Living with toxic tannery

There are few signs of reform at Bangladesh's leather industry where business is booming thanks to the West's growing demand for cheap leather items.

Living with toxic chemicals, Mokter Hossain loads animal hides into huge drums filled with still more dangerous liquids at a tannery in Hazahribagh in Dhaka.

Barefoot and sick with fever, Hossain stops every now and then to cough, a legacy of the job that his doctors warn could one day kill him.

Hossain's tannery is one of 200 in Hazaribagh in Dhaka, where some 25,000 workers toil for as little as $50 a month to produce leather for shoes and other goods for stores in Europe and the United States.

Ramon Magsaysay Award-winner Syeda Rizwana Hasan blames a lack of headline-grabbing disasters in the industry that could make consumers think twice about where their shoes and bags are made.

Rizwana Hasan said,  "In these tanneries, death comes slowly." She referred to respiratory problems, cancers, skin diseases and other illnesses that doctors blame on long hours and few safety precautions.

"While Bangladesh garment disasters make headlines across the world, the even more terrible conditions at the tanneries don't," she added.

An Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporter recently saw children as young as 14 working inside one tannery, whose floor was awash with chromium effluent and where cow and goat skins caked in salt were stacked in piles.

WASTE DUMPED IN RIVER: In Hazaribagh, the environmental and public health costs of the growing industry are on full display.

Every day, the tanneries collectively dump 22,000 cubic litters of toxic waste, including cancer-causing chromium, into the Buriganga, according to the environment ministry.

Nearly 200,000 people live in Hazaribagh including on the banks of the Buriganga, recently voted one of the world's most contaminated rivers by a New York-based environmental group.

The area, once a pleasant, semi-rural district, has been transformed into a patchwork of toxic swamps, garbage landfills and mountains of decomposing leather scraps.

Dozens of small recycling plants burn the scraps to produce fish and poultry feed -- a flourishing offshoot of the industry. Black smoke covers the sky and there is a stench in the air.

GOVERNMENT APATHY: "The department of environment and the department of labour inspectors hardly make any inspection there. The reasons could be political as the government doesn't want to upset the business community," says Rizwana Hasan.

The government concedes tanneries are breaking environmental laws, but favours persuading, rather than forcing them, to improve, while debate drags on about who would bear the cost of any move.

"The tanners do not want to relocate, they want to stay here. They make excuses so that the relocation is delayed," Munir Chowdhury, a former director at the department of environment, said AFP.

The writer is a  journalist and             environment activist.  [email protected]