Sumgayit Journal: With More Jobs, More Smog

Amidst a hydrocarbon-fueled economic boom, the factories in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgayit, a former capital of the Soviet Union's chemical industry, are back at work again, with questionable environmental results.

Built in the 1950s to the north of Baku, Sumgayit in Soviet days produced a cocktail of toxic chemicals ranging from lindane to (until 1981) DDT. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sumgayit became little more than an industrial cemetery. Tens of thousands of its inhabitants left.

Today, the city's official population stands at 270, 000 and jobs are beginning to return: between 2003 and 2006, some 25,000 new positions were created, according to government statistics. Most of the work centers on the manufacture of chemical products for use in oil refineries, pipes and polyester.

But concurrent with the return of jobs, there has been a reappearance of "gazovka," or smog.

Twenty years ago, it would have passed unnoticed, one 55-year-old Sumgayit resident claims. "[W]e did not know the difference," commented Arifa Aliyeva. "But after the factories stopped working in the early years of independence, we saw the difference between polluted and clean air."

Considerable debate now surrounds how "clean" Sumgayit's air has actually become, and whether sufficient safeguards are in place to prevent a return to Soviet smog levels.

For its part, the government maintains that current emissions are a fraction of rates from the late Soviet era. The Ministry of the Environment reports that over 11,000 tons of waste from natural gas emissions were released into the atmosphere in 2006 compared with just over 74,003 tons in 1990. Production of solid wastes has dropped from 165,144 tons in 1990 to 2,198 in 2006. Meanwhile, the government claims that wastewater emissions by the city of Sumgayit into the Caspian Sea have decreased nearly three-fold, to 76.9 million cubic meters in 2006.

"The situation is much, much better now," asserted ministry spokesperson Irada Ibrahimova.

Not all pollution activists agree. In 2006, the Blacksmith Institute, a New York City-based environmental watchdog, listed Sumgayit among the 10 most polluted sites in the world, including Ukraine's Chernobyl and Russia's Norilsk. The government says that the data used is 10 years out of date.

Azerbaijani environmental watchdog groups agree that Blacksmith's data is old, but add that more recent information and statistics are largely inaccurate or incomplete. Serious problems still exist, they say.

Arif Islamzade, director of the Center for Environmental Rehabilitation of Sumgayit, one of the more serious health problems is connected to the use in local factories of sodium hydroxide, a material used in petroleum production. Islamzade claims that high quantities of metallic elemental mercury are used to produce the sodium hydroxide, and remain in waste released into the atmosphere. Mercury vapor can have severe effects on the respiratory system.

Islamzade claimed that local factories have stopped using a government-run disposal unit for sodium hydroxide since they cannot afford the usage fees charged. Ministry officials said that they had no such information.

Part of the problem is that most Soviet-era factories still in operation have been allowed to continue functioning without official certification that their operations meet environmental regulations. "They were approved when they started working back in Soviet times," said Gahraman Khalilov, head of the Ministry of the Environment's industrial department. "We certify only new production sites."

Residents name Sumgayit's Aluminum and Composite Design factories among the chief polluters. Composite Design, a new factory, is the main supplier of plastic pipes for a new water pipeline project between Baku and Gabala in northeastern Azerbaijan. The Aluminum Factory has existed since Soviet times.

Gazanfar Aliyev, head of the Environment Ministry department that oversees Sumgayit, says that repeated warnings to the aluminum plant about its emissions have gone unheeded. The Composite Design production line, however, is "clean," he claims.

Aluminum factory officials could not be reached for comment.

Identifying the location of land waste dumps from the Soviet past only adds to the problem. Ten houses have recently gone up on land between Sumgayit and Baku deemed uninhabitable by the Environment Ministry. Ministry officials state that they had notified city authorities to stop the land sales, but to no avail.

But most of Sumgayit's inhabitants, however, do not understand the potential threat posed by the factories, Islamzade adds. The younger generation "is more interested in having jobs than in the environment," he says, adding that older residents' criticism "does not go beyond conversations in coffee shops."

To domestic and international environmental activists, the red flag for Sumgayit's pollution problems has long been its infant mortality rate, the highest in the country. Azerbaijan's State Statistics Committee puts the rate at 20.8 children per 1,000 live births, compared with the national rate of 9.8.

Data from the United Nations shows an even higher death rate: 74 children per 1,000 live births in 2000, the latest year for which data has been released, according to the organization.

Yet environment ministry spokesperson Ibrahimova argues that Sumgayit's high infant mortality rate is "not necessarily" the result of pollution. It is up to health officials to find out the real cause, she asserts. Meanwhile, Sumgayit residents are holding on. "We understand that the country is developing and that now the situation with unemployment is not as bad as it used to be," commented 70-year-old retired schoolteacher Zuleykha Gasimova. "But I hope they will also think about people's health and do something about pollution."