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British To Recall
Brazil Waste Export
Britain has said it
will take back more than 1,400 tonnes of toxic waste
exported to Brazil in containers apparently wrongly
marked as containing plastic for recycling.
The UK's environment agency said on Sunday that it
was aware of 80 containers of waste that had been
allegedly illegally exported, and that it had
launched an investigation into the case to determine
if an offence has been committed.
Liz Parks, the agency's head of waste, told BBC
radio that the rubbish was currently being held by
Brazilian authorities and that it would take a
number of weeks for it to be returned.
Newspapers in the UK reported that several British
companies were involved in the shipments.
The waste included used nappies, syringes, used
condoms, batteries, food remains, used packages of
cleaning products and cloth, according to Brazilian
news reports and images taken during an inspection
by Ibama, Brazil's environmental agency.
'Improperly imported'
A spokesman for Britain's environment agency
said: "Where the environment agency detects or is
made aware of the illegal export of waste, it works
with all relevant partner authorities to ensure the
environmentally sound management of any illegal
shipments - including the possible return of wastes
to the UK.
"If any company is found to have contravened the
strict controls on the export of waste as set out by
the Basel Convention, the Environment Agency will
not hesitate to take enforcement action."
The United Nations-administered Basel Convention,
which came into force in 1992, bans shipments of
toxic waste from industrialised countries.
The rubbish, which has been linked to two British
companies, was sent from Felixstowe in eastern
England to docks at Brazil's Santos, near Sao Paulo,
and two other ports in the southern state of Rio
Grande do Sul, Britain's Independent newspaper said.
The companies in Brazil that received the waste
claimed to have been expecting recyclable plastic,
said The Times, another UK newspaper.
"I'm surprised to learn that trash was improperly
imported, with a false characterisation, from
Britain into Brazil," Roberto Messias Franco,
Brazil's state environmental agency chief, said in a
statement on Friday.
"Brazil is not the world's dump," he said
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