Meeting with pesticide-waste time-bomb in Ukraine
Old broken bags and corroded reservoirs
09.11.2004 |Margriet Samwel
During our project visit in the Ukraine in the oblast Nizhin we met approximately 3 km from our project village Bobryk, an obsolete pesticide-stockpile. The brick storage building was partly demolished. Bricks of the walls and plates of the roof had been removed by "new-house-builders". Therefore, old broken bags with hazardous chemicals were affected by rain and humidity, labels or inscription have become unreadable. The building was filled with a penetrating and irritating smell. On the other side of the building are corroded reservoirs....
International financial support and assistance for clean-up operations is indispensable.
Obsolete pesticide or other hazardous chemical stocks should not be neglected by the international community. To avoid more damages to the environment and public health in developing countries and counties in transition, help for detecting and removing of obsolete pesticides is urgently needed.
The example of Ukraine: obsolete hazardous waste stocks are a bad heritage from the former Soviet times. Mostly these pesticide stocks are located in rural areas. In these rural areas the communities often don't have even sufficient financial resources to provide basic public needs like drinking water or an adequate health care. No financial resources are available to treat polluted groundwater. The economic situation is getting worse and unemployment is very high and growing. These rural communities need support on where to get assistance and financial support to locate, to identify the chemicals and to remove in a safe way these waste time-bombs.
