Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 4: The toxic cradle of production11 in 2005, but does not mention fires. 2007 was a year of fire in south Durban. At theIsland View chemical storage on Durban docks a series of explosions ripped through 8tanks which burnt through the night of September 18. The air was thick with chemicalsmoke and fish turned up dead in the water a few days later. The mangled wreckageof the tanks would have added to the solid waste stream. Three major fires at Engenspread fumes and soot across the neighbourhood. In July, a fire in the alkylation unitwas caused when a corroded metal flange failed. In November, a storage tank was,according to management, struck by lightening and burned for three days. Just a weeklater, a leak at the lubricants plant caused an explosion and a fierce, if brief, fire. AtSapref, in November, a fire broke out in the catalytic cracker unit.The plastics industrySasol started life as a state owned industry and was heavily subsidised even after itwas privatised in the early 1980s. This followed the US example of providing massivesubsidies to oil corporations to increase production of plastic feedstocks in the 1950s.The basic chain of plastic production looks like this: monomer producers → polymer(or resin) producers → converters [see Box 16]. According to the Plastics Federation 76 ,the South African plastic industry consumes over 1.1 million tonnes of polymersa year of which 800,000 tonnes is produced from Sasol’s monomers. Sasol is theonly producer of monomers and also the largest producer of polymers. A majorexpansion, dubbed ‘Project Turbo’, was due for completion in 2007 and will nearlydouble capacity. Like monomer production, polymer production is capital and energyintensive and there are just three other producers: Safripol (formerly Dow Plastics)located in Sasolburg, SANS Fibres in Cape Town and Hosaf Fibres in south Durban.Converters are considerably less capital intensive and there are some 850 firms rangingin size from small local firms to transnationals.Sasol does not give pollution figures for individual businesses. Sasol Polymers canreasonably be assumed to produce up to a quarter of the pollution at its Sasolburg plantsin 2006. However, much of the monomer production is upstream of this plant both inSasolburg and Secunda. Sasol notes ongoing remediation of mercury contaminationat the Polymers plant [SDR 2007] and, while it has reduced VOC emissions, vinylchloride emissions are up [AR 2007]. Safripol, SANS and Hosaf give no informationon their environmental impacts. Spent catalyst may be assumed to be a significant76 At www.plasfed.co.za.- 108 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation