Welcome to the Island
RYB, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021. Chromogenic print soaked in Gipsön seawater (image: Crystal Bennes).
I’ve become so habituated to the noises of the island that it takes me a few moments to realise that I’m not hearing anything. This is my third and final visit. It’s a hot day in late August; no clouds in the sky, perfectly still, bright sun baking my hatless head. The noise I’m listening for and not hearing is the sound of 12 wind turbines dotted around the island’s periphery. Having become accustomed to their loudness, like a helicopter in surround sound, now that the turbines aren’t moving, now they’re making no sound, it’s evident how much their presence impacts the atmosphere of the place.
This is Gipsön, a small island of 43 hectares located off the west coast of southern Sweden, just in sight of a town called Landskrona, population 40,000. Yet, in a way, it hardly feels appropriate to call Gipsön an island. “Human-made radioactive waste pile in the sea” would be a more accurate description, but you’d be hard pressed to read it as such when standing amidst the tall grasses, wildflowers and young birch trees that have found footing on its artificial soil.
“Gipsön” comes from “gypsum”, which in turn comes from an ancient Greek word meaning chalk, according to some, and calcined or burned according to others. Gypsum is a naturally occurring mineral that humans have used as as a building material for centuries, and as a soil conditioner since at least the 18th century. The gypsum (technically phosphogypsum) that made Gipsön island, however, is a by-product of the production of phosphoric acid, an in-demand synthetic fertiliser manufactured on a massive scale – around 50m metric tons in 2019 alone – by the agricultural industry.
Aerial view of Landskrona with Gipsön and Gråen in the foreground. Date unknown. Reproduced as part of the series No Island Is An Island (photo: Anders Hilding/Landskrona Museum).
Why does agriculture have such an insatiable appetite for phosphoric acid? There are three primary nutrients required for healthy plant growth: nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Although the science is complex, and the causes and effects not entirely straightforward, today’s monoculture agricultural practices tend to deplete natural soil fertility and instead rely on artificial fertilisers to supply adequate nutrition. To obtain phosphoric acid, rock phosphate is treated with an acid, usually sulphuric, phosphoric or nitric. The resulting acid is shipped out as fertiliser, while the phosphogypsum waste product is stored in vast “containment ponds” or “stacks” indefinitely. For each ton of acid produced, five times the amount of phosphogypsum is created as a by-product.
In Florida, where fertilisers are a multi-billiondollar industry, these chalk-white mountain-high phosphogypsum stacks are a worrying feature of the industrial-chemistry landscape. These stacks are also mildly radioactive, with phosphogypsum frequently classified as non-nuclear radioactive waste. Given that phosphate ore contains radioactive uranium, thorium and radium (although considerable variations in its chemical composition exist) phosphogypsum is also radioactive. Concentrated through the fertiliser production process, however, phosphogypsum is usually more radioactive than the unprocessed ore. When phosphogypsum is formed into stacks, some of this radioactivity, namely radon gas, is thought to be trapped in the crust that forms on top of the stack. Countries such as the US have long banned the reuse of phosphogypsum in other industries – road building, for instance – largely because dangerous levels of radon emission could occur if the phosphogypsum is moved. Phosphogypsum and its process wastewater can also contain carcinogens and toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, lead, mercury, antimony or arsenic. In Florida and elsewhere, phosphogypsum storage threatens communities and environments, particularly through the ongoing risk of groundwater contamination.
History of a Fertiliser Factory, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.
In the same way that we currently have no good solutions for the disposal of nuclear waste, we have yet to come up with any ideas for the disposal of low-level radioactive waste materials – beyond heaping them up in large piles. Around 40m tonnes of phosphogypsum are added annually to stacks in the US alone, with a further 90m tonnes added to stacks elsewhere. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that these amounts will more than double by 2040. Of equal concern is the fact that phosphorus pollution affects nearly 40 per cent of Earth’s land areas, largely made manifest in freshwater sources around the world. Polluted waters suffer from eutrophication, or excess nutrient levels, which cause algal blooms, the death of fish and plants, and also reduces the amount of water available for human and animal consumption. The toxicity of the phosphogypsum stacks serves as a reminder of the wider environmental costs of the industry of which they are a byproduct. The same might be said, in even starker form, of the phosphogypsum island.
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To begin to understand the phenomenon of Gipsön, it’s essential to consider the island’s broader geographic and historic context. Its creation story starts with Gråen, another artificial island created in the 18th century that was intended as a fortification for Landskrona’s harbour and its 16th-century citadel. In part because of its prior military importance to both the Danish and Swedish crowns, and in part because of its naturally deep harbour, Landskrona had a long history of involvement in international trade and maritime industries. In the 1880s, the presence of these industries was a factor in a group of Swedish and Danish capitalists electing to build a new fertiliser factory on Gråen – a facility that was moved to the mainland in 1907. Today, Gråen is home to a sizeable group of allotments and a bird sanctuary. The only trace of the former factory are two adjacent barn-like buildings, purchased by the allotment association in the 1960s and used mainly for parties and events.
Although it’s not entirely clear how the mainland factory initially disposed of its waste, by 1968 its owner Supra was awarded permission from the Swedish government to release the phosphogypsum byproduct directly into the Öresund strait. Pipes were laid to transport the waste 4km out to sea and, over the course of 10 years, it is estimated that around 1.5m tonnes of dissolved phosphogypsum were dumped into the sea. Supra assumed that the phosphogypsum would simply disperse, but many of the heavier silicates and sand-like materials (present in the raw ore) in fact settled on the seafloor in two cigar-shaped mounds, which remain to this day. The larger of the two is approximately 400m-long by 120m-wide and 8m-tall at its highest point. As the gypsum contains unknown quantities of toxic heavy metals, the bare mounds have become marine dead zones in which nothing grows and no life can be supported.
En Död Fågel from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.
Just one year after Supra was awarded its permit, the Swedish government issued a new environmental protection act in 1969 that prohibited the discharge of any wastewater, solids or gas from industry into lakes or other bodies of water. As such, in 1974 Supra’s permit was reconsidered in light of the act and the company was prohibited from continuing to pipe waste out into the water. The output of dissolved gypsum into the sea eventually ceased completely in 1978. Until the factory finally closed in 1992, however, Supra didn’t stop producing fertiliser, meaning that it required a new way of dealing with its waste. Gipsön was the answer.
Construction of the island began in 1978. The first step was to mark out the perimeter boundaries in a large, sloping stone retaining wall – a technique used to similar effect on Gråen, the defensive island which was later connected to Gipsön’s northern edge. With this retaining wall in place, two long dykes that curve around the north side and south-east corner of the island were constructed. These were built to trap any contaminated run-off or rain water, preventing it, at least in theory, from leaching into the sea. The island was then formed, quite simply, by piling up wet-on-wet layers – a little like making a toxic watercolour painting. The water from each layer subsequently evaporated, a sludgy, chalky base formed, and the process repeated. Photographs of Gipsön under construction depict a landscape that partly resembles a desert, partly an arctic tundra.
Super NPK, circa 1967. Reproduced as part of the series No Island Is An Island (photo: Anders Hilding/Landskrona Museum).
Between 1980 to 1990, it is estimated that 4.5m cubic meters of phosphogypsum were piled up to form the island. Originally 18m-high at its tallest point, it now measures 15m after years of compression and evaporation. At some point, a large container pond was constructed in Gipsön’s northern corner. This pond holds run-off from the dyke after it has been treated by an on-island purification plant (controlled and monitored from the mainland), which uses lime to reduce the water’s pH from an extremely acidic 1.4 to around 9. Once the pH of the pond water holds stable, it is released back into the sea (which generally has a pH of 8.1). In 1996, a small 7.2 megawatt wind farm, those 12 turbines, was added to the island.
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I first became interested in Gipsön while searching for a subject to propose to the Landskrona Foto residency, a biannual programme that supports contemporary artists. Initially thinking of something on maritime shipping, I became distracted by a peculiar island just off the city’s coast while zooming in and out of satellite maps. I’d previously spent a year working in Paris on a project about the relationship between the city’s geology – namely, its limestone and gypsum foundations – and its built environment, so when I discovered that the peculiarly-shaped island was created entirely out of gypsum, I knew I’d found my subject.
After arriving in Landskrona, I was surprised by how little the city’s residents seemed to know about Gipsön beyond its mere existence. I suspect this was partly because the island is now under the management of Norwegian fertiliser giant Yara, rather than the city. Although many Landskronans have heard of Gipsön, few know much beyond its vague relationship to the fertiliser industry. Even fewer have actually been to the island – hardly surprising considering that it’s strictly off-limits to the public, who are only allowed to visit twice a year in limited numbers on guided tours escorted by a Yara employee. During my month-long residency, thanks largely to the efforts of Landskrona Council employees and a retired Yara chemist, I was lucky enough to make three extended visits to Gipsön.
Perhaps realising that a 43-hectare salt-white gypsum desert wasn’t a desirable aesthetic, Yara partnered with a Swedish sewage-treatment company in the late 1990s or early 2000s to cover the island with thousands of tonnes of solid sludge leftover from sewage-treatment processing. While there are a few places on the island where the gypsum remains visible today – the one area of the island that I wasn’t allowed to visit on my own, because of the danger of falling and becoming trapped, features a couple of 5m-deep open cracks where the gypsum layers are clearly apparent – most of its surface is now covered in wildflowers, grasses and even trees. Many plants on Gipsön echo those on the mainland. There is hare’s-foot clover, common tansy, bushgrass, and viper’s bugloss, but I also spot a patch of glorious carline thistle – sometimes called fireweed for of its spiny gold and bronze daisylike flowers – that I haven’t seen anywhere else in Landskrona. Gipsön today is a strange combination of peaceful, pastoral nature reserve and deafening, post-industrio-chemical landscape. Sitting next to the fireweed, making notes of wildflower names, I think about how important it is that my work doesn’t promote an idea of the island as a techno-sublime landscape, but as a complex entanglement of capital, environment, workers, extraction, legislation, local history and global impact.
Saltöken, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.
Although the actions which led to Gipsön’s creation were carried out by Supra, it is Yara that now holds total responsibility for the island. Supra celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1982, just one year after the energy giant Norsk Hydro had bought a 75 per cent stake in the company. Norsk Hydro has a long and fascinating history itself, dating back to 1905 when its industrialist founders Sam Eyde and Kristian Birkeland figured out how to fix synthetic nitrogen using electrical arcs; a method that was initially the preferred contender for industrial production. It was only replaced when the chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to produce ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, with the resultant Haber-Bosch process – for which Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry – proving more energy efficient. Between 1980 and 2000, Hydro began acquiring a large number of other fertiliser companies – one of which was Supra. In 2004, a de-merger separated the fertiliser business into a new company, Yara, while the petrochemical wing of the company remained as Hydro (although this also merged with the Norwegian state-owned petroleum company, Statoil, in 2006, with the resultant company now known as Equinox). In contrast to the “green” image frequently presented by Scandinavian countries, the histories of industrial-chemical companies such as Supra and Yara, and their close ties to the state, complicate such straightforward narratives of environmental sustainability.
Before, during and after my Landskrona residency, I spent a lot of time attempting to contact people at Yara to no avail. I even managed to sneak into their office building in Malmö, but it turned out to be the end of summer holidays and so no one was there. A later conversation with a marine-environment activist who had managed to speak with an environmental officer at Yara (one of the same people who had refused to speak to me), however, suggested that the company’s line on Gipsön is that the problem was inherited from Supra and they do not want to draw further attention to it. And yet, while Yara may believe that it is merely the unfortunate inheritor of a bad environmental situation, the company has a poor track record when it comes to environmental, social and political issues of its own making. In a 2015 corruption scandal, for instance, four Yara executives were sentenced to prison for their involvement in bribing high-ranking officials in India and Libya in exchange for establishing ventures in their countries. Yara is also one of the world’s largest producers of synthetic fertilisers, which are a major contributor to climate change: production of ammonia alone is believed to contribute between 1 and 2 per cent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, for example. This is only one part of its environmental impact, however. Because Yara produces fertiliser using natural gas – largely methane, and lots of it – it is Europe’s biggest industrial buyer of natural gas and an active lobbyist for fracking. As an industry that relies on extractive activities, phosphate-based fertilisers are hugely damaging to the environment, with a 2015 Global Justice Now report alleging that Yara has a true climate impact of nearly 75m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, as opposed to the 12.5m tonnes it self-declares. Although fossil fuel companies such as Shell and British Petroleum are often visible targets of climate change activism, some 29 per cent of global emissions are associated with food production. The agri-food sector, and companies such as Yara, are integral to maintaining and expanding these systems.
Unloading fertiliser in Landskrona harbour, February 1966. Reproduced as part of the series No Island Is An Island (photo: Anders Hilding/Landskrona Museum).
This contribution towards climate change is often defended on the grounds that without the use of synthetic fertiliser in agriculture, billions of people would die of starvation. Such arguments have been present in various forms, often laced with white supremacy, since the fertiliser industry’s early days. In his 1905 book, The Wheat Problem, British chemist William Crookes – who seven years earlier had entreated scientists to urgently solve the problem of artificial nitrogen production – wrote, “The fixation of nitrogen is vital to the progress of civilised humanity, and unless we can class it among the certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life”. In his 1918 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Haber, too, spoke of the need to increase fixed nitrogen production from “a few hundred thousand tons a year[…] to millions of tons”.
I had a similar conversation (albeit in a less extreme form), sitting on a dilapidated wooden bench overlooking the water purification plant on Gipsön, with the polite and intelligent retired industrial chemist who had accompanied me. You might feel that artificial fertilisers are bad from an environmental point of view, he told me, but I wouldn’t want to have to choose which 2 billion of the world’s population would have to die if we stopped using them. The opening lines of a short marketing film made by Yara in 2020, ‘From Earth to Table’, state: “Mineral fertiliser has saved more lives than any other invention that mankind has created”. Of course, such arguments infrequently account for the fact that access to affordable food is extremely uneven across the world. Although, according to some reports, enough food is produced to easily feed more than the world’s total population, between 700 to 800 million people globally continue to go hungry. Equally, rather than contribute directly to human food production, fertilisers are often used for feed crops for livestock and, increasingly, for biofuels. In Western countries, increased levels of food production have also gone hand in hand with higher levels of food wastage. The arguments are not straightforward.
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Before coming to Landskrona, while researching the impact of Gipsön and the gypsum pipeline into Öresund, I kept encountering the name Kjell Andersson. A retired Lund University research engineer, prolific diver, and a tireless campaigner for Sweden’s marine environment, Andersson has spent much of his adult life raising awareness of the disconnect between Sweden’s self-image as an “eco” nation and the damage that its industries cause to underwater ecosystems in particular. In 1990, together with Lund University colleague Peter Jonsson, Andersson initiated the first Havsresan event, which is now hosted by the Swedish Coast and Sea Center (SCSC). Every year, professional and amateur divers gather for a week in a different location around Sweden to document marine environments, clear ghost nets abandoned by the fishing industry, take bottom samples, and organise educational activities for the public. To my good fortune, the 2021 Havsresan was being held the last week of August in Landskrona. Given Andersson’s knowledge of Gipsön and the area around Landskrona, I was enthusiastic – much, I suspect, to the SCSC’s surprise – to participate as a diver and documentarian, but also to take advantage of the collective experience of SCSC members with respect to their knowledge about Supra, Landskrona and Gipsön. I scheduled my residency specifically to coincide with the Havsresan.
Yara Factory Fence, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021. Includes archive photo of Öresund phosphogypsum output pipe taken by Kjell Andersson in the 1970s (printed on silk).
Nautical charts provide important information about coastal areas. When you look at a nautical chart of Landskrona, for example, you notice that the small channel between Gipsön and the city’s port is fairly deep – around 10m – but most of the surrounding sea is incredibly shallow, between 0.5 and 1.5m. You also notice a long line of red dots and dashes, stretching from the west side of the narrow neck of Gipsön about 4.5km into Öresund. On a nautical chart, this symbol represents pipes. The sea chart maps out the position of the pipes laid by Supra in the late 1960s to pump dissolved gypsum into the sea. During Havsresan, one of my main goals was to investigate the location of these pipes and their current condition. The weekend before Havsresan kicked off, I met Andersson, commercial diver Göran Petersson, and a few other early-arrivals for dinner at a local pizza place. Andersson arrived carrying a small orange box. “You should have these as I don’t really need them anymore,“ he told me, passing the box across the table. Inside were dozens of small black-and-white photographs. Most of the images were taken by Andersson in the 70s and 80s: pictures of the Supra pipes just after they had been installed on the seabed; pictures of the larger outtake pipe further out to sea; pictures of a sunken boat they’d found in the sound; pictures of divers in wetsuits no-one would dare go cold-water diving in today (it’s all drysuit diving in this part of the world now). I later scanned Andersson’s photographs and donated copies of them to Landskrona Museum’s archive.
Later in the week, Petersson and I embarked on a covert mission to find the pipes. Rather than the exit point, 4km out to sea, we decided to start from the input point on the island. I’m curious to find out more about their condition. Have they become damaged? Will there be any sign of environmental contamination from leakages? Because of the extremely shallow depth around the west side of Gipsön, we couldn’t take a dive boat and so used a rigid inflatable boat (RIB) instead. Petersson in full drysuit dive gear; me in a wetsuit and snorkel. Arriving at the location marked on the maps, we hopped out of the boat, both of us standing on the seabed, the water only waist-high. We searched for the pipes for over an hour, crossing back and forth over the line marked on the nautical chart, to no avail. Although we found a couple of dead fish, some strange blue crabs, and a fairly listless-looking seabed, we found no trace of the pipes. Back on the boat, we speculated as to the reasons why. Perhaps the pipes had been removed, which seemed unlikely, or covered over by decades of shifting sands. Given that companies self-report the location of pipelines for nautical maps, Supra may have misrepresented their positioning. It’s hard to say for certain, but it’s frustrating. When it comes to seeking compensation or environmental restoration for industrial pollution there are endless challenges: lack of funds and resources, political or corporate obstruction. But lack of knowledge is also a frequent obstacle. Making a case for damages is often complicated by a simple lack of information. The fact that we can’t even find the pipes to begin to assess their current status and impact is just one of many knowledge gaps in this particular story.
Gipsön, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.
Today, Yara still retains responsibility for maintaining Gipsön. Although the island is off-limits to the public bar its two annual tours, Yara’s employees visit regularly to monitor the water purification plant and take groundwater measurements a few times per year. In the early 2000s, it was hoped that the purification work would have largely decontaminated the island’s water by 2012, thus making it “clean” enough to hand over to the city for management by 2020. At present, precise timings for this handover remain unknown. The city’s lack of resources (and perhaps political will) also make it difficult to know what exactly “clean” means when it comes to Gipsön. No one really knows how much damage the island’s creation has caused to the surrounding sea. Given the large seal colony that lives off the island’s south-west coast and Gipsön’s surprising variety of flora and fauna (a small population of hares and pheasants live on the island, presumably having crossed the ice during a winter freeze), it’s easy to assume that the impact has not been as dire as otherwise expected. A 2013 report by the World Maritime University, however, states that cadmium and mercury are still detectable in water samples, as well as in blue mussels surrounding the island. So often, pollution just isn’t visible.
Perhaps even more concerning is the future rehabilitation of the underwater dead-zone created by the mounds of settled phosphogypsum from the earlier waste-management system. A marine biologist from the County Administrative Board tells me that the situation is difficult, complicated by the fact that the true extent of the phosphogypsum’s current toxicity remain unknown. The biologist speaks of plans, for example, to transform the underwater phosphogypsum mounds into rock reefs, but it would be folly to drop large stones and spread the toxic waste further if it still contains substantial amounts of heavy metals. The lack of information surrounding the mounds’ makeup is partly due to a lack of funds on the part of the county, whose hands are further tied by the fact that Supra had legal permission to dump its waste into the sea. It’s impossible to compel Yara to take financial responsibility for restoring the marine environment when, in purely legal terms, it has done nothing wrong. Until governments around the world legally mandate waste-management controls that prioritise human and environmental welfare, it is sadly and frustratingly likely that phosphogypsum, as with numerous other examples of industrial and chemical waste, will continue to pose problems.
Towards the end of my time in Landskrona, I experiment with creating a series of colour photographic prints. As a photographer, I work predominately with analogue film, and develop and print my images in a darkroom. On my final trip to Gipsön, I bring a 5l bottle and fill it with seawater. Back in my studio, I submerge a large colour print of Gipsön’s containment pond in this water. After about a week, the layers of colour on the print begin to separate and degrade; the top layer of blue flaking off in strange patterns. It leaves blotches of red and yellow behind, like some kind of warning sign written into the surface of the image.
Words and Images Crystal Bennes
This article was originally published in Disegno #31. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.