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X-Press Pearl toxic waste to be buried in Puttalam?

20 Dec 2021

  • Allegation hazardous waste to be buried in limestone quarries
  • MEPA Chair says no such burial will be permitted
BY Pamodi Waravita Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) General Secretary Pubudu Jayagoda alleged yesterday (20) that there are plans underway to bring hazardous waste from the MV X-Press Pearl wreck into the country and bury it in limestone quarries in the Puttalam District. “An international tender by the MV X-Press Pearl’s owners has permitted the private company Resolve Marine to remove the containers embedded in the seabed, following the disaster earlier this year. The Government has no responsibility in this matter. However, a private local company has partnered and is trying to bring this hazardous waste into the country. They have no expertise in getting rid of toxic material. The environmentally hazardous material licenCe they have is for oil. They are trying to take the toxic waste to a land in Negombo and then dump it or bury it in Puttalam. This company has no facilities in getting rid of this toxic waste,” Jayagoda said, addressing the media yesterday. He presented a letter which he claimed shows that the Central Environmental Authority (CEA) permitted the said private company to store the waste in a private land in Wattala. The letter, as seen by The Morning, states: “(The) CEA has no objection to the storing of waste cargo and other debris of MV X-Press Pearl ship at a land in Wattala owned by the N&Y Marine Services (Pvt.) Ltd. company, subject to the following conditions.” The conditions state that the company must obtain permission from the Marine Environment Protection Authority (MEPA) for the retrieval of the damaged containers, cargo scrap, and other debris from the sea. It must further obtain permission from the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) for the removal of waste temporarily stored at SLPA storage facilities. Moreover, the CEA must permit environmental recommendations for the activities and the company must obtain the Environmental Protection Licences and the Scheduled Waste Management Licences prior to the commencement of the operational activities. The Morning’s attempts to contact CEA Chairman Siripala Amarasinghe regarding the aforementioned letter yesterday proved futile. However, when The Morning spoke to MEPA Chairperson Dharshani Lahandapura, she assured that no company will be permitted to bury hazardous items in Sri Lanka. “I believe that Resolve Marine has a local partner for the removal of containers from the seabed. We are approaching this process with the assumption that the containers and the waste are hazardous as it is a mixture of everything. The company has been permitted to store, collect, and transport the waste. MEPA is continuously monitoring this process – this happens full-time. The waste will be sorted at the Wattala yard. There will be some waste that we can dispose of in Sri Lanka – for example, through incineration. However, we will not permit the burial of any hazardous waste in the country. We have already informed the companies that they will have to take that kind of waste out of the country,” said Lahandapura. However, Jayagoda alleged that although there are plans to give the waste to a company in Puttalam, which incinerates hazardous waste, the company does not have the capacity to receive this amount of waste, as the Puttalam company already processes waste of over 1,000 companies in the country. In what is termed as the “country’s largest marine environment disaster”, the MV X-Press Pearl ship caught fire on 20 May this year, approximately nine nautical miles away from the Colombo Harbour. A subsequent explosion on 24 May led to the fire spreading and a number of containers aboard it falling into the sea, thus releasing pollutants including plastic pellets into the water. Since then, debris and deceased marine life have washed up on the country’s western coastline, heavily affecting both the fisheries industry and the country’s marine environment. Reportedly, the ship had carried in its cargo about 25 tonnes of nitric acid, 300 metric tonnes (MTs) of bunker oil, and 78 MT of plastic pellets or “nurdles”. Lahandapura told The Sunday Morning last week that the Government is awaiting legal advice from an Australian legal team to finalise the environmental damage assessment following the maritime disaster involving MV X-Press Pearl. A salvage vessel is due to arrive in Sri Lankan waters on 19 and 20 January 2022 to remove the MV X-Press Pearl shipwreck from our waters, whilst Italian experts have already arrived to conduct autopsies on the 14 turtles and one whale that died after the maritime accident.


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