Turkish ship carrying hazardous waste blocked by Albanian authorities

Albanian authorities have prevented a ship suspected of transferring a huge amount of hazardous waste from docking at Tirana’s main port, officials said, after a watchdog group alerted authorities.

Prosecutors ordered the containers seized and stored “at an environmentally and physically safe place” for monitoring.

The Turkish-flagged Moliva XA443A ship was then kept about a mile away from the port of Durres, 33 kilometres west of the capital, Tirana.

According to the Seattle-based Basel Action Network nongovernmental organisation, or BAN, which focuses on environmental issues, the ship has been flagged by authorities since August.

The group said it had received a whistleblower’s note that its “102 containers” are suspected of carrying “an estimated 2,100 total metric tonnes of … waste pollution control filter dust from the steel industry” and alerted several transit countries.

The “massive shipment” first left Durres on 4 July on two Maersk-chartered ships with the “intended destination of Thailand,” BAN said.

Ultimately, Thailand refused to accept the shipment, asking authorities in Singapore to stop it. The Turkish-flagged ship would later have stopovers in Portugal, Spain and the Italian port of Gioia Tauro before returning to Albania after a three-month journey across continents.

According to local reports, the customs documentation stated that the containers harboured iron oxide.

In August, the Albanian opposition accused the government of taking part in illegally trafficking hazardous material, prompting Prime Minister Edi Rama to say in Parliament in September that the shipment’s documents were verified.

Rama argued that iron oxide is “not considered toxic waste in the European catalogs” on which the environmental and customs procedures of Albania are based.

A UN report shows that over 2 billion tonnes of industrial waste are generated annually.

Environmental NGOs estimate that the global industry of shipping such waste from Western nations to developing countries is worth between €44 billion and €70 billion a year.