Brazil prepares to send “illegal” waste back to the UK

The regulator said last night (July 23) that forty-one containers of material were being readied at the Port of Santos in Sao Paulo, with the Brazilian environmental enforcement agency Ibama claiming that it would take around 10 days for it to reach the UK.

The load represents a significant proportion of the containers which were reported to have entered Brazil between November 2008 and May 2009.

Announcing the repatriation, Carlos Minc, Brazilian environment minister, said: “How is it that countries that say that they are doing everything to protect the environment with technology, money and other means to this, send their domestic, commercial and industrial waste to poor, developing countries to be burned or buried there?”

Mr Minc's criticism of the UK's alleged involvement was echoed by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who attacked richer nations who export waste for reprocessing in poorer countries while he was opening the Bio Brazil Fair 2009 in Sao Paulo on Wednesday (July 22).

President Lula said: “They say it is a clean order of material coming here to be recycled. Who will recycle used condoms and syringes? We do not want to export our waste to other countries and did not want to import waste. We want to import other things that are not waste.”

News that the waste is now to be repatriated came the day after the Environment Agency revealed that three Swindon-based men had been arrested as part of their investigation into the shipments (see letsrecycle.com story).

And, earlier this week, a parliamentary committee for environment, food and rural affairs said that it would be reopening an inquiry into the Waste Strategy for England 2007 to consider the issue of illegal waste exports (see letsrecycle.com story).