TV REVIEW : ‘Dumping Ground’ Points Fingers

“Global Dumping Ground” is a first-class investigative piece on environmental criminals and the nations--including the Unites States--whose policies appear to encourage them.

On this program, and in this context, recycling is a dirty word.

The Center for Investigative Reporting began unearthing this stinking scandal several years ago, and with tonight’s season-opening “Frontline” documentary (at 9 on Channel 28, 10 p.m. on Channels 24 and 50), the probe reaches a resounding resonance. Bill Moyers is the correspondent.

“Global Dumping” is as clear and incisive as a documentary gets. The culprits in this junk-exporting scenario, according to this production of the investigative reporting group and KQED-TV in San Francisco, range from two New York brothers who made a fortune selling America’s toxic garbage to Third World nations, to the U.S. government, which lacks the regulatory will to curtail toxic waste traffic that is as profitable for some U.S. businesses as it is sometimes smelly.

The now-imprisoned Colbert brothers “are to hazardous waste what the James brothers were to bank robbery,” former federal prosecutor James DeVita says here.

“We were basically pioneers . . . in the surplus recycling business,” Charles Colbert tells producer Lowell Bergman.

As it turns out, in fact, the Colberts are in jail not for exporting toxic waste--there is no U.S. law prohibiting that--only for selling it as dry-cleaning fluid.

They got the toxic material from U.S. companies that preferred selling it cheaply or giving it to the Colberts than paying the expensive cost of disposal. Thus, everyone profits. And, Colberts or no Colberts, the global dumping goes on.

Cut to polluted Taiwan, where children near an auto battery recycling plant register high lead levels and perform poorly in school. Smashed up for their lead and usable scrap, the used batteries came from the United States, where they are not even classified as toxic waste. Tell that to the children downwind from the smelter.

We’re told tonight that even though environmentally ravaged Taiwan now wants to stop importation of dangerous toxic materials, it’s still being urged by the U.S. government to let in the U.S. waste and scrap materials that the Taiwanese say are hazardous.

Meanwhile, there are no straight answers here from the Environmental Protection Agency, leaving the impression that global dumpers are simply too powerful politically for the U.S. government to want to stop them.