Cleaning up a badly fouled sea

Press, 19 November 1977, Page 14

Cleaning up a badly fouled sea

From the "Guardian’’

What do Israel, Algeria and Morocco have in common, except for their mutual antipathy? They all border on the Mediterranean.

Their representatives, together with those of nine other Mediterranean countries, agreed recently to a treaty to stop their common swimming pool turning into a sewer. Appropriately, the 12 met in Venice, sinking slowly as its foundations are worn away by the industrial pollution of neighbouring Mestre. If approved by their governments back home, the treaty will be formally signed in Monaco next January.

The agreement will set out a black list of chemicals, with a complete ban on their discharge into the Mediterranean. These include mercury, cadmium, some oils and some radioactive wastes. Dumping of materials on a “grey list” mainly metals, must be supervised by national governments. Among these are arsenic and cyanide. A grey list of countries which did not turn up at the Venice meeting would contain Albania, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Libya. A black list of those who have so far refused to sign even a toothless measure agreed on last year to control pollution from ships, would consist of Algeria, Syria, and Albania. The least enthusiastic supporters of pollution control are the rapidly industrialising countries of the southern Mediterranean. But

not all is sunshine among the northern industrial countries either. The Italians and the French, for example, are unwilling to be shackled by costly pollution controls when the Germans get away with pumping their industrial waste into the Rhine, which eventually flows into the Atlantic. The United Nations Environment Programme (U.N.E.P.) which organised the Venice meeting, claims that the economic arguments run by no means all one way. A cleaner Mediterranean is in the interests both of the German holidaymaker who swims there and the Italian hotelier who provides him with a bed. Pollution can damage fishing. Untreated sewage, as it decomposes, uses up oxygen needed to sustain marine life. Pollution also breeds disease. After outbreaks of cholera, large mussel beds off Naples have had to be destroyed. Even low concentrations of marine pollution can carry diseases such as conjunctivitis and sinusitis. Bad pollution can cause typhus, cholera, hepatitis and polio. The tideless Mediterranean has anti-clockwise currents which shift one country’s sewage on to another country’s bathing beaches. The Mediterranean’s water gets changed through the straits of Gilbraltar only once every 80 years or so. Getting the Mediterranean countries to agree to monitor pollution levels was no mean feat in itself. But U.N.E.P. now has 76 monitoring projects set up, and hopes to publish a com-

prehen sive report next year. The findings so far suggest that the sea’s worst problem is untreated sewage (90 per cent of all sewage goes straight into it), with chemicals from factories and pesticides carried by rivers a close second.

Warnings that the Mediterranean was turning into a dead sea have prodded some northern Mediterranean countries to introduce national controls.

In France an anti-pollution drive has cut the number of beaches unfit for bathing from eight per cent in 1976 to four per cent this year, and the number of badly polluted beaches from 23 per cent to 21.5 per cent. Most of these beaches are on France’s Mediterranean coast, the worst of them near Marseilles, Nice and Monaco. Some 150 sewage farms have been built since

1971, and the French Government plans eventually to have similar plants in all towns with more than 50,000 people. As much as 78 per cent of Italy’s coastline was polluted in 1975, according to a report by the ministry of merchant marine. Anti-pollution legislation now provides for the building of sewage plants throughout Italy.

Spain has introduced penalties for dumping rubbish

on beaches or out at sea. But sewage processing remains lax. Greece is also taking action against major polluters and is rebuilding its ancient sewage systems round Athens. Salonika and Volos. But since its tourism and industry are still relatively undeveloped, most of Greece’s coastline and islands are clean. The Yugoslav coast to the north is also largely untouched.