User:Wondirad

Deliberate act to damage the environment Ethiopian reporterSaturday,23 May 2009] By Wondirad Seifu

A tannery’s waste can cause plants to be more fertile, but, among other things, it amplifies their deadly power. And how long should we tolerate such a toxic production? Yet the Prime Minister and the President have been paying lip-service to environmental protection on various occasions.

Since the introduction of a quasi-market economy in the 1990s, the tanneries' pollution load has been moving to the hitherto intact places, adjacent to Lake Tana. In a recent development, a certain tannery is on the point of contaminating a spice factory operating in a crowded part of the country. It is crystal clear that the venture is undermining an environmental impact assessment study.

Despite the decentralization of the pollution load of the tanneries, the two lakes, Koka and Aba Samuel, have been suffering from the cumulative effect of pollution for 80 years. The recent visit I paid to one of the lakes confirmed to me that the country’s environmental policy and institutes have been doing virtually no nothing in pollution control. Sometimes it has occurred to me that causing such environmental havoc is a deliberate act.

Without exaggeration, this would be regarded as criminal act by other nations. Once I had witnessed a case in Kenya when an environmental inspector had given an order for one of the country’s tanneries to meet acceptable standards.

At the time no one was arguing because the inspector was with his testing kit. The next day I was privileged to read a story from the Standard newspaper to the effect that the factory was sued for damaging the environment. Did we ever read such a story in The Reporter?

It is not surprising why such serious concern is felt in a country like Kenya where tourism is the backbone of the economy. But it is a mockery of reality here in Ethiopia to hear from the government-monopolized media regarding tourism promotion while tanneries are left to damage the environment.

Anyway, you do not need to have a test kit, or it is not necessary to measure the tanneries pollution load by such units by chemical oxygen demand (COD) or biological oxygen demand (BOD), which peasants love to fantasize about.

Instead, it is enough to measure the pollution load of a tannery by the chemical demand of a skin as it is ripped off from the animal to complete its rinsing in the tannery’s chemical bathes. Accordingly, a single skin needs to be laced by common salt amounting to 50 percent of its weight to protect it from purification.

Although some seemingly concerned persons were bargaining to reduce the official amount to 30 percent, the total demand of chemicals per skin should never refrain from moħunting to 80 percent of the skin’s weight, of which about 30 percent is added in the tannery’s operations.

This stunning amount is almost discharged into the environment following the processing of about 18 million skins to yield annually USD 100 million or USD 5 per skin. Obviously, the sum does not absorb the opportunity cost, the cost of damaging the environment which goes to the tanneries accounting project.

In other words, the tanneries are uneconomical and ill privileged to transfer the social cost back to the society they are operating in. However, in the meantime, the developed countries' leather industries are thriving at the expense of our health and environmental damage. Almost all of the leather processing chemicals are imported from them. The chemicals must be taxed according to their impact on environment pollution.

Take, for example, the notorious chemical sodium sulphide, which they consume in large quantities. Smelling like a rotten egg, it can affect your lung adversely, destroys animals’ hair and burns any form of plants. It is a chemical curse.

The tanneries' adverse effect is exhibited in various states. Once an agricultural expert told me his worry about irrigation water used on the farmland he was nursing in the southern part of the country. “Look, this damn thing,” he said, wetting the backside of his palm with the irrigation water. Then I doubted my eyes by seeing a film of water on white powder.

But that was the residue after the water was taken up by the heat of the sun, a rough test for a total dissolved substance in water, which also goes together with the rise of COD and BOD. All these are responsible for adversely affecting the productivity of agricultural lands.

Paradoxically, however, a tannery’s waste may contain chemical compounds that could accelerate plants' fertility rate, usually in waters. And hence many cases were reported (Journal of Leather Chemists and Technologists) in other part of the world in which lakes have been polluted by toxic algae, an aggregate mass of tiny plants in water, when a tannery’s waste water sipped into lakes and caused their over fertility.

Therefore, the pressure of green plants should not be necessarily regarded as a sign of a clean environment as some dare to impose their folly on us. This leads me to ask to what extent our lakes are free from such toxic plants or other pollutants? Nonetheless, it is clear that tanneries are toxic by nature, and it is embarrassing to notice the government’s act of tolerating such toxic units.

Then it does not make sense to celebrate “Earth Day” or to orchestrate a gathering like “Forum for Environment” amidst rampant environmental abuses by tanneries.