With international deployments of U.S. forces at an all-time high,
the troops involved in those operations are spending more time wrestling
with the requirements of the Basel Convention, according to Karen
Moran, an environmental-protection specialist for the Defense Logistics
Agency (DLA), at Fort Belvoir, Va.
This United Nations-sanctioned treaty, signed by 132 nations and
other parties in 1989, places limits on the generation, treatment
and international shipment of hazardous waste, she explained at
an NDIA-sponsored environmental conference in Austin, Texas. The
United States is one of the few nations of the world—along
with the likes of Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti—that have chosen
not to sign the document.
As a result, Basel “has significantly complicated”
overseas training and operations for U.S. troops, “because
of the need, in most cases, to transport waste out of the operations
areas for environmentally sound disposal,” said Jim Carr,
an attorney for DLA’s Defense Reutilization Marketing Service
International.
Because the United States has not signed the treaty, “some
of our closest allies cannot receive U.S.-generated waste,”
he said. For example, he noted, shipments of hazardous waste from
U.S. bases at Incirlik, Turkey, have been stalled, because Spain
refuses to allow them to transit the Straits of Gibraltar. Permission
for similar shipments to pass through the Panama Canal “has
been problematic,” Carr said.
In Kosovo, “it took 11 months to move out the first waste
shipment,” said Bill Nicholls, from the office of the deputy
undersecretary of defense for environmental security.
“The United States deliberately chose not to set the precedent
of shipping waste generated by allies,” Nicholls explained.
This was done “partly to get NATO to step up to the plate,
and secondly, to minimize the risk to U.S. personnel associated
with operating in a hostile theater.” Some NATO allies contracted
locally for disposal, and the waste simply was dumped in a ditch
and forgotten.
The physical layout of U.S. bases overseas often complicates the
situation, Carr said. Overseas bases typically are “small,
fenced parcels in urban areas, rather than large, contiguous parcels
of land, like those in the United States,” he said. “This
can make collection, storage and transportation [of hazardous waste]
difficult.”
The policy of rapid personnel rotations also “creates problems,”
Carr said. “For example, in Southwest Asia, personnel can
rotate every three months.” There is not enough time for troops
to become familiar with Basel requirements, host-nation laws and
local situations before their tour is over, he said.