Ihlenberg landfill

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The garbage heap of the landfill from the north

The landfill Ihlenberg , according to the earlier designation VEB landfill Schoenberg still often landfill Schoenberg called, is a 1979 District Rostock founded waste disposal facility for hazardous and non-hazardous waste in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern . It belongs to the neighboring Selmsdorf .

location

The landfill is located in the western Mecklenburg-Vorpommern near Selmsdorf and Schoenberg within the former restricted area of the inner-German border . Between the two locations there is the natural Ihlenberg hill (60 m and 82 m above sea level), which extends over several kilometers. This gave the landfill its new name after 1991. On the southern half of this hill, the landfill was built as a slope landfill or heap landfill. The distance to the center of the nearest large city Lübeck is about 14 km, the nearest residential development is only 200 meters away.

history

background

The German-German contract from 1973 formed the basis for the future Schönberg landfill .

In January 1979 the GDR Politburo decided that a garbage dump should be built in the Rostock district not far from the border area. This order was also delegated to the Grevesmühlen district by resolution in March 1979 by the Rostock District Council . The district council members in Grevesmühlen were only informed that a landfill for building rubble, slag, fly ash, etc. was to be set up at the Ihlenberg site. At that time there was no mention of hazardous waste.

construction

In a first step, the properties on the Ihlenberg, which lay between the village of Selmsdorf and the town of Schönberg, were converted into public property and expropriated. Construction progressed rapidly so that the landfill was ready for operation on May 15, 1979, four months after the Council of Ministers decided. There was no approval procedure with public participation, nor was there a civil rights movement or environmental protection organization. The lack of an assessment of the soil conditions for a landfill before the start of construction is considered to be questionable: At this point in time - if at all - soil investigations regarding location, depth, groundwater and stratification were and are kept secret by the landfill operator to this day. It was known that the soil, in addition to marl boulder, was strongly folded ice-age sand and gravel layers with a high degree of permeability for fluids, because sand and gravel mining was also considered.

It is not known whether there was a legal permit from the responsible authorities with the participation of the legislature in the GDR for the construction and commissioning. The Politburo resolution of January 1979, which was also often assessed as a permit by garbage dealers and authorities in the old federal states, cannot be equated with a permit within the meaning of the legislation in the GDR. The establishment and commissioning of waste dumps in the GDR was regulated at the time by the State Culture Act, but not by a Politburo. The Politburo was also not the approving authority in the GDR (see constitution of the GDR ).

Operation in the GDR

For the first four years, the landfill was operated by the VEB Stadtwirtschaft Grevesmühlen , which was subordinate to the city administration of Grevesmühlen . In 1983 it was converted into an independent, district-managed company, the VEB Deponie Schönberg .

In the first few months, around 15,000 tons of building rubble were brought from the Lübeck area to Schönberg. This deposition of building rubble was followed by the dumping of hazardous waste, in accordance with a further Politburo resolution from 1980. A basic seal, as it is prescribed today, was not the technical standard back then, neither in the east nor in the west. Dumping prices and the inadequate monitoring by the GDR authorities made the Schönberg landfill interesting for European waste management. The price of using a waste incineration plant in the Western European economic area was up to DM 300 per ton, while the disposal of hazardous waste in an underground landfill was even more expensive. In Schönberg, however, garbage could be disposed of for 20 DM per ton.

The garbage came from the Netherlands , among others . In addition to the Philips incandescent lamp works NL , W. Biesterfeld u.Co. in Alphen, Blythe Cobours in Maastricht, Seado BV and Oco Andeno to the customers of the landfill. Companies from West Germany included Dankers Hamburg-Heimfeld, Beiersdorf AG , Rastatt AG Hamburg branch, Reinger hazardous waste disposal Wutöschingen-Horheim, ABG Messerschmitt - Blohm GmbH , K + S AG , Deutsche Shell AG Raffinerie Harburg, ABG Berliner Gaswerke Hamburg, CF Plump Bremen , Edelhoff Bramsche and Ruhrkohle AG Essen.

In 1982, following a further decision by the GDR Politburo, the landfill was also cleared for substances in which the prescribed limit values ​​for poison class 1 and 2 were observed. Controls of the chemicals delivered could not be carried out until late in the 1980s because the appropriate technology was not available. Intercontrol, based in Wismar , was responsible for chemical analyzes . From 1983 onwards, voices were raised in the GDR Environment Ministry that the high levels of dioxin in the waste materials supplied could have health effects on employees. However, this did not affect the acceptance of the substances.

The main contractual partner of the GDR in the west was the Hanseatische Baustoffkontor (HBK), which received the sole marketing rights. In return, the shareholders of the HBK established the necessary contacts to personalities from business and politics in the Federal Republic. Politicians in Kiel, Hamburg or North Rhine-Westphalia received perks from the main shareholder Adolf Hilmer , such as regular cash donations, vacation stays in Travemünde, on Föhr, etc. Peter-Uwe Conrad, who was also responsible for issuing transport permits. In the GDR, the processes were controlled by Intrac , a sub-division of the state-owned foreign trade company in the KOKO department in East Berlin.

In 1989, the Schönberg landfill reached its temporary high point with deliveries of 1.3 million tons, mainly hazardous waste, but also commercial waste. At the end of 1989, a total of around 10 million tons of waste was stored in the landfill.

After the fall of the Wall, 1989–1993

Citizens' protest in 1990

After 1989, the Treuhandanstalt initially took over the landfill operations, and at the same time the name VEB Deponie Schönberg changed to Ihlenberg-Landfill for marketing reasons . Adolf Hilmer retained control of the site. From 1993, the rights of use were contractually granted to DMG Deponie-Management GmbH , the main shareholders of which were Hilmer and RWE Umwelt . Eventually the IAG (Ihlenberger Abfallentsorgungs-Gesellschaft) came into being. The responsibility for aftercare, however, remained in the hands of the state. This type of risk distribution led to protests, so that an investigative committee was finally set up in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state parliament by the PDS and SPD. The background to this was the discovery of possible follow-up costs for securing and restoring the mountain of toxic waste, which had grown to 13 million cubic meters. Experts estimated the financial resources required to be around DM 1 billion. Provisions of around DM 76 million from 1993 were, however, completely collected by the trust company in the course of the transfer of ownership. As a result, there were two other investigative committees in the country, which also failed to bring clarity to the dubious processes of unification-related crime with regard to the ownership and use of the landfill. Due to the allegations made against him in the course of the investigation, the politician Wolfgang Kubicki had to resign in 1993 from the state chairmanship of the FDP and the parliamentary group chairman in the Kiel state parliament.

The other years

Since 1996/98 the rights of use have been again in the hands of the state via the IAG. Thanks to a large number of special and exceptional permits issued by the state authorities themselves, the landfill is now operated under the name “Deponie Ihlenberg”. There is no coherent and binding closure, security and aftercare concept, which is why the financial requirements for this are not known. Under pressure from the citizens 'initiatives, the Environment Minister of the State of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Wolfgang Methling, established a landfill advisory board in which representatives of the state, the Grevesmühlen district, the neighboring communities, the IAG and citizens' initiatives are represented.

The mountain of rubbish grows annually by approx. 600,000 tons of mostly hazardous waste that requires monitoring from all parts of Germany. The height of the mountain is currently about 110 meters, the base area covers an area of ​​82 ha. There are no facilities for waste treatment, especially hazardous waste, on the Ihlenberg.

The management of IAG and the majority of the members of the supervisory board came from Schleswig-Holstein until 2019, the workforce mostly comes from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

There were two waves of layoffs between 2003 and 2005. This reduced the number of employees from 164 to approx. 100.

In October 2019 it was reported that the Ministry of Finance was planning to close the landfill in 2035. In 2019, the management was changed in order to be able to initiate the closure.

Environmental pollution

The first verifiable investigations of the subsurface were carried out in 1982. Boulder clay and clay alternate with sandy layers. The groundwater level on the Ihlenberg is unusually high. The upper aquifer extends in places to the surface of the earth. The surface water that arises is polded and channeled into the city pond of Schönberg. Toxic seepage water was sucked off until 1990, only defused in a cleaning system with osmosis technology since 1990 , whereby the poison concentrate obtained is returned to the garbage heap. In 1996 it was officially announced for the first time that groundwater contamination had occurred in the northern area of ​​the landfill. Gradually, from 1998, measurement technology and permanent analysis were scaled back to save costs.

The greatest threat comes from the lack of basic sealing of the old landfill. As soon as the highly toxic seepage water under this part has reached the aquifer, which is only a matter of time, the region's groundwater is irreversibly poisoned. This can also affect Lübeck because it has not been proven with certainty that the groundwater flow does not also flow in the direction of Lübeck. In 2001, another citizens' initiative was founded, which endeavors to minimize the negative effects of the landfill in the region with considerable, also financial, effort.

At the end of 2002 it became known for the first time that IAG employees were suffering from cancer. The company doctor was allegedly unaware of this until then. 16 employees had to be reported to the responsible trade association due to public pressure. The number of known employees suffering from cancer has continued to rise since then.

In 2005, the University of Greifswald started an epidemiological study on cancer cases, which in mid-2008 found an 80% increased risk of cancer for employees at the landfill.

In 2018, soil levels of cadmium, zinc and mercury were found that were in the range of 30 to 100 times the permitted limit.

Waste

All conceivable chemical waste materials occurring in Europe have been and are dumped and buried here. Waste products from the chemical industry, which could no longer be marketed or presented themselves as problematic substances, were mainly brought from Italy, Switzerland and the Ruhr area to Schönberg and encapsulated in so-called “special trenches”. These special trenches - cavities with partially mineral sealing - have been set up since 1982 for materials that were not allowed to be brought into open-cast mining.

For a long time, the Ihlenberg u. a. Controversial waste such as the reactor contents from the Seveso accident and active waste from the alleged accident suspected at the GKSS .

On November 23, 1981, a delivery of barrels from Italy arrived at the landfill, the contents of which were not known at the Schönberg landfill. Because of this incident at the landfill, the civil defense from Grevesmühlen was called in. According to the files, the waste materials - partly liquid and in closed barrels - were later housed in a special Sauer ditch. Through "targeted measures" by the Stasi and with the support of the main shareholder of the HBK, the media-led "environmental uproar" on the West German side was suppressed.

The landfill operator claims that there is a cadastre for the substances stored here. To this day, however, he could not and did not want to provide proof of this. The declaration analyzes of the delivered waste materials belong to the most closely guarded secrets of the landfill operator. These declaration analyzes were evaluated and archived in the landfill sales center in Berlin-Pankow during the GDR era. VEB-Schönberg also had samples of various types of waste prepared by the Intercontrol company in Wismar.

The core business of the former DMG and IAG are the acceptance and burying of waste materials in closed containers - big bags and barrels. Often these come from the ports of Naples (Italy) and Rotterdam, but also from Germany, e.g. B. BASF, or from the waste disposal of the Greifswald NPP . The actual producers of the waste materials from abroad are often not known. The IAG only analyzes the contents of the containers in certain cases. As a rule, one restricts oneself to a sensory test of the closed containers, as these may no longer be opened on site for safety reasons.

Another very important mainstay of the hazardous waste dump is the mixing of different waste materials. This means that the IAG is also able to collect liquid, muddy and shredded waste with a high level of pollutants.

Municipal waste and light commercial waste were only accepted at the hazardous waste landfill with the background that the sometimes often muddy or powdery hazardous waste materials could be landfilled. Built-in municipal waste is an important part of the water balance within the landfill. The landfill company has been suffering from a shortage of this municipal waste since 2005. Without this proportion, the landfilling of hazardous waste and waste in closed containers is fraught with considerable problems. For this reason, for example, shredder waste is currently being stored in an interim store and looking for ways to put the problematic substances into a "landfillable" state in terms of sharpness by mixing different waste materials.

literature

  • At the end of real socialism. Vol. 4. The end of the GDR economy: analyzes of economic, social and environmental policy. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1999, ISBN 3-8100-2744-8 .
  • From Germany policy to GDR policy. Premises - Problems - Perspectives.
  • International environmental policy. Developments - deficits - tasks.
  • "Gegenwind" magazine, No. 204, September 2005, pages 22 ff.
  • Dioxin in Hamburg: polluter, responsible, affected. of the GAL environmental group, ISBN 3-921909-67-8 with information on waste transport from Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg to the landfill in the 1980s
  • Matthias Baerens, Ulrich von Arnswald: The garbage connection. Disposal companies and their businesses. A Greenpeace book. CH Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-34083-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. District Rostock , Council Decision no. 53/1979
  2. Law on the planned organization of socialist national culture in the German Democratic Republic - Regional Culture Law - of May 14, 1970 (Journal of the GDR I p. 67)
  3. ^ NDR: 1979: The Ihlenberg becomes a landfill . ( ndr.de [accessed on February 23, 2020]).
  4. File situation Gauck authority, file situation StAUN Schwerin, final report of the investigation committee "Landfill Ihlenberg" from 1994, state archive Greifswald
  5. ^ NDR: Landfill Ihlenberg closes in 2035. Accessed on February 23, 2020 .
  6. New bosses for the Ihlenberg landfill are to implement closure. Retrieved February 23, 2020 .
  7. Landfill Ihlenberg - toxic waste on the doorstep. Retrieved on February 23, 2020 (German).
  8. LIKL: Schoenberg: The almost forgotten scandal Landfill | svz.de. Retrieved February 23, 2020 .
  9. ^ Sven-Michael Veit: Schoenberg landfill problem: concern for Lübeck's drinking water . In: The daily newspaper: taz . November 19, 2018, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed on February 23, 2020]).
  10. ARD magazine monitor
  11. Source: Süddeutsche Zeitung
  12. Initiative warns of radioactivity on the landfill. Retrieved February 23, 2020 .

Coordinates: 53 ° 51 '58 "  N , 10 ° 52' 48"  E