The Moliva, which Thailand refused to unload due to its suspicious cargo of toxic waste, has returned to Albania. The Albanian prosecutor’s office in Durrës ordered the sequestration of the containers.
Albania blocked a ship suspected of transferring a huge amount of hazardous waste from docking at the main port of Tirana on Monday, officials said, after a monitoring group alerted authorities.
The Turkish-flagged Moliva was kept about a kilometer from the port of Durres, west of the capital. Judicial authorities ordered that the containers be seized and stored “ in an environmentally and physically safe location » in order to ensure monitoring.
The non-governmental organization Basel Action Network (BAN), based in Seattle in the United States and specializing in environmental issues, said it reported the ship to authorities in August, followingan anonymous alert stating that its 102 containers are suspected of carrying an estimated total of 2,100 tonnes of pollution filter dust from the steel industry.
BAN said the cargo first left Durres on July 4, 2024, aboard two ships chartered by shipowner Maersk, with Thailand as its destination. The NGO also alerted several transit countries and collaborated with EARTH, a Thai environmental organization, to raise the alarm.
Thailand refused to accept the shipment and asked Singapore authorities to stop it. The ships then docked at a Turkish port and the cargo was loaded onto the Moliva, which made a brief stopover at the Italian port of Gioia Tauro before heading to Albania, BAN said.
Customs documents indicated the containers contained iron oxide, according to local reports.
Suspicions of trafficking in toxic industrial waste
In August, the Albanian opposition accused the government of participating in the illegal trafficking of dangerous materials. Prime Minister Edi Rama told parliament in September that the cargo’s documents had been checked and the iron oxide was “not found” not considered as toxic waste in the European catalogs on which our country’s environmental and customs procedures are based “.
Jim Puckett, director of BAN, was in Durres when the ship arrived and asked the authorities to carry out a public opening and sampling of the containers to ensure transparency. The group also wants the samples to be analyzed in “ different laboratories in parallel “.
He told reporters he suspected toxic dust from the steel furnaces had been collected in an Albanian company’s pollution control filters and had also been smuggled in from Kosovo and Germany.
“ It is up to the Albanian government to find a solution to eliminate them ” said Mr. Puckett.
The Ministry of Tourism and the Environment had no immediate comment.
