Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Le cargo de la honte

Le cargo de la honte

Dussol, Bernard
Nithart, Charlotte

Paperback

Series: Essais - Documents

Letters & EssaysLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 2234063515
ISBN13: 9782234063518
Publisher: Stock
Published: May 19 2010
Pages: 258
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.54 Width: 5.32 Depth: 8.47
Language: French

Rights available

At 7.06 pm, the first tanker arrives at the Akouédo waste tip, twelve kilometers from the port of Abidjan, and sheds more than thirty-six tonnes of rubbish. Its load reeks of rotten eggs, badly decomposing bodies, garlic concentrate and mercaptan, the petrochemical molecule that gives commercial gas its smell. It is a dense, powerful cocktail. The fumes spread and soon reach the village of Akouédo. At 2 am, women come out into the street, protecting their mouths and noses with their hands and strips of scant clothing. What is this terrible smell setting their lungs on fire and giving them headaches? Coughing echoes back and forth across the village, questions mutate into fear and anger. Some already have nose bleeds, all of them feel they are suffocating, held in an invisible clamp.

In August 2006, the Probo Koala, a bulk carrier ship chartered by Trafigura (the third most important oil trader on the planet), initiated an ecological catastrophe in the Ivory Coast by offloading 500 tonnes of toxic waste in the port of Abidjan. The waste was spread on the ground in the dumping site, leading to ten deaths and poisoning a further 6,000 people.
This book, which fully deserves to be called a thriller, explains how the Probo Koala - which operated both as a tanker and a floating factory - came to dump its mysterious cargo in the port of Abidjan. Mysterious and deadly: its fumes sowed the seeds of death in the Ivoirian capital, forcing the country's political leaders to assume a pose of ruthlessly pursuing the culprits.... but only minor, third party players were ever sanctioned.
This incident reveals how some companies are turning the world - particularly the third world - into a waste dump, while they derive incalculable profits from it. There is a whole sophisticated system that the authors of this book lay bare: how the rules are flouted in mixing fuels in order to make quick profits; how these circuits function globally and how the ships are parameters on the circuits; how business is smothered in order to continue doing business. The enquiry is tight, meticulous, scrupulously informed. It reads like a novel. In the end, the reader can only regret that it is not a novel.

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