On the night of 19 August 2006, the tanker Probo Koala docked at the port of Abidjan and unloaded more than 500 tonnes of toxic waste at roughly a dozen sites across the city, including the Akouédo dump, roads in Abobo, ravines in Yopougon and residential areas in Agboville. The waste, a mixture of caustic soda, mercaptans and hydrogen-sulfide-saturated hydrocarbons, was refining residue that several European ports had refused to handle because of treatment costs. It was chartered by Dutch-Swiss trading firm Trafigura and offloaded by a local contractor without the infrastructure to treat it. Officially, 17 people died and more than 100,000 sought medical treatment for poisoning.
The legal aftermath has never fully satisfied victims. Trafigura reached a 2007 settlement with the Ivorian state worth roughly 152 million euros in exchange for dropping prosecution of the company and its executives. A separate 2009 civil settlement in London allocated about 45 million euros among nearly 30,000 Ivorian plaintiffs, under 1,500 euros per person, and NGOs have said some of that sum never reached intended recipients. Dutch courts fined Trafigura’s local subsidiary in 2010, a penalty widely seen as minor relative to the disaster’s scale. No criminal case has directly targeted the dumping itself in Côte d’Ivoire. Each August, victims’ associations mark the anniversary by pressing for compensation they still consider inadequate against the physical and psychological harm reported by survivors.
What makes the anniversary more than a retrospective is a regulatory shift now arriving two decades later. Starting 21 November 2026, EU member states will be barred from exporting plastic waste to non-OECD countries unless the receiving country obtains a specific derogation. To qualify, importing states must demonstrate they can treat the waste in an environmentally sound way, a reversal of the burden of proof from where it sat in 2006, when nothing meaningfully stopped a chartered ship from finding whichever port would take its cargo. Egypt, Mauritius, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia and Togo have already applied for derogations, turning waste treatment and recycling capacity into an active point of trade negotiation between African governments and Brussels rather than an afterthought.
The measure exists inside a legal architecture that, on paper, already prohibited what happened to Abidjan. The Basel Convention of 1989 governs transboundary movement of hazardous waste, and the Bamako Convention of 1991 specifically bars importing hazardous waste into Africa from non-African countries. Both were in force in 2006. Their existence did not prevent Probo Koala, which is the uncomfortable baseline against which the new EU rule has to be judged.
What to watch: which African applicants actually receive derogations and on what evidentiary standard, whether the EU’s review process meaningfully audits treatment capacity or becomes another self-reported compliance exercise, and whether Côte d’Ivoire, as the state with the most direct experience of this exact failure mode, plays a visible role in shaping how Bamako Convention enforcement is discussed alongside the EU’s new export regime.