Authorities in India have removed hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste from a chemical factory that witnessed one of the world’s deadliest gas leaks 40 years ago.
Thousands of people died in the central city of Bhopal in December 1984 after breathing a poisonous gas leaked from the factory.
On Wednesday, around 337 tonnes of toxic waste was taken from the Union Carbide plant to an incinerator facility around 230km (143 miles) away after a court last month set a four-week deadline for it to be disposed of.
Officials say it will take between three and nine months to treat and destroy the waste but activists have raised concerns about potential damage to people’s health at the new location.
Since the disaster, the toxic material had been lying in the mothballed factory, polluting groundwater in the surrounding areas.
The toxic waste cleared from the factory this week included five types of hazardous materials – including pesticide residue and “forever chemicals” left from its manufacturing process. These chemicals get the name because they retain their toxic properties indefinitely.
Over decades, these chemicals at the abandoned factory site had been slowly seeping into the surrounding environment, creating a persistent health hazard for people who live in nearby areas.
A 2018 study by the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research revealed that high concentrations of metals and chemicals have contaminated groundwater across 42 residential areas near the factory.
After decades of inaction, the Madhya Pradesh state High Court on 3 December set a four-week deadline for authorities to dispose of the toxic waste material from the site.
The court said that authorities were “still in a state of inertia despite 40 years”.
The process of moving the waste began on Sunday when officials started packing it in leak-proof bags. These bags were then loaded onto 12 sealed trucks on Wednesday.
Officials said the waste was transported under tight security.
A police escort, ambulances, fire engines and a quick response team accompanied the convoy of trucks carrying the waste, the Indian Express newspaper reported.
Swatantra Kumar Singh, the head of Bhopal gas tragedy relief and rehabilitation department, told the PTI news agency that initially, some of the waste would be burnt at the disposal unit in Pithampur and its residue examined for toxic remains.
He said that special arrangements had been made to ensure that fumes from the incinerator or the ash left after do not pollute the air and water.
But activists and people living near the disposal site have been protesting against the move.
They said that a small amount of waste from the Union Carbide factory was destroyed at the plant on a trial basis in 2015, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.
It ended up polluting the soil, underground water as well as fresh water bodies in the nearby villages, they said.
Mr Singh has denied these claims, saying that incineration of toxic waste would not have “any adverse impact” on nearby villages.
But Rachna Dhingra, from the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, told BBC World Service that the transfer of waste would “create a slow-motion Bhopal” in the new location.
She adds that the transported waste is only a tiny percentage of the actual contamination that people in Bhopal are still dealing with.
“The 1.1 million tonnes of toxic soil and waste still continues to contaminate the groundwater of hundreds and thousands of people [in Bhopal],” she says, referring to an estimate from a 2010 government study.
Over the years, officials have made several attempts to dispose of the waste from the Bhopal factory but dropped their plans after facing resistance from activists.
In 2005, India’s pollution control board said that the toxic waste would be incinerated in Gujarat but the plan was dropped after protests.
The board later identified sites in Hyderabad and Maharashtra state as well, but faced similar resistance.
The Bhopal gas tragedy is the one of the world’s largest industrial disasters.
According to government estimates, around 3,500 people died within days of the gas leak and more than 15,000 in the years since.
But activists say that the death toll is much higher. Victims continue to suffer from the side-effects of being poisoned even today.
In 2010, an Indian court convicted seven former managers at the plant, handing down minor fines and brief prison sentences. But many victims and campaigners say that justice has still not been served, given the magnitude of the tragedy.
Union Carbide paid $470m (£282m) in compensation to the Indian government in an out-of-court settlement in 1989. Another US firm Dow Chemicals, which bought Union Carbide in 1999, says this settlement resolved all existing and future claims against the company.
