Albania stopped the docking of a vessel suspected of hiding a huge amount of toxic waste

TIRANA, Albania. Albania prevented a ship suspected of carrying huge quantities of hazardous waste from docking at its main port of Tirana on Monday, officials said, after a monitoring group alerted authorities.

The Turkish-flagged Moliva XA443A was about a mile off the port of Durres, 33 kilometers (20 miles) west of the capital. Prosecutors ordered that the containers be confiscated and stored “in an environmentally and physically safe place” for monitoring.

Basel Action Network, or BAN, a Seattle-based environmental nongovernmental organization, said it reported the vessel to authorities in August after a whistleblower tipped off that its “102 containers” were suspected of carrying “approximately 2,100 metric tons of … dust from filters for pollution control by steel industry wastes”.

BAN said the “large party” first departed from Durres on July 4, 2024, on two chartered Maersk ships with an “estimated destination of Thailand”. The group said it also alerted several transit countries and worked with EARTH, Thailand’s leading environmental organization, to jointly raise the alarm about the cargo

Thailand refused to accept the cargo, asking Singaporean authorities to stop it. The ships then docked at a Turkish port and the cargo was loaded onto a Turkish-flagged vessel that stopped briefly at the Italian port of Gioia Tauro before heading to Albania, BAN reported.

According to local reports, customs documents indicated that the containers contained iron oxide.

In August, the Albanian opposition accused the government of involvement in the illegal trade in hazardous materials. Prime Minister Edi Rama told parliament in September that the cargo’s documents had been verified and that iron oxide “is not considered a toxic waste in the European catalogs on which our country’s environmental and customs procedures are based.”

Jim Puckett, chairman of BAN, was in Durrës when the ship arrived and called on authorities to publicly open and sample the containers to ensure transparency. The group also wants to analyze the samples in “different laboratories in parallel”.

He told reporters that they suspect the toxic steel dust was collected from pollution control filters from an Albanian company and was also illegally exported from Kosovo and Germany.

“The Albanian government needs to find a solution to remove them,” Puckett said.

There was no comment from the Ministry of Tourism and Environmental Protection.