Inadequate inspections on manufacturers dumping toxic waste have resulted in hundreds of thousands of tons of dangerous chemicals festering outside factories and near industrial sites across the country, scientists said yesterday ahead of an international conference on toxic waste that starts tomorrow on Crete.

“Unfortunately, the main problem with the management of toxic waste in this country is that we have no idea what is really going on,” Vangelis Gidarakis, the director of the University of Crete’s toxic waste laboratory, told Kathimerini.

According to Gidarakis, the chief barrier to progress is that there is no consensus about the size of the problem. The Environment and Public Works Ministry says there are some 600,000 tons of toxic waste in Greece. The European Union puts this figure at 1 million tons. Environmental groups say the real figure is closer to 10 million tons.

“No one really knows what volumes we are talking about,” Gidarakis said. “Huge amounts of waste are polluting the ground and penetrating the water table and subsequently the food chain,” the scientist said, adding that the ministry, local authorities and large manufacturers were all to blame for the situation.

One instance where toxic waste leaking into the water table has had a major impact is in the central prefecture of Viotia, whose water supply is largely fed by the Asopos River. The latest in a series of studies on the quality of the Asopos River water has shown once again that pollution levels are very high.

“I was shocked, I have never seen anything like this,” Giorgos Hadzi-nikolaou from the Inland Water Institute of the Hellenic Center for Marine Research told Kathimerini. “It is by far the worse river in Greece, it is full of sewage and is even more polluted near the industrial zone,” he said.