Its products cleans your face and your teeth, but global giant Unilever is not willing to clean up the soil of mercury which has poisoned lives in Kodaikanal.
By Papri Sri Raman
The Tamil Nadu Alliance against Mercury (TAAM) is not asking for the sky. It just wants Rs100crore deposited by Hindustan Unilever (HUL) in a trust fund, interest from which can help the 300-odd victims of mercury poisoning and their families in the resort town of Kodaikanal, known as the queen of the Southern Hills.
Though the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCNB) forced HUL to take back to the US some of the mercury polluted soil in 2003, much of it continues to remain in situ, leaching into the local water bodies. The Alliance has charged the TNPCNB and the government environment testing agency, the Nagpur-based National Environment Engineering Research Institute (NEERI – a CSRI establishment), of colluding with HUL and altering the permissible limits of mercury in Kodaikanal’s soil and environment, degraded by a HLL thermometer factory here.
The multinational company begins your day with Pepsodent toothpaste, sustains it with tea, coffee, Dove soap, salt, atta, and ends it with HUL rubbers. Its daily use consumer goods are distributed through nearly 6.5 million outlets in India.
Kodaikanal’s civil society groups have accused Supreme Court Monitoring Committee (SCMC) member Dr Tapan Chakrabarti, the NEERI scientist also under Unilever contract, of unethical practice.
Alliance activist Shweta Narayan says, “How can the same person be a part of the SCMC and also be the Unilever expert who will direct the clean up?”
“In a blatant display of conflict of interest and abuse of office, NEERI consented to serve as Hindustan Unilever’s paid consultant even while serving as a member of the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on hazardous wastes,” TAAM and residents of Kodaikanal claim.
Chakrabarti has been accused of recommending to the Tamil Nadu government (Pollution Control Board) higher mercury levels in soil standards at the Kodaikanal thermometer factory, at the behest of Unilever.
The Alliances says the standard for mercury in one kg of soil should be what is accepted in the United Kingdom (1mg mercury/kg of soil). However, the pollution board had first accepted Dutch limits (10mg/kg of soil) and has now further diluted even that, to a acceptable limit of 25mg of mercury/kg of soil.
“Unilever’s clean-up standard for India is 25 times lower than it is in its home country, the UK,” Rajagopala Durairaja, TAAM leader spearheading the struggle of the local people told Current. He pointed out that HUL applied different standards for rich and poor countries. “This is pure environmental discrimination,” he added.
Soon after the state pollution board agreed to lower norms (in 2005-8), Chakrabarti wrote to the chairman warning that no mid-term revision of clean-up standards will be allowed. In other words, once approved, the clean-up standard of 25 mg/kg cannot be made more stringent.
Public outcry had forced the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board to shut the HUL factory in 2001. Greenpeace says, by the late 1990s, mercury contamination in the area was hundreds of times over the permissible limits of .01mg/kg in the soil. In 2001, the Palani Hills Conservation Council (PHCC), Greenpeace and several other NGOs, along with local people began protesting the mercury dumping and consequent poisoning of HLL workers and others (including scrap dealers). Mercury poses serious health hazards, including poisoning of the foetus.
In November, 2002, local groups asked the Mumbai-based Indian Peoples’ Tribunal (IPT) to look into the health and environmental impacts of mercury pollution, besides recommending safety and effluent disposal measures. In its report IPT said mercury levels at the site was 9.6 times more than accepted standard.
The state pollution board’s reports had said the amount of Mercury lost to the environment was 2,031 kg. In 2002, Hindustan Unilever estimated that it had discharged more than 1.3 tonnes of toxic mercury into the Pambar shola in addition to contributing more than 366 kg of mercury to the soil within the factory site.
In 2003, an institute of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) released a study which said mercury levels outside the factory was at dangerously high levels even years after the factory having shut down.
The study found Mercury levels at 1.32 microgram per cubic meter against the normal level of 0.5-10 nanogram per cubic metre; effectively an aberration of between 132 to 2,640 times. The DAE also observed that the mercury contamination had spread far and wide from the factory and had reached deep inside the pristine Pambar Shola forests. “A level of 0.2 mg Mercury was found in every kilogram dry weight of lichen and moss collected from a lake 20 km away from the factory.”
In March 2003, following extensive public consultations, the pollution board ordered HUL to collect the mercury containing glass waste dumped in scrap yards and forests and send it back to the United States for recycling and disposal. Consequently, the company had no option but to collect, pack and send 289 tonnes of waste material to a recycling facility in Pennsylvania from the Tuticorin port in May 2003.
Sheela Rani Chunkath, then chairperson of the board, said, “They wanted to send the contaminated material to Uttar Pradesh. But when we declined the offer they then agreed to ship it back to the US.” However, this lasted only during the tenure of Chunkath.
The Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on hazardous wastes took up the matter of environmental remediation of the contaminated Unilever site in September 2004. However, the pollution board chairperson was changed in 2005 and public consultations on the issue were done away with and the cleanup process suffered a huge setback.
According to Dr Mark Chernaik, toxicologist and staff scientist at the US-based Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW-US), “The site-specific target level of 25 mg/kg was established only with regard to the protection of public and without regard to protection of ecological values.”
Critiquing Chakrabarti’s reports, Chernaik said: “The monitoring committee member and Unilever consultant NEERI trots out a curiously perverse argument.”
He noted that Chakrabarti had said in his reports“. . .the entire site of HUL is covered with thick vegetation and population of trees. It may, therefore, be mentioned that, if a clean-up criteria of 10 mg/kg is selected, an additional 3881mt of soil will have to be excavated and treated, which may disturb the ecology of the site.”
Even worse, rather than worry about the fate of the sensitive shola forests that are being condemned, NEERI’s preoccupation for the welfare of its client is particularly visible, Chernaik pointed out.
NEERI said in its report: “In addition to the above, techno-commercial aspects are also to be considered while deciding the screening level for remediation. The benefits likely to accrue out of stricter norms are to be compared against the additional cost that may be incurred while undertaking such projects.”
Chernaik noted that the diluted clean-up criteria were never revealed to either the local area environment committee or the working committee. Both these committees were reconstituted pursuant to SCMC directions of September 2004, and entrusted with the task of overseeing the implementation of remedial action plans approved by the pollution board.
However, in September 2005, the SCMC directed the board to appoint a new “experts committee” of pliable scientists.
In February 2007, NEERI submitted a protocol for remediation of the mercury contaminated site, based on a risk assessment by another Unilever consultant – ERM India Private Ltd. Neither the experts committee, nor the pollution board, thought to question the lack of independent data. “All data regarding this subject have been generated only by Unilever’s consultants – URS Dames & Moore and ERM. Validation of these data was done by another Unilever consultant, NEERI.” Chernaik pointed out.
No information, such as the Risk Assessment report on which NEERI’s report is based, seems to have been shared with the experts committee. Indeed, in response to a Right to Information question as to what documents were presented to the experts committee during this presentation, the pollution board tersely stated that such “Information [is] not available.” In a letter to Ramachandran, member secretary, TNPCB, dated 16 August, 2005, a sub-committee of the SCMC, consisting of members Dr Claude Alvares and Dr Boralkar, noted with concern: “The activities [of decontamination] are being conducted by NEERI in association with Hindustan Lever Ltd, and Hindustan Lever Ltd is directly financing the consultant. This is not in keeping with the SCMC’s directions which require the work of remediation and rehabilitation be done through the Board.”
Both Alvares and Boralkar were relieved of their responsibilities in the Kodaikanal matter and this was handed over to two other committee members.
Chernaik said that NEERI and other Unilever consultants “provide grossly inadequate support for a site-specific target level of 25 mg/kg and that a much lower site-specific target level may be necessary to protect critical ecological resources and public health.”
NEERI has admitted that the diluted standard was arrived at based solely on risks to health of future residents, and not on the risk to ecosystems and soil micro-organisms essential for maintaining ecosystem integrity.
“TNPCB and NEERI have colluded with Hindustan Unilever to keep the public in the dark and dilute clean-up standards from the originally proposed 10 mg/kg to 25 mg/kg of mercury in soil. As a result, more than 100 kg of mercury will still be left behind in the soil even after clean-up and this will act as a ecological time-bomb slowly releasing toxic mercury into the sensitive Pambar Shola ecosystem and hurting the integrity of the ecosystem,” TAAM warns.
Ponds of mercury
In 1984, Ponds (the well-known brand of cold cream and talc) brought to India a thermometer-making plant from the US and set it up in the ecologically sensitive Western Ghat mountains of Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu. Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), a subsidiary of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch Consumer company acquired the plant in 1997 as part of Unilever’s global acquisition of Ponds.
From 1984 to 1997, for 13 years, the company made thermometers here and dumped the waste locally. (The photographs show how the wasted mercury contaminated bottles are strewn about, how workers worked in close proximity to the waste, how the broken thermometers were dumped in the small tourist city and was accessed regularly by rag-pickers and others.) Kodaikanal sits on a unique ecosystem known as the Pambar Shola. It is a bio-diverse environment with numerous rare and endangered species of plants and animals, including some that were believed to be extinct until recently. Shola forests are high-altitude (2,000m) stunted evergreen forests, unique to the Western Ghats.
The mercury thermometer factory lies entirely within the Pambar shola watershed; every drop of water that falls in the factory drains out into the Pambar Shola and Pambar River. The Pambar River eventually joins the Vaigai River – an important source of drinking water and fish in Madurai and other central and western districts of Tamil Nadu.
Elemental mercury changes into the highly toxic methyl mercury in aquatic environments, and builds up to lethal levels in fish. Scientific studies suggest that 1 gram of mercury is sufficient to poison a 25 acre freshwater lake over a period of years. The public outcry forced Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board to shut the HLL factory in 2001.
Kanimozhi’s support
Rajya Sabha member and DMK leader MK Kanimozhi has promised the Tamil Nadu Alliance against Mercury (TNAAM) and other environmental organisations that she will support the cause of the Alliance appealing for a trust fund that can help mitigate the sufferings of local people affected by mercury waste from a Hindustan UniLever thermometer factory in Kodaikanal.
Kanimozhi gave the Alliance (TAAM) a hearing at a candlelight vigil and exhibition of photographs of the poisoned site at the Alliance Francaise in Chennai.
Asked what she thought of companies abdicating their responsibilities in cleaning up chemical sites, the daughter of Chief Minister M Karunanidhi said, “We don’t have proper policies in our country.”
Asked if the polluting companies should not be held liable, the member of Parliament said, “of course… before letting such factories be set up, all these matters must be taken consideration.”
The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam is a partner of the UPA government which proposes to introduce the Nuclear Liability Bill in the budget session of Parliament.