RICH NATIONS TREATING ASIA AS THE WORLD'S CESSPIT: GREENPEACE. The world's rich nations are treating Asia as the cesspit of the industrialized world by paying developing countries to take their toxic wastes, AFP reports Greenpeace said today. "Industrialized countries are spending money to dump waste in less developed Asian countries, and to buy incinerators in those countries to burn rich states' waste," Tara Buakamsri of Greenpeace Southeast Asia is quoted as saying at a conference in Bangkok. "We will no longer be the cesspit for the industrialized world."
Tara said Japan was one of the world's largest producers of deadly toxins and heavy metals, which are emitted into the air when burnt at incinerators or dumped in poorly-regulated landfills. And now it was stepping up its strategy of offering southeast Asian states money to build incinerators to burn its transferred waste. "It is unacceptable that Japan, which has created an environmental health disaster in its own backyard ... is pushing to export its polluting machines."
Global organizations, including the World Bank and the ADB, are also contributing to the hazardous waste control techniques by funding these projects, Greenpeace said in a statement.
Noting that Bangkok's city administration has recently decided to buy incinerators to burn up waste-its own as well as garbage shipped in from other countries, Greenpeace said it had set up a regional anti-toxic dumping and ecological protection organization called Waste Not Asia to curb rich states' plans to move even more waste to the region. Asia would no longer allow "a toxic technology being dumped on us by some of the most polluted nations in the world," Tara said.
Waste Not Asia will strive to replace toxic waste dumping and incineration with recycling and more effective waste management, said Sasanka Dev, an Indian environmental activist. "We would like to put governments and the incinerator industry on notice that we now have the ability, information and skills to challenge their visionless designs," he said.