South Africa 'unleaded' petrol still toxic - report

South African petrol remains almost as dirty and poisonous as ever, despite the introduction of "clean" unleaded petrol over the past few years.

This is the main conclusion of a report sponsored by the Netherlands Institute for South Africa and an environmental watchdog body in KwaZulu-Natal.

Although recent laboratory test samples suggest that most petrol companies are complying with the government's new fuel specifications, the report says the public is still being exposed to a toxic cocktail of heavy-metal additives and other compounds which have the potential to poison the brains and other organs of children and adults.

For example, South African petrol still contains up to five times more cancer-causing benzene than petrol in Europe and parts of the United States. South Africa has also failed to set any legal safety limit on the amount of benzene pumped into the air from car exhausts and other industrial processes.

The World Health Organisation recognises benzene as a powerful cancer-causing agent after several medical studies proved that it caused blood cancer, even at relatively low levels of exposure.

Several samples of South African fuel also contain manganese, a metal additive which has been linked to brain damage and learning disabilities, depending on the quantity and the length of time people breathe it in.

Manganese is the same metal which led to several recent cases of severe tremors and debilitating sickness among factory workers at the Assmang smelter in Cato Ridge and the Samancor plant in Meyerton.

Mixed into certain brands of local fuel under the trade name "MMT", the manganese additive acts as an octane-boosting replacement for lead, which was banned finally from SA's fuel last year because of the high levels of lead poison in the blood of numerous children.

In a report published in Durban this week, the Netherlands Institute and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) released chemical analysis reports on eight samples of unleaded and lead-replacement petrol collected from Shell, BP, Engen and Caltex garages.

All the test samples were analysed at an Engen-appointed laboratory. The report reveals that just before the final ban on leaded fuels took effect last June, the government considerably watered-down its proposed "cleaner fuels" laws following complaints from some oil refineries which argued they could not meet the new standards.

For example, the permissible level of residual lead in lead-free petrol was doubled, the percentage of benzene was increased from 3 percent to 5 percent and the permissible level of manganese was doubled from 18mg/l to 36 mg/l.

While the report welcomes the removal of lead from petrol, it argues that the replacement fuels marketed as "clean fuels" to the motoring public "may prove to be as dangerous, toxic and problematic for human health and the environment".

Engen's Willem Oosthuizen disputed this: "The new fuel is cleaner... The second phase of this process aims to get us to a situation where our fuel is as good as Europe and other parts of the world. At the moment, we are somewhere in the middle...