Pollution Solution

Mr. Luay Al-Mukhtar, National focal point, from the Iraq Ministry of Health and Environment, discusses pollution and chemical safety in Iraq with Zoe Rutherford

In a country such as Iraq, the world’s sixth largest oil producer, and therefore the sixth largest consumer of chemicals for petroleum production, the task of trying to map the chemical industry can be difficult. it encompasses massive multinational oil producers, small private companies, and public sector organisations that are using different chemicals for various purposes. The first thing to do is to carefully consider the system changes that have occurred in Iraq over the years.

In the 1970s Iraq’s chemical industry was well-developed and heavily invested in, with the main players being from the public sector and including the ministries of industries, oil and power. The private sector was there but in a limited way. By 1980 Iraq had the second largest economy in the Arab world, after Saudi Arabia, and the third largest in the Middle East. It had developed a complex, centrally planned economy, which was dominated by the state.

Later in the 1980s and 1990s however, industry in Iraq began to experience difficulties because of the political situations resulting from the Iran/Iraq war, and the First Gulf war. These conflicts also damaged Iraq’s infrastructure, left the country isolated from the international community, and financially and socially drained. Because of these difficulties some of Iraq’s industries collapsed entirely.

As we entered the 2000s, and particularly after 2003, Iraq’s chemical industry was very weak, with less development and investment than it had seen in preceding decades. As these issues took their toll on both the government and industry, you might think it would be difficult to keep track of all the country’s chemical operations, and know exactly what was there and what they were doing. Companies were monitored, the funding mechanism that was then in place for this industry was the issue.

Prior to 2003 the system in Iraq was very different, the government subsidised industry’s expenses and covered them when money was lost. After 2003, this

The Shatt al Arab has been a problem for years ©Raymond Bucko

process had to be carefully reviewed, this subsidy system was unsustainable. Many of the old government related companies began to seek financial investment elsewhere. The government also began to look for outside, private investment for these industries, which they could then turn into more development.

Iraq is now seeing new industrial investment, particularly the petrochemical industry, insofar as the production of oil, and their refineries, are the main consumers of chemicals. With superior raw materials in Iraq, it is hoped that renewed investment will continue to bolster the private sector and lead to further development.

As industry has rebounded, so has Iraq’s ability to map its chemical industry and monitor the materials used and produced. Luay al-Mokhtar, director of the ministry of environment’s chemical monitoring and site assessment department, said: “In Iraq we now have good tools for monitoring and controlling chemicals. An environmental agreement is important for each chemical imported into Iraq. We have a yearly database delineating what types of chemicals are coming in, where they are from, and what they will be used for.” Plenty of data is held, but work remains to be done on the detail of the data as it relates to the security of chemical management.

If a facility falls outside the ministry of environment’s purview how can they know what contaminants/chemicals may be present on a site, and how can they manage the potential threat to civilians if they are not made privy to the information? Iraq, like other countries, has regulations, and environmental laws to assist with this, said Mr al-Mokhtar. “We have an environmental protection law, number 27, published in 2008. This is not the first environmental law, but it is a new one.” Under this law any new activity needs an environmental licence before it can happen. Companies have to complete an environmental assessment report, and these explain all of the environmental impacts of an activity before premises can be built and the activity begun.

The ministry of environment also monitors every activity wherever it is in Iraq, that is the law, though there are issues. “I think the implementation is not yet efficient enough. It needs for example, more techniques, more technologies, and more cooperation with the stakeholders concerned over sharing their data and careful self-monitoring,” said Mr al-Mokhtar.Renewed investment, development and monitoring is of course a good thing, but one major issue that remains to be tackled, is pollution. Luay al-Mokhtar stated that there are some clear reasons for this. “When it comes to the chemical industry there is a huge pollution problem, largely because a lot of the old industrial sites are

contaminated. We have to look carefully at oil production, oil refineries, and new petrochemical projects, as well as others, like cement projects, in terms of emissions and environmental risks.… As the ministry of environment, we need to consider how the private and government sectors can work together to control releases and emissions into the environment. We also need to look very carefully at chemical and hazardous waste management, because knowledge in that field is still limited.”

It is not just emissions that cause industrial pollution in Iraq, another is the way in which waste is dumped. This has been a perennial problem, with industrial and agricultural wastewater being discharged into the Shatt Al-Arab for more than a decade, and many oil spillages occurring on industrial sites.

As an environmental specialist Mr al-Mokhtar, divides waste into three or four categories. “In the first instance, we are only talking about solid wastes and emissions and releases into the environment, that is emissions into water and the air. Solid waste can be divided into hazardous and municipal wastes. Medical waste has special regulations. When we talk about dumping waste, we have to know clearly there is no dumping of waste in Iraq on official or unofficial sites, whether hazardous, medical or municipal waste.” To control hazardous waste, and ensure it is treated safely, Iraq now has a directorate within the ministry of science and technology whose sole purpose is the careful management of the country’s hazardous wastes.

The Euphrates and Tigris come together at Basra to form the Shatt Al-Arab, and the water pollution problems here usually stem from sewage, not industry. Approximately 6m cubic meters of wastewater is delivered to the rivers every day, most of it untreated. “This is a very big problem” stated Mr al-Mokhtar.

To understand these issues, we first need some understanding of the water situation in Iraq. When we look at the river system the main sources of the water coming into Iraq are Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Some of these countries have built dams on their rivers over the years, which has caused issues with floodwaters coming into Iraq from neighbouring countries. The incoming waters are often polluted with sewage and crude oil, and some believe the dams have caused the water quality in Iraq to worsen because they reduce the natural dilution effect of waters that are allowed to flow naturally. Preventing these dams is not the solution for pollution though, says Mr al-Mokhtar, “The solution is to manage our water and wastewater carefully; we have to treat it and use these water sources carefully in development. We haven't depended on the dilution process; this is not enough,” he added.

At present no Iraqi city has a fully operational sewage collection and treatment system, and maybe less than 20%, of the wastewater is treated. A lot of water treatment projects were started before Daesh, but they stopped during the troubles and until the oil price settled down. “This was very sad, and very tragic, especially for Basra” says Mr al-Mokhtar.

Basra has a major problem with sewage treatment, as 12 rivers flow from the Shatt Al-Arab and return into it. If these were clean the city could become a very beautiful place - the Venice of the East, as it was once called. Unfortunately, people throw their sewage into these rivers and create a very bad situation. Mr alMokhtar stated: “We encouraged the government of Basra, and the ministry of municipalities to continue working on a project to fix the problem, but unfortunately that was stopped some time ago.

Iraq is now addressing the situation with new wastewater projects. “There is a fantastic project in Kerbala, which amounts to complete wastewater treatment,” stated Mr al-Mokhtar. This new wastewater project could cover all of Kerbala for the next 20 years, which is good news, and it is to be hoped that this will happen in every city in Iraq.

Iraq’s pollution issues require long term solutions and programmes around capacity building, as well as the provision of technical assistance to all stakeholders, enabling them to be

more engaged, and to understand how to carefully manage wastes and hazardous chemicals. One issue that is often raised when talking about Iraq, chemicals and pollution, is the north of the country. This region was targeted by terrorist groups for a long time, leaving a legacy of contamination, with places like Halabja being particularly damaged.

In working with the ministry of environment’s chemical monitoring and site assessment department, Luay al-Mokhtar assisted the ministry of defence at Halabja, when the government of Kurdistan sought help in moving the remains of people who died through previous regime’s use of mustard gas. As part of this work Mr al-Mokhtar and his team checked the environmental levels, and he commented: “We couldn't say that there is [still] mustard contamination. As you know mustard gas can be persistent in the environment, but it's limited and there is no clear evidence that the pollution continues.”

Iraq's environment ministry has also worked with the UN environment programme (UNEP), on post-conflict assessments after Daesh, and there is an ongoing project to remove waste from buildings in the old city of Mosul. Mr Al-Mokhtar has visited these sites and made reports with UNEP about the contamination. “In Mosul, in particular, there were many fires and sulphur, as well as fires in the oil fields. These sites were thoroughly assessed for the effect on public health and environment.”

With such hazardous tasks, assistance from international organisations is often needed to help clear up sites like Mosul and Halabja. As Mr al-Mokhtar explained, UNEP has a good approach. “The previous executive director of UNEP visited Mosul after Daesh. We worked together closely to assess that area, and I think there were discussions and agreements about how to fix some of the environmental problems. What happened, was actually very sad, it was disaster for the environment and the people. Sometimes we couldn't do more than try to fix things after they had happened.”

In recent years more and more Iraqis have created social media pages to document environmental incidents. Does Mr al-Mokhtar think this is taken seriously enough by those in power in order to rectify the situation. “Actually, I'm one of them,” he says, “I'm one of the people who is raising the problems using social media, especially Facebook, usually trying to alert the government.”

Although working within the government, Mr al-Mokhtar believes the people sometimes have to send a clear message to the politicians, to make them listen and push them into action. “Sometimes that results in positive government action,” he said “sometimes not.” Action can be hindered as there are a lot of gaps in the regime itself because of political failure and corruption, gaps in management

The North of Iraq has been particularly hard hit, with a wide variety of contaminants ©US Army

of the government, how to manage resources, the money, and how to plan best for the future. “As an individual, I am trying to make my country better, I hope that we attend to these very important actions for the people, they need a better future and a better environment, and we have to do our best to help them to live in a better environment,” said Mr al-Mokhtar.

In terms of contaminated sites, government departments are still facing many challenges cleaning these up. The contaminated sites often mean that there is a lots of pollution, and certain types are distributed and dispersed in various locations. In order to begin the clean up there many factors to consider. There needs to be risk assessments of the different types of contamination, and what different areas they are affecting, such as the environment and/or the people. “Then we need to try to rehabilitate or remediate that pollution,” said Mr al-Mokhtar, “We have limited experience in that area and have worked in some places in Iraq trying to fix the contaminated soil. We are now thinking about oil contamination of the soil, for example, and how to use biological or physical treatment methods to fix that.” Iraq is working hard to resolve these problems, but the contaminated sites are very costly and difficult to remediate. In order to address the matter effectively the present process is to identify the critical contaminated sites and prioritise them, before going to the sources of the problems and trying to fix them.

Chemical pollution is not unique to Iraq. With such a large chemical industry, and a major exporter, it is only reasonable to wonder if the August 2020 explosion in Beirut caused Iraq’s legislators to sit up and take notice? Have they decided if this is a port or ANFO problem, and that if those criteria are not met then they don’t need to worry? Or have they realised that this could be any chemical in any city in Iraq. According to Mr al Mokhtar: “The explosion in Beirut should be an emergency warning to everybody”.

Iraq’s ministry of environment and health heads something called the 92S committee which is a high level committee for applying chemical policy in Iraq." The different sectors on the committee have been working to produce this policy since 2015, and to build it up using the strategic approach to international chemical management (SAICM). Mr al-Mokhtar said: “The main ideas from SAICM and also from CBRN, should be applied by this committee, which is headed by the ministry. The committee met in September 2020 and discussed the issue of the Beirut explosion.”

Iraq has to resolve the situation in its ports, because, said Mr alMokhtar: “We think that it's not right to put chemical stores near ports. This is an important lesson from what happened in Beirut. [We must] tell the ministry of transportation to establish stores far away from ports. Sometimes that takes a long time in cost terms, or testing of chemicals, is dangerous for the port and the people. Hopefully, we now have a resolution, and will be working on it very fast and very soon.”

Iraq has been working on its problems of pollution, conflict contamination, and chemical responsibility for some time, but will the current generation be the last to have to deal with these issues or are there quite a few decades of work ahead of them? Ongoing projects to improve wastewater treatment are hoping to prevent issues such as over 11,000 people getting sick from polluted water in 2018. More still remains to be done as a majority of Iraq’s water treatment plants are only partially functional.

There have also been major efforts to clean up and monitor the conflict contamination in the north of Iraq, and as Mr alMokhtar commented, monitoring has shown that it is perhaps not as bad as has been reported in the west. What timescale can be put on the clean up efforts, is 10 years too little out too much for getting those sites completely clean? “In terms of damage and what happened to them 10 years is long enough for people to turn and forget,” says Mr al-Mokhtar. “They have to return to their cities and good memories not the bad ones. We have to help them go back, and we hope that 10 years will be enough to fix everything.”