August | 2023 | University of Washington Press Blog

In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia, began a two-year journey, roaming the world’s oceans in search of a dumping ground. Its initial destination and then country after country refused to accept the waste. The ship ended up dumping part of its load in Haiti under false pretenses, and the remaining waste was illegally dumped in the ocean. Two shipping company officials eventually received criminal convictions.

In The Toxic Ship, historian Simone M. Müller uses the Khian Sea‘s voyage as a lens to elucidate the global trade in hazardous waste—the movement of material ranging from outdated consumer products and pesticides to barges filled with all sorts of toxic discards—from the 1970s to the present day, exploring the story’s international nodes and detailing the downside of environmental conscientiousness among industrial nations as waste is pushed outward.

From the Introduction

Often the rotor blades were audible before the helicopter became visible. The weather had been mediocre since the ship had anchored at Big Stone Beach. Two small inlets, defining the lower end of Delaware Bay, sheltered it from the waves and winds of the Atlantic. Looking out to sea—one of their pastimes since they had been grounded—the crew could observe waves with crests just about to break and a sea garnished with foam. When they heard the sound of swirling air cut by metallic blades, it usually meant that members of the US Coast Guard were approaching by boat. At the beginning of the ship’s nearly three-month stay, the coast guard had come frequently to check on what they called inoperable equipment and outdated charts, two almost laughable details given the dilapidated freighter’s signs of wear and rust. The ship’s papers were not in order either. Its stay at sea had outlasted its insurance coverage and other certificates. Technically it was a renegade ship, since Liberia was withholding its flag until the ship’s papers were renewed.

Sometimes, the coast guard had been accompanied by guys in white hazmat suits, who had crawled all over the ship’s cargo with their gloves, their test tubes, and their clipboards. Captain Arturo Fuentes Garcia was not sure what exactly these people were doing, but he knew it had to do with his cargo and would determine whether the ship could proceed up the Delaware. He also knew that their activities were of great interest to the journalists circling above in the helicopter, like vultures waiting for the lions to finish their meal.

When Garcia had taken over as captain of the freighter Khian Sea, he had expected nothing out of the ordinary. It became the voyage of a lifetime. Fuentes, a native of Honduras, learned about the job in November 1987, when the Khian Sea had already been roaming the greater Caribbean for over a year. The ship had left Philadelphia in September 1986, carrying about fifteen thousand tons of incinerator ash destined for the Bahamas. The ship was owned by Lily Navigation, Inc., and chartered by the Amalgamated Shipping Corporation, both registered in the Bahamas. The latter had a contract with the Philadelphia waste-hauling company Paolino & Sons. Paolino, in turn, had a multimillion-dollar contract with the city of Philadelphia for the disposal of up to two hundred thousand tons of incinerator ash for fiscal year 1986–87. To add to this complex arrangement of international stakeholders, the ship was sailing under the Liberian flag (at least until its papers expired). For Fuentes, these different involvements mattered little. His main contact partners were two Americans, John Patrick Dowd and William P. Reilly, president and vice president of the Annapolis-based company Coastal Carriers, which was the US representative of Amalgamated.

Mostly it was Reilly who told Fuentes where to take the ship. After the original plan to unload it in the Bahamas had fallen through, Fuentes was directed to sail to the port of Gonaïves in politically fractured Haiti, where Coastal Carriers had secured a landing for the ship’s cargo as topsoil fertilizer. Years later, when he testified to an attorney with the US Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section about what happened next, Fuentes would say the ship had “bad mojo.” In the middle of unloading, Haitian soldiers had ordered them at gunpoint to stop. Under cover of darkness, Fuentes set sail to take the Khian Sea back to Philadelphia, abandoning part of its cargo at Sedren Wharf in Gonaïves, but US officials ordered them to anchor in lower Delaware Bay and confined the crew to the ship.

With morale low and nerves strained, Captain Fuentes then committed his first major crime by disobeying direct orders from the US Coast Guard and taking the Khian Sea back out to sea. In news interviews and later court testimony, Reilly and Dowd from Coastal Carriers made it sound as if they had been blindsided by Fuentes’s move, but that was questionable. Fuentes next took the ship across the Atlantic to West Africa, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe, through the Suez Canal, and across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, always on the lookout for a new site to unload the cargo. Meanwhile, an international network of environmentalists, US officials, and the media hunted the renegade ship. They managed see through its attempts at disguise, such as changing the ship’s name from the Khian Sea to the Felicia, the Pelicano, and finally the San Antonio. It was a game of cat and mouse that, most of the time, Fuentes lost.

The Toxic Ship scrutinizes the tensions inherent to a world where, since at least the mid-twentieth century, we have been facing the issue of growing amounts of hazardous waste combined with finite planetary disposal spaces and acute, and increasing, social and economic inequality.
Simone M. Müller

Fuentes’s problem was the cargo and its purpose: mounds of black incinerator ash, interspersed with bits of half-burnt paper and pieces of metal. It represented the remnants of Philadelphia’s waste, material that US traders had repeatedly tried to sell as fill material for land reclamation, fertilizer, or building material. The issue was not the cargo’s texture or its musty smell, but minute particles of heavy metals and dioxins in material intended for use in sensitive ecosystems and relatively unprotected production contexts in countries of the global South. No matter what those people in the white hazmat suits had found out from testing the ash, the label déchet toxique—the Haitian term for toxic waste—had stuck to the ship throughout its journey of more than two years. Always sailing on the verge of illegality, Fuentes eventually broke more laws, marine and otherwise, by dumping the cargo in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

By following the journeys of the Khian Sea and other waste-carrying ships from the United States, The Toxic Ship scrutinizes the globalization of hazardous waste, environmental justice, and environmental governance in the latter half of the twentieth century. Starting in Philadelphia, the story takes in Panama, the Bahamas, Haiti, Honduras, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Italy, Norway, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, the Philippines, and Singapore. The book opens by reviewing the emergence of environmentalism in the industrial world in the 1960s, a trend that was followed almost immediately by the creation of the first waste-trading schemes with countries of the global South. The story centers on the 1980s, the height of this unequal trade, before considering instruments of global environmental governance implemented in the 1990s, such as the UN’s Basel Convention (passed in 1989 and implemented in 1992), and the Organisation of African Unity’s Bamako Convention (passed in 1991 and implemented in 1998). The Toxic Ship ends in the early 2000s, when the partial cargo of incinerator ash that the Khian Sea had abandoned in Haiti was returned to the United States.

The international trade in hazardous substances is a broad term for a trading network that moves items ranging from hazardous waste to banned pesticides and nonmarketed consumer products. It has received considerable attention from environmental, health, and human rights activists, investigative journalists, administrators, policymakers, and scholars. Most activist literature examines the trade through a normative lens and the framework of global environmental justice and environmental racism. From this viewpoint, the Khian Sea is the flagship of the evils of the global waste economy. It and other ships like it represent all that is ethically despicable, and yet the Khian Sea’s activities were mostly legal, part of a multimillion-ton and multimillion-dollar trade in hazardous waste between countries of the global North and those of the global South, marked by substantial differences in political stability, economic opportunities, and environmental and health and safety regulations.

What led a city like Philadelphia, with a large African American population, to export hazardous waste to Panama, the Bahamas, or Haiti, and what induced local agents to import it (legally) for use in sensitive ecosystems? How did the actors involved in the global waste economy endure the conflicting pressures born from the fact that hazardous waste would not go away, but had to be disposed of somewhere?

The Toxic Ship scrutinizes the tensions inherent to a world where, since at least the mid-twentieth century, we have been facing the issue of growing amounts of hazardous waste combined with finite planetary disposal spaces and acute, and increasing, social and economic inequality. The book examines the structures and dynamics underpinning a global system that appeared to be based simultaneously on toxic colonialism and voluntary exchange, yet which was ultimately premised on different valuations of human life.

Simone M. Müller is Heisenberg Professor for Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg. She is author of Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks.