Trafigura
Dumping Toxic waste on the Ivory Coast and gagging the media
Daily-Life-Trafigura
Earlier in the year, there was media frenzy in the U.K. over celebrities getting court injunctions to silence the press from reporting on their various misdeeds and grubby encounters. This story actually stems from a far more serious beginning, in 2006.
Trafigura is a multinational formed in 1993, trading in base metals and energy, including oil. It makes almost 80 billion USD a year. In 2006, it caused a health crisis affecting 108,000 people, after a ship leased by the company was told that, due to toxicity levels higher than expected, the price of transferring the waste on board to the processing plant in the Netherlands had increased twenty-fold. To avoid the charge, Trafigura ordered the ship to dock at other seaports until they could find someone who would dump the waste. At Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, one of Africa’s largest seaports, the waste was handed over to a newly formed dumping company, Compagnie Tommy, which illegally dumped the waste, instead of processing it. Many people there became sick due to exposure to the waste, and investigations began to determine whether it was intentionally dumped by Trafigura. Trafigura said in a press statement that their tests showed the waste not to be as toxic as had been claimed.
This was proven false by a 2009 UN report posted by Wikileaks.
When newspapers came to publish their own findings, which proved that Trafigura was guilty of releasing toxic waste, they “lawyered up” and
