Basel Action Network Press Release

Seattle, WA.  October 4, 2004 .  The Basel Action Network (BAN), an international environmental organization working to halt toxic trade, and one of the key environmental groups that filed suit last year to halt the Bush Administrations plan to export ex-naval vessels from the Ghost Fleet, today submitted a stinging critique of the Draft National Guidance: Best Management Practices for Preparing Vessels Intended to Create Artificial Reefs (Reefing Guidance), co-authored by the US Environmental Protection Agency and US Maritime Administration. 
 
BAN considers the EPA/MARAD guidance document to be yet another attempt by the Bush Administration to legitimize unsustainable environmental practices for toxic end-of-life ships instead of promoting domestic ship recycling programs.  The Reefing Guidance will allow for ships to be scuttled that still contain significant quantities of the globally banned persistent organic pollutant known as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).
 
"EPAs plan to allow the dumping of  PCBs into the marine environment is a shocking and singularly bad idea.  PCBs are known to be toxic, they are known to cause cancer, they are known to cause hormonal disruption, and once in the marine environment they are known to accumulate in fish andguess what, people are known to eat fish," said Jim Puckett, coordinator of BAN.  
 
There is considerable pressure placed on EPA to allow the US Navy and the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) to be able to get rid of about 225 obsolete naval vessels that contain asbestos, PCBs and other hazardous substances.  Congress has given MARAD a deadline of 2006 to get rid of most of these vessels.  Scrapping the vessels and recycling them can be costly.  A report by the RAND Corporation in 2001 estimated that the total cost to the government for disposal of these vessels would be 1.87 billion dollars via domestic recycling, 170 million to export them to Asia, and 500 million dollars to dump them as artificial reefs.  
 
BAN believes that regardless of the costs, the dumping of toxic wastes on developing countries or in our oceans is contrary to international law and fundamentally misguided and immoral.
 
"The Bush Administration is proposing yet another dangerous dumping scheme to save a buck.  But what is a contaminated fishery worth?" said Richard Gutierrez, of BAN.  "This scheme is especially callous when one realizes that we can utilize domestic ship recyclers to recover the steel, while providing much needed jobs."