yes.
You are right.
Joe Chin says he understands the government's new concern with the environment, and that
his lucrative business in Taiwan is coming to an end.
The government want to stop this.
I think they have some reason to.
So you understand why they're doing this?
Yes.
But what Joe Chin understands is not, according to Dr. Chin, understood in Washington.
Our country raised the issue that we stop the import of the scrap metal to Taiwan.
And to our surprise, the U.S. government, they say because of free trade, each country
must accept the other country's export.
So the U.S. government wants to pressure you.
What word would you use?
To open the door for the scrap metal into this country.
Even though you are telling them it's causing health problems here.
And after some negotiations later, we have factually said, no, we cannot accept more
scrap metal to this country.
The United States government's decision to exempt batteries and non-ferrous scrap from
controls to keep them off the hazardous waste list was apparently motivated by both politics
and profit.
When we were drafting our legislation, we were not going to exempt it.
And the Bureau of Mines came in and said, you can't do this.
We've got tons and tons, thousands of tons of scrap metal with economic value going to
— and they rattled off, you know, 20 or 30 countries.
And what happened?
We exempted scrap metal.
They won.
You lost.
Well, OMB won.
The president's budget bureau.
Yes.
They took the position you should send it.
Yes.
The U.S. Department and the USTR, trade representative, and the Council on Economic Advisors.
So Dr. Chen in Taiwan was right.
The government is urging scrap metal be bought as —
Well, let's see, I don't know that we're urging, but we're not hindering.
The administration's policy of free trade and waste is defended by Wendy Greeter's
bosses at the EPA.
But isn't this a case where it's best to be safe than sorry that we shouldn't take
any chances with this stuff?
Well, yes, to some degree, and we have air to tend on the side of public safety, but
on the other hand, we have to compete in international markets, and it doesn't do us any good to
be over-controlling waste and not really a problem, more to make sure it would be nice
if we had just control, just the right amount of control.
You don't make me feel like we're on this problem.
I think we are.
We're making progress.
I don't mean to be pessimistic.
Perhaps some of my own frustration is coming through trying to find hazardous waste, but
it is very difficult.
What's recycling?
How do you know when something's recycling when it's not recycling?
Because Taiwan's EPA has cracked down, Joe Chin has stopped shipping scrap to Taiwan
from this yard in San Jose, California.
But every day all over the U.S., thousands of tons of scrap like this are piling up.
If it is not exported, it has to be dumped here in the U.S., and that costs money.
When you dump stuff in a dumping place, you've got to pay them.
You've got to pay, you've got to pay.
So people are talking about Malaysia or Singapore or Pakistan or India or Philippines, but I
think the best place right now is in China.
Most of Chin's scrap is shipped from San Francisco, the broken, leftover, and obsolete technology
of the first world bound by sea for a dump site in the third world.
Joe Chin's new processing operation is in the People's Republic of China, in the countryside
in Guangdong province.
The scrap is trucked through farmlands to Chin's processing yard.
I'm one of the pioneers, I think I'm the biggest process in China regarding the scrap
metals.
The reason I set up this yard here mainly is because very low cost labor, less than
$22 a day, and you can see that the work is as hard as anybody else in the world.
And you've had how many containers come in so far?
So far we have 110 containers in 39 days.
According to Chin and officials of the People's Republic of China who talked to us, the Chinese
government, desperate for foreign exchange, hard currency, charges $50 U.S. dollars for
every ton dumped here.
In return, they supply the workers and facility.
Joe Chin makes money by selling the reclaimed metal, like aluminum, on the world market.
And we are request to ship all the finishing products out of this country.
Joe Chin is candid about the lack of environmental restrictions and regulations in Communist
China.
I got a feeling the government is only care about the fund, the money.
And I don't seem to realize the problem yet.
No.
Well, this one says back here it says toxic material, right, you know, this kind of material
we have, we put them all together in the drum and we bury in our dish over there.
So it'll be safe.
Yeah, okay.
Show us the dish.
Yes, sir.
Joe Chin insists that despite the indifference of the Chinese Communist government, he is
trying to be environmentally responsible.
I don't think you can see much, many houses around, okay, so I think I can make the best
use of this area.
Now you can see from there all the way around back there, we are going to use this as a
Tongtai garbage dumping place.
By the time we bury all this, bury all our waste and garbage up to the level, maybe three
years later.
After our visit in April 1990, Joe Chin opened two more processing yards in China, and other
agencies of the government of China are actively soliciting waste of all kinds from the United
States.
On the face of it, what's wrong with our shipping waste to third world countries willing to
take it?
In Asia alone, our research turned up shipments to Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and
Pakistan.
But the question it would seem is whether we bear any responsibility for the environmental
effects of our waste on their citizens, especially when we know that their countries have neither
the technology nor the money to dispose of hazardous materials properly.
The place we confronted that question most vividly was right next door in Mexico.
On the U.S.-Mexican border, there are nearly 2,000 factories called maquiladores.
Recycling electronic components, recycling lead acid batteries from the United States.
They come here for cheap labor, and in part because the environmental regulations in Mexico
are so poorly enforced.
Most of the companies are American or Japanese, and they're supposed to dispose of the hazardous
waste they create by shipping them back across the border.
Some do, but many don't.
There are only records from around five or eight maquiladoras in Tijuana shipping back
their waste.
It could be more than that.
The problem is that EPA customs, U.S. customs, or Mexican customs, as they do it, they don't
have records or they don't have a control on what is actually coming across the border,
legally or illegally.
Roberto Sanchez, who teaches at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana, is an expert
in hazardous waste disposal and the maquiladores.
This is waste from those maquiladoras being returned to the United States.
Sanchez says it's but a small fraction of what is produced by the foreign factories.
If they are not dumping it legally, if they are not recycling it legally, if they are
not shipping it back to the United States as though obliged them to do it, our big question
is where is the waste?
Part of the answer, Sanchez says, is that hazardous waste winds up here in the Tijuana
municipal dump and in the antiquated and overflowing sewer system.
Testing all along the border has turned up evidence that hazardous waste is being disposed
of inside Mexico, threatening the water supply, the health of its people.
Evidence that toxics are being poured down the drain.
What goes in that drain comes out here.
It's some of the water from the factories and it's laden with heavy metals and toxics
that move down this hill into the well water of a working class neighborhood in Tijuana.
Well water is the only all purpose water supply for many of the people who live in the area.
Juan Lopez is the owner of this well.
Sometimes the water comes out black, sometimes yellow, and it looks like paint.
Local residents say their children suffer from that water, and this, another stream
of waste water from those factories flows down the hill, through the streets, and past
the local school.
In the skin they get some like costras, sores, yeah, and the dogs drink the water and the
hair, take it out, you know, and I think it's a big problem.
Dr. Juan Sanchez-Leon works in the local clinic.
The water that comes down from the factories is one of the main causes of sickness here.
It's a source of contamination which creates many illnesses.
The water pollution is compounded by the lack of plumbing here, and the residents use discarded
chemical containers to store their wash water, barrels from the maquiladora factories, barrels
that originally contained toxic chemicals trucked in from the United States.
We went back up the hill to the factories in search of the source of contamination,
and here where the sewer overflows we found this American-owned maquiladora, a battery
recycling operation that imports from the United States.
Senor Reynaldo Kahn is the manager of the facility.
And the acid and the things that are beside your building that has nothing to do with...
We don't have any acid here.
No sulfuric acid in the batteries?
It's all recycled, yeah.
It's coming to stainless steel tanks and is sold back to battery manufacturers, yeah.
Plastic is recycled, lead is recycled.
But then how does all this stuff get in the river here?
That's what they're trying to find out.
Not you.
Not me.
Although he denied complicity, Reynaldo Kahn confirmed that people in the village were getting
sick from the waste water flowing down the hill.
The head of this household is Senor Rosa Devor Rizzo, a grandmother.
Everything is contaminated.
When we bathe we get a lot of itching, rashes appear, a lot of itching and our hair falls
out.
If I were one of the owners of the maquiladoras and I had come down and were sitting here
talking to you, what would you tell me?
I would tell them to be considerate of the people living below the hill and not to dump
any more contaminated water our way.
If we had plumbing and running water, that would be wonderful.
We and our children wouldn't be suffering from the itching on our bodies.
I'd say to that that I understand, but I do provide jobs for your people.
I put you to work.
It is good that they provide jobs for us and our sons and daughters for our welfare.
But if they give us jobs on the one hand and on the other, we are sick.
That is a problem.
But the threat to Senor Devor's family is not just from the maquiladoras next door.
It also comes from 120 miles north in Los Angeles where most of California's toxic waste
is produced.
Because of tough enforcement there and skyrocketing disposal costs, a flow of toxic and hazardous
waste is going south.
I wouldn't call it a trickle, I wouldn't call it a flood.
I think it's more of a steady stream.
Bill Carter is a lead prosecutor with the Environmental Crime Strike Force in Los Angeles.
I think to some people involved in the generation and transportation of hazardous waste, Mexico
is a large open area that they can use as a dump, a landfill, to take their waste down
there and forget about it.
To them, Mexico is just a big trash can.
In fact, the waste flow south has included everything from poisons and percentages like
PCBs to the solvents and ink from printing plants of the major Southern California newspaper.
And when we crossed the border into Tijuana, a city of some two million people, we found
hazardous waste from the United States stored right in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
Sources in Tijuana told us about a shipment of barrels from Los Angeles which led us to
a pottery shed, to a cache of hazardous waste.
Scores of barrels filled with used solvents like toluene, old paint, and poisons smuggled
into Mexico.
Experts told us Tijuana's neighborhoods are laced with barrels of waste like these, barrels
that have gone down the toxic trail to Tijuana.
The intentional disposal of hazardous waste is no less harmful than someone planting a
bomb somewhere.
This bomb may not go off in a minute or a second or an hour, it may go off 20 years
from now.
But it's no less serious than someone planting a bomb, it's a time bomb.
Most of these barrels of waste came from this aluminum company in Los Angeles.
We hired an individual to transport the hazardous waste to a disposal facility.
We paid him what we would have paid any legitimate transporter, and he deforted us.
And the individual was?
Ray Franco.
Ray Franco was a hazardous waste hauler with a criminal history.
Franco declined our invitation to talk on camera.
But this man, David Torres, a Mexican trucker who hauled the waste across the border, did
agree to talk.
Let's go to the back of the building, pick up the drums, and that's it.
You just go to the back of the building?
Yes, with Franco.
With Ray Franco.
You trusted him?
Well, I never think, you know, I don't know, I do something illegal.
How much would he give you for a drum?
$20 for a drum.
$30 for a drum?
Yes.
Uh-huh.
Torres transported the drums to his pottery shed in Tijuana.
Did anyone ever check to see what you were carrying in your truck?
No, I never.
I never.
No highway patrol?
Well, no, never, never.
The customs in Mexico?
No, no.
That informants tipped off Bill Carter's Los Angeles-based environmental crime strike
force to the Franco-Torres smuggling operation.
We put Mr. Franco under surveillance, and the first day he was under surveillance we
saw him engaged in an activity that we believe to be suspicious.
The investigation led to that pottery shed touching off an unprecedented international
law enforcement operation.
The FBI and the California Highway Patrol were allowed access to Torres's shed by
Mexican authorities.
It was a landmark, the first time U.S. environmental laws have been used to charge anyone with
international trafficking in hazardous waste.
We have complete cooperation with the government of Mexico on this case.
On the 9th of May, 1990, a federal grand jury indicted Raymond Franco and David Torres.
Raymond Franco was arrested, and his case is still pending in federal court in Los Angeles.
And David Torres, after the indictment, decided not to return to the United States.
He is in Mexico, where he remains a fugitive.
We think the major problem now is with the Mexican border.
Two thousand miles, and let's face it, drugs are being smuggled in.
Why can't hazardous wastes be smuggled out?
And that's exactly what's happening.
Bill Baker is in charge of all criminal investigations at FBI headquarters in Washington.
He says environmental crimes, and illegal exports in particular, are a new priority
for the FBI.
When I go to the post office now, I see the old most wanted signs, white collar crime,
violent crime, organized crime.
Are we going to be seeing environmental crime up there too?
Absolutely.
The FBI in the 90s is going to be very busy, and environmental crimes are going to be one
of our priorities.
But trying to stem the growing tide of illegal exports is a relatively new priority for law
enforcement.
How you doing?
Fine.
Where are you heading tonight?
Only computer parks.
Just computer parks?
The California Highway Patrol has started checking trucks going south to Mexico.
But the commitment to enforce our environmental laws leaves a lot to be desired.
While the FBI and some local agencies are gearing up, they are the exception.
What about the agency charged with protecting the environment?
In the EPA's enforcement division, there are only 50 criminal investigators to handle the
whole country.
We wanted to talk to EPA Chief William Riley about this, but he declined, insisting instead
that we talk with his assistant, Donald Clay, the head of hazardous waste.
How many enforcement officers do you have working for you in this area exporting?
Don't know.
Don't know?
Don't know.
But I'm told that EPA only has 50 agents working at any time on all environmental issues of
enforcement like this.
And that's hardly enough, it seems to me, to do justice to checking these illegal exports.
Well, I mean, part of it is EPA has lots of people and there's always a matter of priorities.
Do you want them to do this or something else?
We have lots of others.
We have 12 major environmental statutes to enforce.
All problems can be the very highest priority.
And there are two people doing the waste work.
I just got an assistant after nine years.
The real issue is that it's an enormous problem out there and just a very few of you are coping
with it.
And you feel always, every time my phone rings and you get one of these guys, is that you've
got a potential problem, that I don't feel confident after I talk to these people that
something isn't necessarily going to happen.
You make it sound mild with the word problem, but you're talking about something far more
grave than that.
Just a problem.
You're talking about turning this world into a dumping ground.
And I'm talking about very severe repercussions diplomatically.
Waste export is not only an environmental and health issue, it's a foreign policy issue.
And we've come very, very close to having major difficulties with countries because
of proposed exports.
To cope with those problems of exporting hazardous waste, delegates from 116 nations gathered
in 1989 in Basel, Switzerland, seeking international agreement.
Most countries of the Third World wanted to outlaw hazardous exports altogether, but the
industrialized nations led by the U.S. insisted on continuing the exports with some regulation.
After all, the international trade in waste is a growing part of a booming business.
In the U.S. alone, hazardous waste disposal adds up to $15 billion a year.
Ten thousand people who make their living in the business gather in Atlantic City for
their annual international convention.
What are these?
Well, these are total encapsulating suits on the left, Class A class suits, Class B
that don't fight total encapsulation.
We ship to a partially government-owned facility in Ramaki, Finland.
We do have an operation in Canada.
We think there is a significant international opportunity.
Our most rapid growth has been in Europe, where we've grown tenfold in the past year,
year and a half.
I don't think it helps American industry to provide more landfills or more incinerators
or a foreign country to take our toxic waste.
What helps American...
At the convention, we talked with Joel Herschorn.
For the last decade, he was in the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, a top advisor
on hazardous waste.
If these countries want to import it, if it is economically valuable to them, why should
we care?
I'm troubled by two things.
We have in the United States the most extensive regulatory system, especially for hazardous
waste.
Even with that regulatory system, we have massive noncompliance by people who generate
and manage hazardous waste.
People get around the law.
Get around the regulation.
Absolutely.
Now, I look overseas, I see very weak regulatory systems.
So from a moral point of view, when we talk about exporting hazardous waste, what troubles
me is that when it gets to that foreign country, we have very little assurance that it's going
to be managed in a correct, safe way.
A culture, a company, a nation that takes its raw material, takes energy, takes labor,
takes capital, and produces waste, garbage, toxic waste, is a society, a company, that
is inefficient, economically inefficient.
Countries like 3M and Dow Chemical and Polaroid and a number of others have discovered that
if they use their engineering talent, their management talent, to restyle what they're
doing, restructure it, redesign it, and they cut their generation of environmental waste,
they make more money.
Good industry, good practice, good profitability is ultimately linked to the best environmental
practices.
Hazardous waste, hazardous materials, waste, etc.
This is a big part of the problem, because the problem is not only does the language
confuse the public, it's confusing the people in the environmental enforcement agencies.
They're not sure what they're supposed to be regulating.
The biggest problem in America they're facing in the next couple of years is where they're
going to bury all the garbage.
New York ran out of space, Jersey ran out of space, Pennsylvania's running out of space,
they're trucking stuff to Ohio right now.
I heard recently Ohio's about to close its borders and not letting any more garbage in
the state, because there's no place to bury it.
We are going to put in, not able to be used, plastic, oil, any material involved, EPA,
some materials, hazardous waste, we've got to dispose right away, and oil, all kinds
of oil from transmission, from air compressor, from some other materials or transformer
containing oil, we're going to bury them all here.
We're going to bury them all here, we're going to bury them all here, we're going to
bury them all here, we're going to bury them all here, we're going to bury them all here,
we're going to bury them all here, we're going to bury them all here, we're going to bury
them all here, we're going to bury them all here, we're going to bury them all here, we're
going to bury them all here, we're going to bury them all here.