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New lawsHigh upPublished on 06/09/2021
Alexander Clavel was expelled from Basel because his dye factory stank to high heaven. As a result, he was forced to relocate to Klybeck in 1864, which was then located well outside the city limits.
Only a short time later, the city walls were torn down, and Basel began to grow rapidly. In 1900, almost 35 years after Clavel’s expulsion, the city’s population had increased from 40 000 to 100 000. At the same time, the city’s boundaries had expanded further north to encompass Klybeck.
At the turn of the 20th century, Ciba, whose roots reached back to Clavel, operated a large chemical manufacturing site in Klybeck, where residents relentlessly complained about the nasty smell pestering the entire neighborhood.
Until the 1950s, the inhabitants of Klybeck had to cover their noses to ward off the pungent smells rising from the chemical factories. Back then, when companies weren’t subjected to strict waste management regulations, harmful waste and toxins were simply discharged into the environment – inconceivable from today’s perspective.
The tall chimneys, which were built to drive the pollutant gases further away, dominated the city’s skyline for many decades.
“You have to realize that, for decades, hazardous waste from the chemical industry was simply dumped into the Rhine,” says Paul Svoboda, Head of the Water and Soil Department of the canton of Basel-Stadt. “This was the simplest and cheapest solution. The city even set up three ramps – located on Rheinweg, Dreirosenstrasse and Elsaesserstrasse – so that industrial waste could be poured down into the river. At the beginning of the 20th century, a ferry was put into operation to discharge the waste straight into the middle of the Rhine, and thus disperse it more evenly,” Svoboda adds.
This crude way of garbage disposal, which was then actually approved by the government, damaged the ecosystem and threatened the livelihoods of local fishermen, whose yields decreased substantially.
At some point, the city constructed large pipes extending into the Rhine, which enabled factories to release industrial effluents directly into the river. This, in turn, exacerbated the pollution problem and ren-dered fishing unviable. The chemical industry reimbursed the fishermen for their losses by purchasing “fishing leases,” the last payment being made in 1951 – to a former fisherman named Buerglin.
