Toxic Waste Dumping in Abidjan: environmental concerns

Abstract

On August 2006, a number of trucks discharged from a boat some unknown toxic wastes across the city of Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire). Five hundred tons of toxic wastes were illegally dumped at a certain number of sites in the city. Pollutants were dumped on municipal waste disposal sites (Municipality of Cocody), in small canyons (Abobo and Koumassi), in proximity to a slaughterhouses (Abobo) and in water ponds (Cocody). The epidemiological investigation focused on the discharge sites in the vicinity of housing areas. Five sites in three municipalities were particularly concerned. A multidisciplinary survey was carried out by a team 3 months after the disaster. The first challenge of the team was to assess which environmental spaces or streams have been affected. The exact locations of the waste dumped sites have been established. The environmental component of the study has helped to deliver an updated mapping of points dumping sites of toxic waste, and to highlight the main environmental exposure factors in the immediate vicinity of the sites (food crops fields, urban agricultural fields, open food selling points, other farming activities). The study revealed the dynamic nature of some dumping sites, like the wastes dumped into a ravine that was flowing along a canal ending up to a water bed in Dokui. Of the sixteen discovered dumped sites, eleven of them were very close to human settlements and four sites were even located in the middle of human settlements. The wastes from each of the dumped sites have affected soils, water beds and/or surrounding farming activities (urban agriculture, livestock), at even an extent that has not been enough explored. The talk will elaborate on the difficulties for southern research institutions to deal alone with the challenges of undertaking assessment of environmental exposure to complex wastes in case of a disaster like the recent one with toxic wastes in West Africa.