That Awful Smell

More than a year ago, the burghers of Hanneche in eastern Belgium began complaining about "that awful smell" emanating from the rusty vats stored in an abandoned sugar-beet factory. Cats died from it. Trees shed their leaves. Grass turned brown. One of the stored vats burst, and the stench, rather like the smell of decomposing rats, brought still more complaints from the village of Burdinne, six miles away. Only last month, finally, did the ministry of labor, which deals with environmental problems, get around to investigating. It found that the vats contained between 2,000 and 3,000 tons of potassium cyanide--theoretically enough to kill every person in Europe.

The poison, along with tons of other toxic wastes, had come from chemical plants all over Europe, partly be cause Belgium has extremely tolerant pollution laws, partly because the village of Hanneche (pop. 300) has a rather tolerant government. Specifically, Mayor Edouard Elias and his town council had struck an agreement with a newly created Belgian disposal company named Vebeka. Elias got a seat on the company board and Vebeka got a license to dump wastes in the cavernous old factory; the town would get 55-c- per ton of the lethal garbage. Vebeka Chief Adrianus Van den Bogert, a Dutch citizen, told the villagers: "There isn't any danger at all, believe me. I have experience in these things."

Lethal Chemicals. Nonetheless, fearful Hanneche authorities refused to renew Vebeka's license, so Vebeka went out looking for new dumping grounds. "I had to do something," says Van den Bogert. "Several big transports were on their way: twelve tons from West Germany, 18 tons from Switzerland, 20 tons from Sweden." So he joined with another Belgian firm and made new arrangements. In Hasselt, for example, he left 50 tons of lethal chemicals in a shed just 100 yards from the Albert Canal, which supplies Antwerp with its drinking water.

"This case is a very serious one," declared Labor Minister Louis Major when he heard the details. "For several nights we couldn't sleep at the thought of the tons of cyanide at Hanneche. We couldn't understand how such imports were smuggled into our dear country."

Belgium has plenty of laws designed to protect citizens from buying toxic products but none to control the disposal of toxic wastes. Van den Bogert and other entrepreneurs openly and legally took advantage of the situation to turn Belgium into Europe's dump. Belgium even made a profit from all the business--confirmation of Premier Gaston Eyskens' maxim that "prosperity is more important than the quality of life."

The Hanneche scandal changes all that. Belgium's Parliament is expected to act this week to outlaw any further dumping. At Hanneche, 50 specialists from the civil defense department, wearing rubber suits and gas masks, now are carefully examining and repacking some 10,000 drums of chemical wastes, many of which turn out to be labeled "concentrated orange juice." The poisons are to be transferred to the nuclear center of Mol, near Brussels, but scientists there do not have the means to get rid of the toxic stockpile either. The most likely solution: the poisons will eventually be dumped far out in the Atlantic. It is another place where no laws prevent cheap disposal.

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