Trafigura - what was the chemical called?

[Henry Hawthorne]

Hi,

I remember watching Newsnight last yr or whenever it was regarding the Trafigura scandal in Cote D'Ivoire. The reported said the waste dumped released a smell from a particular chemical, which was the "strongest smelling substance" in the world. I remember searching up this chemical and finding it was some group and there was no mention of it anywhere on the Internet stating the super-strong smell. Anyway, I want to do some more research and was wondering if anyone knew the name of it.

I thought it was matarpan or something like that, but Google throws nothing up.

Cheers,

HH

[pacman1]

Probably no more than this

I remember reading about 15 years ago of some huge chemical dumps in the US. Big tanks where they'd stick anything that wasn't nice. Anything, just poured it in. Lots of Naval and military waste too. But no one kept an inventory of what went in. The article I read said that they wanted to clear them up before the tanks began to leak from age, but were so potentially dangerous that nobody would get near the resultant soup.
Still there, as far as I know.

[turbobloke]

It was probably a member of the family of chemicals known as mercaptans, modern name thiols i.e alcohols containing sulphur in place of oxygen in the hydroxyl group. The artificial smell put into natural gas (methane) to help detect leaks is t-butyl mercaptan.

[hairykrishna]

pacman1 said:

Probably no more than this

I remember reading about 15 years ago of some huge chemical dumps in the US. Big tanks where they'd stick anything that wasn't nice. Anything, just poured it in. Lots of Naval and military waste too. But no one kept an inventory of what went in. The article I read said that they wanted to clear them up before the tanks began to leak from age, but were so potentially dangerous that nobody would get near the resultant soup.
Still there, as far as I know.

We've had similar in the UK. They used to have a big hole at Dounreay that they chucked all manner of radioactive waste down, with minimal inventory keeping.

[Pothole]

In August 2009, the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant reported that Trafigura Beheer and its lawyers sued the Dutch government in order to keep a document of the Dutch National Forensics Institute (NFI) secret. This document had been given to the lawyers of the victims of Ivory Coast toxic waste. Trafigura wants this decision to be reverted on the basis that the victims are not a party to the Dutch case under Dutch law, and claim it would do them irreparable damage if published. The contents of the document are, according to the newspaper, not challenged by Trafigura. The newspaper stated that the NFI determined that the contents of the tanker had been 528,000 litres of extremely alkaline waste constituting 6.8% sulfur, for 3.5% alkyl-thiols and 0.5% hydrogen sulfide.[13]

[Henry Hawthorne]

turbobloke said:

It was probably a member of the family of chemicals known as mercaptans, modern name thiols i.e alcohols containing sulphur in place of oxygen in the hydroxyl group. The artificial smell put into natural gas (methane) to help detect leaks is t-butyl mercaptan.

That's the one! Cheers.