Solutions

The Government of India can speed up the switch to clean production and force-polluting industries to use clean solutions and stop relying on cheap and dirty escape routes. Several international treaties provide a starting point to get the world off its toxic treadmill. These treaties will be effective only when enough governments write them into national laws. Politics and industry play a big role in ongoing negotiations. Some of these treaties include

· The Stockholm Convention moves to reduce then eliminate the release of persistent organic pollutants.

· The BASEL Convention helps stop the movement of hazardous waste. An amendment specifically stops wealthy OECD countries from shipping hazardous materials to poorer countries.

At Eloor, we have been campaigning to make the Industry to switch to clean production technologies and the State and Central Governments to pressurize the industry into being accountable to remediate the toxic hotspot they have transformed Eloor into. Eloor plays home to industries producing obsolete pesticides (POPs), such as DDT, banned in most countries. The need of the hour is for the Government of India to Ratify the Stockholm treaty, while expanding and promoting existing non-chemical alternatives for the purpose these chemicals are used, namely vector management and agriculture.

For every toxic problem, there is a clean solution. To avoid further problems that toxic substances create, they must be treated as dangerous until they are proven safe. This approach is based on the precautionary principle and common sense. Greenpeace believes in the "polluter pays" principle. We force companies and governments to clean up the mess they make.

Further Clean production would help the industries to do away with meaningless end-of-pipe solutions. We need to look only as far as Bhopal to see what happens when time runs out. Time is running out for Eloor too. We need to act NOW!