Fertilizer Waste

Huelva, Spain

Since 1994, when this plant stopped disposing its waste directly into the Huelva River, it created the large “gypsum stacks” which breached during a storm in December 1998 allowing between 50,000 and 400,000 cubic meters of toxic slurry to be released into the Ria Huelva, a tributary of the Rio Tinto. Legal actions by environmental groups and the EU forced the company to close the dumps and remove all the material. Production has been moved to Morocco and Saudi Arabia, locations with presumably lower environmental protections.