Waste from Denmark caused 2021 blast at German plant that killed 7

Waste from Denmark was the trigger for the devastating 2021 explosion at an incineration plant in western Germany that killed seven people, prosecutors said on Tuesday, reported dpa.

The central unit for the prosecution of environmental crime in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (ZeUK) ruled the waste had "a self-decomposing property" that caused the accident at a chemical park in Leverkusen, near Cologne.

The ZeUK, based at the public prosecutor's office in nearby Dortmund, said it has dropped proceedings against employees of Currenta, the chemical park operator, citing "insufficient grounds for suspicion."

However, investigations into those responsible at the Danish waste producer and a Hamburg-based broker are continuing.

Prosecutors said it must be established whether these parties "culpably failed to pass on information about the dangerous properties of the waste material to the operating company." The authority did not name the companies involved.

On July 27, 2021, a storage tank exploded at the hazardous waste incineration plant in Leverkusen, triggering a massive fire that destroyed further tanks. Seven men were killed and 31 others were injured, some of them seriously, in one of the worst work accidents in Germany in recent decades.

Prosecutors said the "technical cause and starting point of the explosion" was the Danish waste, which had been stored in the Leverkusen tank above the so-called self-heating temperature.

This caused "an exponential rise in temperature and pressure and ultimately to an explosion followed by a fire."

Investigations also established that those responsible at Currenta for accepting and storing the waste material had no way of recognizing, from the data and documents submitted to them, that the waste had the fateful "self-decomposing property."

The incident was therefore "not foreseeable" for them, prosecutors said.