Online reports – Ecology – The trail of sin from then until now

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Documentation of a waste disposal story, author Martin Forter

The disposal of waste from the production of its highly profitable products continues to haunt the chemical industry to this day

From Martin Forter

No one has investigated the history of what he calls the “use of the environment” by the Basel chemical industry as thoroughly as OnlineReports employee Martin Forter. His dissertation* with the apt title “Play of Colors” has just been published in book form.

For more than a hundred years – from the beginning of the first paint production in the mid-19th century to the Second World War – the Rhine served as a garbage disposal for the Basel chemical industry. The solid chemical waste was dumped behind the factories on the banks of the Rhine, thrown through a hole in the Middle Rhine Bridge into the floodwaters of the river (1860 to 1870), later ground up in the so-called “dirt mills” and washed into the Rhine with the wastewater, or allowed to be washed by the river's current out of the belly of the so-called Girrfähre (1916 to around 1945).

Chemistry: Dam as Rhine polluter

In the 1930s, France built the Kembs river power station and dam below Basel. Since the dam reduced the flow of the Rhine, it washed the mostly colored chemical waste out of the city more slowly. This led a Geigy employee to put forward the absurd theory: “That the dam, even if not directly, is more causal for the pollution of the Rhine than industry.”

The dry summer with low water levels in the Rhine at the end of the 1940s and the rapidly increasing water demand of the growing city and the flourishing industry made the use of the Rhine as a waste disposal site even more visible. This put pressure on Basel companies: they had to relieve the river of solid chemical waste and dispose of it in landfills on land.

Ciba was the first to remove its waste mills, and from 1946 onwards it deposited its chemical waste in the “Lippsgrube” in the southern Baden border town of Weil am Rhein. “It shimmered in all colors,” recalls an eyewitness, which is why the Lörrach district office banned the dumping in the “Lippsgrube” in 1951 out of concern for the groundwater. Ciba's waste is now in the Feldrebengrube in Muttenz (BL/CH). It is located on the edge of the “Hard” groundwater area, which has been used as a drinking water source by Basel-Stadt since 1951. The two Basel plants are intended to enrich the groundwater there with seeping Rhine water. Although a report had warned of contamination of the drinking water well, Ciba and Geigy deposited their chemical waste in the “Feldrebengrube”.

Evasion to Alsatian and Baden neighborhoods

When the first water protection law in Switzerland came into force in 1955, Sandoz AG also got rid of its waste mills. Because it feared that the new law in Switzerland would legitimize third-party liability claims, Sandoz stored its toxic waste in the “Gravière Nord” in the Alsatian border town of St. Louis until 1961.

In 1957, a stinking, orange liquid containing phenols came out of a groundwater borehole between the “Feldrebengrube” and the “Hard” drinking water supply. As the Basel-Landschaft government now issued a ban on dumping, Geigy and Ciba followed Sandoz's example and dumped their solid chemical waste in the French and German border areas: in “Le Letten” in Hagenthal-le-Bas (F), in “Roemisloch” near Neuwiller (F) and in Hirschacker as well as in the Kesslergrube in Grenzach (D).

Bach came green, then red and yellow

It was not until 1960 that the German and French authorities succeeded in stopping the illegal dumping on the border with Switzerland. Chemical waste was now piling up on the factory sites. No other place could be found in the vicinity of the Basel factories. Experiences with toxic residues in the past had been too bad. For example, in the border town of Neuwiller (F): “One day the small stream from the 'Roemisloch' was green, the next red, then yellow.” Later, several times “a cloud of steam hung in the air above the village,” says former mayor Frédéric Schoeffel. “It was like fog. It made it difficult to breathe.”

Something similar quickly happened everywhere the Basel chemical industry brought its waste back. In 1961, no municipality would tolerate a chemical waste dump any more. The industry was left with “only transport to a very distant pit”. In 1961, the Basel Chemical Industry (BCI) discovered an exploited clay pit on the border with France between the two municipalities of Bonfol (today's canton of Jura) and Pfettenhaus in Alsace. At that time, no one in the structurally weak Ajoie knew what chemical waste was. It came open and in barrels. No one recorded what kind of substances were emptied into the pit on the French border.

Bonfol praised as an “exemplary project”

Like the previous landfills in the Basel region, the Bonfol mine was also smelled far and wide: in 1966, the residents of Pfetterhouse complained in a petition about toxic clouds from the neighboring chemical waste landfill. Geigy denied its existence. But within the company, a Ciba employee reported: The “emissions” around the Bonfol mine “contradict (…) pretty much all cantonal building laws.” The Basel “National-Zeitung” wrote in 1968 that the Bonfol landfill was “an exemplary work.”

As early as the early 1960s, a geologist had warned JR Geigy AG that, unlike the gravel pits previously filled in the Basel region, the clay pit in Bonfol was sealed against the groundwater. There was therefore a risk that the landfill would fill with water. Geigy believed that he could get the situation under control by covering the chemical waste with clay and installing a drainage system for the seepage water. But the water ingress into the landfills that had been in place between 1961 and 1976 could not be stopped: the toxic storage facility on the border with France slowly filled with water and threatened to slide into the neighboring country at the beginning of the 1980s. BCI secured the landfill for 28 million francs with a more waterproof cover, a new drainage system for the seepage water and a sewage treatment plant to clean it. Today, the government of the canton of Jura is demanding that BCI dig up all the chemical waste in the Bonfol pit and burn it in hazardous waste incinerators.

Kölliken also awaits total renovation

There is also currently talk of complete renovation of the Kölliken hazardous waste landfill in the canton of Aargau. The solution is likely to be – as for Bonfol and the landfills in the Basel region – digging up and burning the pit contents. Kölliken was filled with hazardous waste from 1976 to 1985. Around 10 percent of the toxic waste stored there came from Basel industry.

As in the 1950s in the area surrounding the landfills in the Basel region and in the 1960s and 70s around Bonfol, the residents of the village of Kölliken also complained of chemical tanks, headaches and nausea shortly after the dumping began. The Aargau authorities played down the symptoms: the cantonal doctor at the time, Max Buser, described the complaints as “psychosomatic” in 1979.

Six years later, the Kölliken municipal council closed the hazardous waste landfill. Up to this point, around 300,000 tonnes of hazardous waste had been deposited in the pit. Around 50,000 litres of contaminated landfill leachate flow into the local sewage system every day. As in Bonfol, the landfill operators had to secure the pit: they installed a sewage treatment plant for the leachate and an incineration plant for the contaminated air from the landfill. But the legacy waste is still leaking out. A planned drainage system is intended to prevent further seepage of the pit water until the total remediation (estimated cost: 500 million francs).

Teuftal: “The politically possible solution”

The public dispute over the Bonfol and Kölliken mines meant that the chemical industry was unable to open any more chemical waste dumps in Switzerland after 1985: As was the case in the Basel region in 1961, by the mid-1980s no municipality in Switzerland was prepared to tolerate toxic waste on its doorstep. The federal government took this fact into account at the legislative level in 1990 with the “Technical Ordinance on Waste”. This prohibits the direct disposal of chemical waste throughout Switzerland. As a result, the chemical industry had to close the second successor to Bonfol in Teuftal near Mühleberg (BE) in 1996. It was first persuaded by the Basel chemical industry in 1976 and has a volume of 300,000 cubic metres: each waste barrel was encased in concrete and its location mapped. Although Hans Gubser, former environmental officer at Ciba-Geigy, stated in 1977 that the mine in the Bern region was not the best technical or geological solution, but the politically possible one, there is still no talk of a total renovation in Teuftal.

Since there were no new chemical waste dumps to be found in Switzerland in the mid-1980s, the industry exported some of its waste. At the same time, Basel-based companies expanded their incineration plants. Today, they burn almost all chemical waste. The finance department of the canton of Basel-Landschaft had already called for its incineration in 1957: Basel-Landschaft was unable to approve chemical waste dumps simply because the chemical industry found the special facilities required too expensive. The industry refused to listen and approved eight more pits outside the canton of Basel-Landschaft. Today, it is paying the price for this.

* Martin Forter: “Play of Colours – A Century of Environmental Use by the Basel Chemical Industry”, Chronos Verlag Zurich, 2000.

June 6, 2000