Trafigura Captured by Mercaptan and Hydrogen Sulphide
While the Gulf Jash, ex-Probo Koala, is leaving the oily waters of the Gulf of Mexico and while the Aristos II, another tanker chartered by Trafigura, is being scrapped on the muddy beaches of Chittagong in Bangladesh, the judgement of the Amsterdam court course is showing a new light on the dark side of traders and marine traffic.
The misinformation by the multinational Trafigura is denied. According to their spokespeople, lawyers and their spin doctors everything which happened in Abidijan is “a myth”. Amsterdam’s judgement confirms that the waste from the Merox desulphurisation onboard the Probo Koala was toxic and dangerous. Four years after the Probo Koala’s stop in The Netherlands, this judgement puts an end to the alleged irresponsibility of Trafigura. In spite of the breaking up of responsibility in place in shipping, each link in the chain, on land and at sea, has been grasped by the justice.
Trafigura lies
At the witness stand in the Amsterdam courtroom, Trafigura steers the truth as ruthlessly as it steered the Probo Koala. Trafigura’s defence lawyer declared that all the damages caused by refining at sea of Petroleos Mexicanos’ hyper sulphurized naphtha and all the health risks from the desulphurization waste could be only a “myth” spread by ecologists, journalists, and politicians. In his opening defence he stated that “It has not been proven that the events in the Ivory Coast [the spreading of Probo Koala’s waste in Abidjan] cause serious harm to the health of the population, or that they could have done”.
A Plastic Sea in the Seine River
Millions of polypropylene widgets used to attract bacteria in wastewater treatment plants are drifting along in the Seine after being dumped by either the Essonne Intercommunal Union for Sanitation and River Restoration (1) or its subcontractors.
The Norwegian inventor describes the technology as “a 3-room apartment with a kitchen where bacteria can live comfortably and eat pollutants in wastewater.” The technology, described in France as Radical Flow Fluidized Filter (R3F), is considered easy and economical to operate. The lifespan of the “biomedias” (2) is 20 to 25 years. They are used in Bordeaux, Mulhouse and upstream of Paris, to name a few locations. These bacteria niches can amount to 19 million units per 100 m3 of water. Operators have obviously released them in large numbers into the natural environment.
