Rhine pollution worries Germans

Press, 21 January 1982, Page 20

Rhine pollution worries Germans

From the “Economist in London

It is difficult enough to enforce the principle that the polluter should pay even within national boundaries. It is virtually impossible when the offender is over the border, upwind or upstream. A tentative agreement, under which the French will reduce their pollution of the Rhine with salts from Alsatian potash mines, was reached only after years of haggling — and a thwacking contribution from downstream countries. And that was a deal among friends.

The West Germans are about to try to crack a tougher nut: pollution of the Elbe by East Germany and Czechslovakia. Pollution of the Elbe comes in many forms — and the West Germans themselves are responsible for some of it. As yet, only two thirds of Hamburg’s own sewage, for example, is treated — although DM4OOM ($lBO million) has been earmarked to close the gaps in the city’s water clean-up programme. But West Germany controls only about 15 per cent of the catchment area of the Elbe. Much of the junk in the final slice of the river is washed' down from eastern Europe: ammonia from

farms, fertiliser plants and sewage; heavy metals from natural leaching, mining and smelting operations, chloralkali plants, waste incineration and the disposal of contaminated sludge on land.

The West Germans can only guess what pollutants come from what sources. They have had no data from the Czechs or East Germans for 20 years. They do know, of course, what shows up at the border, at Schnackenburg. What worries them most is the amount of heavy metals arriving there.

Cadmium and mercury contamination can be laid firmly at the door of the east Europeans; concentrations of both fall progressively downstream.

All three metals are nasty. Lead can affect the synthesis of blood proteins and damage the kidneys and nervous system. Mercury (taken up in fish as methyl-mercury) has been notorious ever since the first outbreak of Minamata disease in Japan in 1953; the disease, which damages the central nervous system, was caused by the long-term consumption of fish highly contaminated with mercury. Chronic ingestion of cadmium can cause kidney and possibly bone and liver damage. Nobody argues that the amounts of these metals now found in the lower Elbe are patently and immediately dangerous. But neither can anybody yet say for certain what levels of exposure might have harmful health effects over the long term. The only sensible policy, the West Germans insist, is to make all reasonable efforts to keep the contamination to a minimum.

Well, yes. . . but who is to

say what is reasonable and who is to pay? As a first step, the West Germans would simply like to have some detailed information from the East Germans and Czechs about the various possible sources of the heavy metals washing down the Elbe.

For their own part, they are analysing deep sediments of the river to try to determine the natural levels of the metals. (The deep sediments were laid down long before the industrial revolution.)

The results of those analyses should be available soon. It will be interesting to see if they throw up any surprises.

Recent analyses of data collected over the past five years on mercury pollution in the Mediterranean have thrown up two unexpected results.

First, tuna and swordfish in the Mediterranean have mercury levels 10 times higher than those in their Atlantic brethren. Second, it is now clear that this is a result not of man-made pollution but almost entirely of natural pollution: from mer-cury-rich rocks and the outgassing of volcanoes. Experts of the United Nations regional seas programme for the Mediterranean are taking the view that this makes a nonsense of putting mercury on a black list for the area as a whole (though some local controls might still be needed). Rather than enforcing strict and expensive rules on mercury’s industrial use, as at present, it would be more sensible simply to mount a campaign to teach people to limit their consumption of tuna and swordfish from the Mediterranean.