Greenpeace action puts stop to dredging at Pansio harbour in Turku

Environmental activists concerned about high TBT content

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Activists of the environmental organisation Greenpeace brought dredging work to a halt at the Pansio harbour in Turku on Thursday. At about nine in the morning, the Greenpeace members in a rubber boat appeared below the digging machine to prevent it from dredging the harbour, and piling the material from the bottom back in the sea in another location.
      Greenpeace says that the mud in the harbour contains large amounts of tributyltin (TBT).
      A company hired by the Port of Turku has been dredging the mud at the bottom of Pansio harbour from the beginning of the month.
      The company plans to move about 200,000 cubic metres of the mud into another part of the sea: North Airisto, which has already received more than three million cubic metres of mud containing TBT since the 1990s.
     
TBT, an environmental toxin, originates from harbour shipyards, where it is used mainly in paints on the hulls of ships.
      Under recommendations by Finnish environment officials, it is permissible to move bottom mud that contains as much as 200 microgrammes of TBT per kilo.
     
Baltic herring caught in the Airisto area of Turku were found this spring to contain 20 times the recommended amount of TBT.
      According to Greenpeace, Environment minister Jan-Erik Enestam would have the authority to ban the transfer of contaminated harbour mud to Airisto.
      However, Sari Tolvanen, a marine biologist, and head of the Greenpeace sea campaign, says that the only thing that has happened is that the TBT content of the area is constantly being checked, again and again.
      As Tolvanen sees it, the Port of Turku is trying to get rid of its TBT problem as quickly as possible - by dumping it in another place in the sea.


Links:
  Greenpeace web site: TBT, a global problem for the marine environment

Helsingin Sanomat