Caption: "The international trade in toxic waste has been outlawed since the Basle Convention came into force in 1992. Since then, Earth Report has followed nations' efforts to enforce its provisions.

"In Poisonous Snakes and Ladders, Earth Report found evidence that the treaty is working to stamp out toxic wastes.

"Today we bring that story up to date."

Comm: "In the 1980's, revelations that the industrialised world was exporting poisonous wastes to poor East Europe and African countries caused a public outcry.

"Responding to pressure - especially from Africa - governments turned to the United Nations Environment Programme to get agreement to control transport of wastes hazardous to us and our environment."

Dr. Wiltshire Johnson, Health Minister, Sierra Leone (1989): "Poverty has been the reason that people have been lured into accepting substances that under other circumstances, they would never have contemplated doing."

Comm: "Earth Report reveals that the Basle Convention has been surprisingly effective at stopping the poison trade despite being criticised by environmentalists and developing countries.

"A majority of countries have now signed the accord.

"But there is a toxic legacy to be cleared up, and new chemicals are constantly coming to market, posing new hazards.

"The toxic waste trade has been a dangerous game of ups and downs."

Comm, (Koko Beach, Nigeria, 1988): "The contents of these drums were poisonous enough to cause burns, blood vomiting and partial paralysis to the Nigerians who touched them.

"Nigerians were furious that Italians had dumped toxic waste on their shores without asking. They seized an Italian ship to force Italy to remove the waste.

"Toxic waste comes from chemical factories like ACNA here in Northern Italy that have, for a hundred years, produced more and more poisonous waste which has been discarded in land dumps and down the Bormida river."

Roseanna Vivaldi, Protestor (1989): "No. Having seen the problems in the Bormida valley, I have absolutely no faith in them, and I think they shouldn't even be producing these things, because when chemicals are not biodegradable, they shouldn't be produced. Our children still have to drink the water and live on this earth and that's why I'm fighting."

Comm: "Toxic waste from the ACNA factory was piling up. The factory needed to get rid of it.

"A deal was done with Ceaucescu's Romania. Chemical poisons were dumped in the beautiful Danube Delta."

Dr Giovani Elephante, Director, ACNA Chemica (1989): "If you go to Romania, okay, I have to confirm that we have sent toxic wastes to Romania, but all these, how can I say, all this was done according to the Italian law."

Comm: "Toxic waste, because it now had value, started to be traded by brokers who could make money by side-stepping new environmental laws. Some, like Italian Gianfranco, thought they were protecting their landscape by sending it to deserts in places like Djibouti."

Gianfranco Ambrosini, Waste Trader (1989): "They know what they were importing - we are, were not importing like chocolates, we were importing industrial waste."

Comm: "Ambrosini's partner company Jelly Wax had hired many ships to take toxic waste to Africa and the Middle East. But this time they were found out, and the Djibouti load was banned."

Renalto Pent, Waste Trader (1989): "We couldn't allow the cargo to be dumped in the sea - it would have damaged our image. It would also have cost us a lot of money if the ship returned here. So we contacted Venezuela."

Comm: "When toxic waste turned up on their doorstep, the people of Venezuela protested at being turned into a noxious dump. It was routed to Syria. Discovered there, it was hastily loaded at gunpoint into a barely seaworthy ship called the Zanoobia. After a two-year voyage, 2,000 tons of poisonous cargo arrived back in Italy.

"Italy wasn't the only rogue player.

"Ex arms traders like Arnold Kunzeler got in on the act, cashing in on war-torn countries in Africa."

Arnold Kunzeler, Arms dealer (1989): "Then we decided OK, we would attack Angola and Namibia, and most probably South Africa we have a possibility and this was how it started."

Comm: "Here was a toxic time-bomb. If chemical poisons were being dumped everywhere, then sooner or later there would be an environmental catastrophe. It was time to bring in the law.

"The United Nations Environment Programme started work on an international agreement to control toxic waste in 1987.

"It was the first glimmer of hope.

"Back then, nobody knew how much waste was produced, or being dumped. Guessing, the officials reckoned a 10th of all toxic waste was exported abroad, and about 10 million tons of that was going to poorer, developing countries every year.

"While industry wanted less restrictions, environmentalists, backed by public outrage, wanted a total ban on toxic waste exports. After hard bargaining, representatives from 132 countries finally agreed to control toxic waste.

Dr Klaus Toepfer, United Nations Environment Programme: "It was really a signal of a new solidarity and in this dimension it was really a landmark."

Comm: "The Basle Convention had a profound effect. The worse excesses of the toxic waste trade were stopped. The toxic traders were not happy."

Arnold Kunzeler: "UNEP is to control the movement of hazardous waste. Now somebody somewhere, somehow, in Europe has to save some faces. Because if you see who is in the meeting, and who's organised the meeting, you can point a finger at them. They are the real bastards."

Comm: "These traders soon found loopholes. They marked waste 'recyclable' and exported it for the valuable materials that might be extracted.

"But it was all a sham and dumped toxic waste was causing injury.

"It took five years before control of toxic exports became a ban."

Dr Toepfer: "Because there is a lot of money to be earned if you can export hazardous waste for example under the headline of recycling to developing countries. It's very expensive to handle this waste at home for the developed countries and therefore it was extremely important to come to a total ban."

Comm: "Today, 300,000 cubic metres of highly toxic waste still sits in ACNA's lagoons.

"Meanwhile, the waste traders have moved on. Gianfranco Ambrosini now operates in Eastern Europe and Renalto Pent has moved into battery recycling. But what about the poison they left behind?

"Before the export of toxic waste was banned, thousand's of barrels of Italian carcinogenic chemicals, poisonous solvents and decomposing pesticides were sent to civil war torn Lebanon."

Zeina Al Hajj, Greenpeace: "It all started in 1987 when a ship called the Radhorst docked at Beirut Port and unloaded 15,000 barrels of toxic material and 20 containers into Beirut Port, imported from Italy to be dumped all over the country."

Comm: "The right-wing Christian militia was paid millions of dollars to take toxic waste without the faintest idea of what to do with it."

Zeina Al Hajj: "In 1988, one year after the import of the waste to Beirut port, many barrels were found along the Lebanese coast, along the beaches and people get panicked about these barrels and the containers."

Comm: "Doctor Pierre Malychef is a pharmacist outside Beirut, selling medicines for over 50 years.

"Back in 1988, Dr Malychef discovered a huge cache of the toxic barrels and containers in this quarry. Investigating the barrels caused him injury.

Dr Pierre Malychef, Pharmacist: "I opened it and once I opened it was hot, and the gas came in my lungs and I fell down, my attention went three or four maximum, and they took me to the hospital of Abou Jadwe, and I was treated for cancer epitulma, caused, I said by I was manipulating something very dangerous, called dricofall-antreaclefall."

Comm: "Today Dr Malychef is returning with Zeina Al Hajj and colleague Dr Wilson to hunt for more evidence."

Dr Malychef: "In this place in general, they were burning about 300 barrels here. And when they burned these 300 barrels the fumes and the ashes covered all the nature here. And a quantity and goats and sheep, they died when they eat this grass."

Comm: "During 1988, Abdo Al'Hajj who worked at the garage next door, thinking one barrel contained shampoo, used it to shave and wash his hair."

Dr Malychef: "I think that he was very badly intoxicated, by this barrel, especially, he had a barrel of, they gave him of detergent. And one day, he died from it."

Zeina Al Hajj: "There is a barrel here, but he doesn't know what's in it. Here's a barrel!"

Comm: "The Italian toxic waste has never been totally accounted for. Today, the garage may still contain evidence of contamination. Ten years ago, toxic waste was sold on by the militia as herbicide, paint or detergent to unsuspecting villagers in the mountains above Beirut.

"Barrels were recycled and used for storing water.

"Five years after toxic waste was first found in war-torn Lebanon, there was mounting evidence that thousands of barrels were still at various sites throughout the country."

Zeina Al Hajj: "In this dumpsite there's a mixture of toxic material, there's a mixture of household waste, hospital waste, industrial waste and also barrels from the Italian toxic shipment that were imported into Lebanon in 1987."

Comm: "Again Pierre Malychef was on the trail, high up into the mountains where ski resorts were being built. Lebanon was now into a period of reconstruction and wanted to re-establish a tourist industry and the discovery of more toxic waste was not to be tolerated.

"Pierre Malychef is convinced Italian toxic waste still poisons the mountains and water supplies.

"Returning again, helped by a satellite positioning sensor, they uncover a known dumpsite."

Dr Malychef: "I am working, I am speaking too much from maybe 20 and more years in Lebanon, for my fight for the Lebanese environment. I am beaten. I am put in jail. They deny my pharmacy. I agree, but even if there is some result, but I see there is no one result."

Comm: "500 metres down the road is more Italian toxic waste that was never cleaned up."

Dr Malychef: "Everywhere you see is anilene, metylanilene, see red quality. You have seen the violet quality. There is yellow, and even there is this red. In general the more quality is the red anilene. The most dangerous toxic, by inhalation, you have, you have, you can have the cancer of the lung, and you have the attack of the central nervous system.

"You can be paralysed by this bad substance."

Interviewer: "Do you think the ministry should do something?"

Dr Malychef: "Yes you have to give him some photos and some samples of the anilene you see."

Interviewer: "I went yesterday with a gentleman Mr Malychef up to the mountains and was shown evidence of Anilene toxic waste. I wondered what you'd say to that?"

Berj Hatijan, Director-General, Lebanese Ministry of Environment: "Well, what I would do as a scientist, and administratively responsible person. I would try to find ways of analyse for concentrations of anilene in this soil, get real data on the identification of the toxic material and then act upon the results. I would just not throw conclusions in the air from a sample of soil that has no indication of its pollutants in it."

Zeina Al Hajj: "Italy has a moral obligation to solve this issue once and for all. Apparently not all the waste has been shipped back to Italy in '88 and definitely in 1994."

Interviewer: "Would the Italian government be prepared to take back this soil?"

Guiseppe Cassini: "We are ready to do that provided that we won't become the sweepers of the mountains of Lebanon, polluted by hundreds of individuals or foreign polluters. I am saying that because at least one thing we know, that so many actors played a role in this tragi-comic event. That as soon as you accept responsibility, probably you shall be put on our shoulder all the waste of the country."

Dr Malychef: "On the barrel it was written, metylanilene, from the German BASF company, German factories, who give it to Jelly Wax to be incinerated. And Jelly Wax, they don't incinerate it and throw it in Lebanon."

Comm: "Zambia, land of the Victoria Falls. It's one country where Western governments are trying to make amends for a policy that gave farmers agro-chemicals, but that had unforeseen consequences.

"Half of this load of abandoned pesticides is thought to have been washed into this canal, a source of drinking water.

"Banned in the West, pesticides such as DDT, lindane, endosulphane, atrazine and diazinon, were once seen as a boon for growing food in poor countries.

"These agro-chemicals were donated to farmers as aid. But the farmers received little training in their safe use and many preferred not to use them."

Ale Wodageneh: "Some of these pesticides have been sitting for 20, 25, 30 years, so it's endangering the lives and the livelihood of the people."

Comm: "The German aid agency GTZ discovered the dangers and found 360 tons at seven sites all over Zambia.

"They temporarily covered some in polythene, but now the decaying poisons need cleaning up.

"A $1.2 million European and United Nations clean-up contracted a British company to remove and repack the obsolete chemicals.

"Eight shipping containers of equipment were brought, including this flame-proof drum crusher.

"Inches of DDT dust were found in this warehouse. Unaware of the dangers, children crawled in here to play.

"In the end, all these out-of-date pesticides were sent to be incinerated, but thousands of tons of agricultural toxic waste remain in Africa."

Ale Wodageneh: "Help has to come from developed countries, and they should take back some of these pesticides, at least for destruction, I mean you don't say that part of the planet is yours and doesn't come to me, and this part of the planet is mine - we are mingled you see, we live together."

Comm: "To get rid of toxic waste, it's either buried in landfill to always threaten water supplies, or it's incinerated. But the most lethal substances known can result from burning poisons. Dioxin induces cancer, birth defects and immune system damage at almost immeasurably small doses.

"Are there safer ways of getting rid of poisons like Anilene?"

Dr Aysuman Sen, Penn State University, Chemistry Department: "We can take water that is polluted with anilene, and we put this catalyst, iridium, which facilitates the reaction and we expose it to oxygen from the air and warm it up for a few hours. All the pollutants were removed, they were converted to harmless carbon dioxide in the water, and the water was just about clean enough to drink, so a very broad range of toxic organics can be destroyed, in fact the same procedure can be used to destroy nerve gases or chemical warfare agents."

Comm: "In the last ten years, reedbeds have been used to suck up and break down man-made poisons. But other more far reaching solutions to hazardous waste must be found.

"Solutions such as minimising waste generation at source. That means thinking through the entire life cycle of products from design to disposal."

Dr Klaus Toepfer, United Nations Environment Programme: "We must come to cleaner production, we have to close the cycle, the life cyle economy. Not to come to an easy way, with the throw away society. Somebody has to handle the hazard of those wastes."

Comm: "To find other solutions to this toxic legacy regional centres have been established throughout all five continents. The centres pool resources and information on hazardous waste.

"One of the centres is here in El Salvador."

DR Ana Maria Majano, Environment Minister, El Salvador: "One of the very important functions of the centres is to create that capacity to give information, to exchange information with other countries, to force the technology transfer and to force the development of private companies to provide those services."

Isatou Gaye, National Enviroment Agency, The Gambia: "Well the regional, sub-regional training centres that have been established in Africa, as I said is a step in the right direction. For Africa cannot afford the technology to deal with hazardous waste - even those that it generates, not to talk of those that are generated from outside Africa. And actually that is why the Basle Ban Amendment which is indeed a land mark in the history of the Basle Convention is very important for Africa.

"Ten years on from Koko beach and more toxic waste is being produced. Waste from thousands of new chemical compounds and new electronic products, like mobile phones and Internet computers, are all challenging the work of the Basle Convention."

Dr Klaus Toepfer, United Nations Environment Programme: "Now I believe the next step must be the use of liability. It's really the first time that you are using this important market-orientated instrument 'liability' to implement those convention and protocols and to have a better compliance and enforcement. But this is not the end of the story. Much more important than only to ask to avoid the export of hazardous waste is simply to avoid hazardous waste."