Right to breathe: Industrial poison sickens Wagha Town

Steel re-rolling mills continue to use tyres as fuel, putting workers’ and neighbours’ lives at risk.

A year into his job at the mill, where scrap metal is melted down to recycle construction steel, Ahmad developed a cough. He was soon diagnosed with tuberculosis. More than half his colleagues have TB or some other lung disease, he says.

“My children and wife are always coughing,” he adds. “Twelve families from the neighbourhood have moved away recently. I’m thinking about it too.”

Shadipura in northern Lahore is home to dozens of steel re-rolling mills, interspersed with haphazardly-built shops, schools and homes. Shadipura and the nearby areas of Iqbal Colony, Jamshed Town and Sharifpura are home to some 150 mills. These run mostly on old tyres, spewing out acrid black smoke that includes carbon, sulphur and dust pollutants.

The Environmental Protection Department has cited and temporarily sealed almost all of them for using a banned fuel.

But in the absence of a tribunal to hand out stronger punishments, the mills continue to pollute the atmosphere and make the residents of Wagha Town sick.

The consumption of toxic gases damages the thin, sensitive lining in the air passage and can cause various lung diseases, including bronchitis and asthma, according to chest specialist Dr Nadeem Rizvi.

Steel workers are particularly liable to get siderosis, a lung disease caused by the inhalation of iron particles. “Exposure to smoke reduces the defence mechanism of the lungs and makes one prone to all kind of diseases,” Dr Rizvi says.

Lung diseases are rife in Iqbal Colony, Shadipura, Jamshed Town and Sharifpura, but the four areas have no hospitals, only a dispensary set up by the owner of one of the re-rolling mills. The five-marla dispensary in Iqbal Colony offers subsidised but only basic treatment to workers.

“Everyone goes to the dispensary once and then they decide not to go again,” says Shafique, a former mill worker suffering from TB. He now consults a doctor at Shalamar Hospital. “The dispensary is only there to give the mill owner cover for what the mills are doing to the workers.”

This correspondent made several calls to the dispensary over the last week, but no one picked up the phone.

The mills were at least partly running on gas last year, but have not been receiving any for the last six months. Instead they have switched to used tyres.

Manzoor, who runs a small store on Bhaini Road, which divides Jamshed Town and Iqbal Colony, says the mills didn’t used to run at night, but now they operate 24 hours a day. Most of Manzoor’s customers are schoolchildren from four schools on Bhaini Road. “By the time school is over, their faces are black with soot,” he says.

Ismail, a resident of Iqbal Colony, says some of the mills were closed for a day or so after 200 residents protested about the air quality on January 17 at the Lahore Press Club. “The owners told the EPD they would install scrubbers, and they were soon running again,” he says. A scrubber is a small electrical device that filters out carbon soot from smoke.

EPD Inspector Kamran Tufail admitted that the department’s warnings were ineffective. “They do not pay heed to EPD’s warnings. They know there is no tribunal head, and hence no strict punishment will come their way,” he says.

The environmental tribunal, which can imprison violators of environmental laws, has been without a chairman since July 2011. Tufail says some 130 cases involving steel mills are pending with the tribunal (See box).

He says the rerolling units in Wagha Town have all been told to install scrubbers, but adds: “Now due to severe shortage of electricity, it’s not a suitable option.”

All four regions of Wagha Town were residential, but were declared industrial areas under the Lahore Master Plan 2021, approved by the city government in 2002.

Ismail says most residents were workers or low-ranked government servants. “They do not have political connections, or no one would dare to put their health at risk,” he says.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 2^nd, 2012.