The victory of Tunisian NGOs in the battle of David vs. Goliath for toxic waste with Italy

Tunisia won this weekend in a long-running battle between David and Goliath against Italy. On Saturday, a shipment of 7,900 tons of toxic waste illegally sent by Italy to Tunisia was returned from where it came from after a nearly two-year legal wrangling led by small local environmental organizations.

With its wide white sandy beaches, sparkling turquoise sea, bright sunshine and luxury resorts, the beautiful coastal city of Sousse is known as a holiday destination. But it has recently become famous for a smellier reason: since 2020, more than 200 large shipping containers filled with 7,900 tons of Italian toxic waste have been suspended in limbo in a port warehouse.

Between the end of May and the beginning of July 2020, 282 containers were exported by the Italian company Sviluppo Risorse Ambientali (SRA) from the port of Salerno in the Italian region of Campania to this Tunisian port city. The Tunisian company that imported it, Soreplast, announced to customs that it contained scrap plastic left over from its manufacturing operations, which Soreplast said it would then recycle. But it was revealed that it instead contained household and hospital waste, which is legally prohibited from importing into Tunisia.

The Italian company SRA was founded in 2008 through the sale of a branch of another company Fond.Eco. The two companies ended up at the center of a judicial investigation in 2016 conducted by Salerno’s Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate. Tommaso Palmieri, who runs the two companies, has been accused of leading an organization that recycles bulk waste. SRA is also one of the companies included in an Italian parliamentary report on the link between the waste industry and organized crime.

5 million euro contract The containers were the first shipment of a 5 million euro contract to dispose of 120,000 tons of Italian waste in Tunisian landfills. €48 per ton of waste was paid to Soreplast.

213 containers were stored at the port of Sousse, and the remaining 69 containers were sent to a warehouse outside the city. The containers and their contents rotted in these warehouses for more than a year until the Tunisian government officially seized them last July. However, they – and their pungent smell – will stay in place for another seven months.

On December 28, 2021, Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio flew to the capital, Tunis, for talks with President Kais Saied, in particular to address this thorny issue. At the conclusion of this meeting, the Tunisian presidency published a statement on Facebook, stressing “the need to expedite the return of waste to the country as soon as possible.”

An agreement was finally signed on February 11th to return the trash to Italy. “The signing of this agreement comes within the framework of the continuation of the consultation process between the two countries that started in 2020,” the Tunisian Ministry of Environment said in a statement published after the meeting on its Facebook page. The statement continued: “Among other things, this agreement provides for the immediate return of 213 containers in the first place, out of a total of 282 containers, after 69 of them caught fire.”

The ministry added that consultations are continuing regarding the return of the remaining waste after the containers were damaged by a fire that broke out in the importers’ warehouse in Sousse governorate. They did not clarify the condition of the containers after the fire or when any subsequent transfers might occur.

‘Important victory’ Last Friday, the first 213 containers were loaded onto a Turkish vessel chartered by Italian authorities. The ship left Sousse at 8 pm local time on Saturday.

Only a few people were invited to watch from the sidewalks, including a number of politicians, one television network and members of one volunteer network, Réseau Tunisie Vert, an NGO that fought hard to get this waste back to Italy.

Nidal Attia, network member and program coordinator for the environment at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Tunis, said, speaking to FRANCE 24.

“This is a very important victory for Tunisian civil society. It was an environmental battle completely different from what we are used to fighting, so this outcome will certainly enhance the courage and will of the people to confront such issues.”

When news of the mountain of rotting waste in the port first appeared in local media, it angered residents and local NGOs, who said they refused to allow their country to become Italy’s trash.

“This type of trade is immoral and destructive to the environment; it is not permissible to import waste from Italy to Tunisia for burial. Mohamed Tazrut, an activist with Greenpeace in the Middle East and North Africa, said in a joint statement published by a number of NGOs: generating toxic leaching and contributing to the deterioration of human health and the environment.”

Having developed into something like David’s fight against Goliath over the past two years, the result was the result of a united protest from a number of local and international NGOs, who continued to pressure the Tunisian government until they finally agreed on a way with the Italian government to return most of the containers.

We met with three successive cabinet ministers to push them to achieve this result. “We wrote to the president twice without a response, and we communicated with international forces such as the United Nations,” Attia said. “It was a great campaign.”

On December 21, 2020, Tunisia’s Environment Minister Mustapha Laroux was arrested and about 25 officials – 12 of whom were also arrested – were indicted. The list of suspects also includes the names of his prime minister in La Rue, the directors of the National Waste Management Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency, customs officials and the laboratory responsible for analyzing waste from abroad. It also houses Pia Ben Abdelbagi, the Tunisian consul in Naples. One person missing from the list – certainly Tunisia – is the owner of Soreplast, who has fled abroad.

“We have been lobbying the Ministry for the Environment for more transparency for nearly two years to share the information they have, but so far they have stopped,” Attia said. There has been a complete lack of transparency about how the deal was reached so far. People have been arrested and are awaiting trial, but even after that ends, we don’t know if we’ll ever learn how this deal happened in the first place.”

In 1991, the then-chief economist at the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, signed a memorandum defending the age-old practice of trafficking waste from developed countries in the world’s north — where strict environmental regulations make disposal prohibitively expensive — to less developed countries. .

“I believe the economic rationale behind dumping a load of toxic waste into a low-wage country is flawless and we must confront that,” Summers’ controversial memo read. Summers later claimed that he was “satirical” in this department.

Outrage followed its publication, but the scandal served to project the image of a relatively recent environmental treaty, the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Hazardous Waste, while providing impetus to the subsequent 1998 Bamako Convention, which were created to regulate the transit of toxic substances. cross-border waste. Bamako is specifically designed to ban the import into Africa of any waste that cannot be recycled. This Tunis deal appears to be a direct violation of that.

All Tunisia’s waste is managed in landfills. The country’s largest city, in Bordj Chaker on the outskirts of the capital, Tunis, absorbs an estimated 3,000 tons of waste each day, a figure significantly more than the 44 tons per day allowed in EU landfills. Plastic bags are everywhere and the waste pollutes nearby water sources.

“This Italian deal shows how our environment is another sector directly affected by corruption and mismanagement,” Attia said. We don’t talk about it enough because it’s overshadowed by other priorities like the economy. But what will all this waste do to our environment, to our land, if it is buried in our soil? ”

This was only the first wave of containers and there were many more if we hadn’t caused such a protest. This scandal really highlights, both nationally and internationally, the current restrictions on recycling. “She will not be able to put an end to the waste management problems,” Attia said.

“We need to change the way we deal with household waste; we cannot simply bury it all in landfills.”