BDPollution

Chevron is back up against the ropes after a United States federal court judge denied a bid made by the corporation to stop Ecuadorian plaintiffs from collecting a damages award of $18 billion. Federal court judge Lewis Kaplan was asked to freeze assets owned by the plaintiffs until the result of a fraud lawsuit against the Ecuadorians was known. Unfortunately for Chevron, the bid was denied.

Adding to that, just a few days before the bid to freeze assets was made, Chevron was hit with one more nail in the coffin. An Ecuadorean appeal court upheld the $18 billion judgement over the oil damage in the county’s Amazon region. If the fraud lawsuit against the Ecuadorian plaintiffs fails, the oil giant has just one more option left, and that’s to make an appeal to Ecuador’s Supreme Court.

What caused the pollution?

The exact circumstances of the pollution in question happened under Texaco, which has been part of Chevron Corporation since 2000. Texaco developed and operated the Lago Agrio oil field in the country from 1972 up until 1993, and during that time it is alleged that they did not dispose of industrial waste safely. It has been claimed that Texaco released up to 18 billion gallons of produced water into the Amazon rainforest, leaving a toxic trail that damaged vegetation, killed wildlife, and caused a variety of sicknesses in the local indigenous population. An environmental audit of the area pressured Texaco and Petroecuador, the two companies that extracted oil from the Lago Agrio oil field, to fund a $40 million remediation program from 1990 onwards. In 1998 a scientific team took water and soil samples only to find that around half of the samples analysed still had unsafe levels of petroleum hydrocarbon in them.

Action taken against Chevron 

After years and years of campaigning, the Ecuadorian people finally managed to bring a case against Chevron in 2003. 30,000 Ecuadorean people were responsible for creating enough pressure and finding enough money to take on the multi-national corporation, and it paid off 8 years later. On the 15^th of February 2011, an Ecuadorian court fined the oil company $8.6 billion for polluting the Amazon rainforest and the consequences of the damage. It was claimed during the lawsuit that local cancer rates increased, and crops and livestock were lost to the pollution.

The penalty rose to $9.5 billion dollars once an additional 10 per cent for reparations was included, but the total sum requested by Ecuadorian plaintiffs ended up being $27 billion. The court granted $18 billion, and the result of the case set a precedent, because it was the first instance of indigenous people suing a multinational corporation in a court located within the country the pollution actually happened in. Environmental activists celebrated and saw it as a start to charges being brought against other companies that pollute developing countries without punishment.

Chevron fights back 

Chevron has opposed the fine since it was imposed, and filed a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian plaintiffs for fraud. The corporation believes that they have cleaned up their part of the damage to the rainforest, and they are being charged too much for the damages that have been claimed against them. Chevron has claimed that fraud and corruption have been used by the Ecuadorian plaintiffs, and the racketeering lawsuit they filed in New York in 2011 has yet to be decided.

This is not the first time that Chevron has been accused of illegal pollution, and they have even broken laws in America concerning pollution, namely the Clean Air Act. Other notable incidents were the 2002 oils spills in Angola that resulted in a claim for $2 million by the government of Angola for the damage. Only last year Chevron were prohibited from activities in Brazil after over 400,000 litres of oil were leaked into the ocean off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The legal action that is being brought against Chevron in the Brazil case is demanding that $10.6 billion is paid in damages.

The controversy over Chevrons actions in Ecuador and whether they have been treated unfairly has been debated many times, but perhaps this new ruling is the beginning of the end to the case. What is certain is that no amount of money can turn the clock back and make good the damage done to the Amazonian rainforest.

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This is a guest post.

Olivia Lennox is a green freelancer from London. Normally she’ll be extolling the virtues of tempurpedic products or the latest organic soaps, but she has her finger on the pulse of international environmental law too.

India’s big leap in economy has caused a greater increase in hi-tech waste. What is hi-tech waste? Toxic electronic waste like computers, televisions, and many more are hi-tech waste and it is claimed by an environmental group that such wastes are been thrown without check and the reason would be that there are no laws present to regulate these wastes.

Toxic Link said while the Asian giant’s economy has been growing 8 percent annually over the last three years has also resulted in the production of 150,000 tonnes of electronic waste each year.

After an eight month study by the group shows that India’s great source of e-waste is the busy financial hub Mumbai producing 19,000 tonnes every year.

Director of Toxic Link said that since there are no laws for its safe management that this could create serious health and environmental impacts.

In the early 1990s India’s liberal economic provided people to create more banks, financial institutions, electronics industries, information technology firms and call centres setting up operations across the country.

This surge in economy has also led middle class people estimated 300 million people an increase in spending as more people get better salary. More spending would lead to a craving for electronic products which will eventually create a massive increase in electronic disposal.

Most people buy electronics such as mobile phones, use it for 2-3 months chuck the old one and buy another one. India is not the only one, China is not far behind. I found a site e-waste Guide which deals with e-waste and how to recycle it. They have done case studies in various countries such as India, China, South Africa.

So if e-waste increases however there are disadvantages to it such as it has one of largest Let me now talk why electronic waste is toxic. Chemicals such as lead and cadmium in circuit boards lead oxide and cadmium in monitor cathode ray tubes (CRT); mercury in switches and flat screen monitors; cadmium in computer batteries; polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in older capacitors and transformers and brominated flame retardants on printed circuit boards, plastic casings, cables and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) cable insulation that release highly poisonous gases when heated.

In order to contain these wastes expensive recycle plants or machines are required to keep these wastes under control. Although currently in India the present recyclers do not have such expensive technology to handle such waste. Alternate methods such as product reuse, conventional disposal in landfills and incinerators. However we know that when such products burn they produce extremely poisonous gases which a small percentage could kill people.

As many as 1.5 million cars are being scrapped illegally in Britian every year. Just imagine the amount of pollutants, fluids being disposed each year.Well according to the European Union in 2003 they introduced a legislation requiring all cars put to death must be taken to an approved site cleaned of pollutants and the owner issued a certificate of destruction. However people are not following this method which means tons of toxic waste are dumped unnoticed.

So in the end we have another ecological disaster in our hands.

Some 300 industries around a 20 sq km near the Dhaka Export Processing Zone (DEPZ) in Savar are dumping toxic chemicals. To see the image http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/05/20/d6052001044p.htm . Its horrendous.

These toxic chemicals are running in farming lands where vital crops are being destroyed also causing environmental imbalance. The reason for this is because of lack of sewage and draining facilities. Not only that there are no recycling plant built-in with the industries to treat these toxic wastes.

Uk is planning to dispose its nuclear waste deep underground. To know more go to
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4949096.stm

China had to dump more chemicals to clean up the toxic river. The cadmium containing slick forced people to cut off tap water. The slick was then flushed into the North River, running to the Guangdong province north to south. The sludge was then enclosed by a dam, where chemicals were dumped to neutralize it.
The chemical benzene was tested to check if the concentration of it were within safety regulations. Luckily it was. Although do we really know for sure that whether it was safe. Only the fishes would be able to tell us.

The explosion at a chemical plant in China. Eventhough this is old news, i need to say it cause i think this explosion may lead to a great ecosystem imbalance. During the explosion the chemical, benzene leaked into the river Songhua polluting the river and eventually made it impossible to drink water from the river.

It not only affected China, the toxic chemicals also entered Russia. According to reports a chemical cadmium a potentially cancer-creating chemical also flowed to a tributary of Yangtze River.

So you can imagine when toxicating a river the lives of fishes and aquatic animals are in great risk. Pollution not only affects animals but it also affects us. Although the explosion is an accident we have to learn to be must more careful and cautious or else things could get worse…