Radioactive shrimp and sneakers: The global trail leading to Indonesia

The first sign of trouble surfaced thousands of miles from Indonesia.

Inspectors in the US are used to seeing containers of frozen shrimp and sneakers pass through their ports. Some 600,000 metric tons of the seafood and more than two billion pairs of shoes arrive each year from various countries, usually without incident. But in July, inspectors in Los Angeles - then other ports on either side of the US - discovered something strange: shipments of prawns, and Nike branded sneakers, emitting faint traces of man-made radiation.

At the same time, across the Atlantic a single container of sneakers made for Adidas was making its way to Switzerland, only to be flagged for traces of radiation by port officials in Rotterdam.

When authorities began to investigate, the trail led halfway across the globe to Southeast Asia and to a bustling factory park outside Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. And what local officials found at the Modern Cikande Industrial Estate was startling.

Radioactive Cesium-137 had been released - it’s unclear if by accident or deliberately - into the air from a small smelter processing scrap metal. Minuscule particles of the isotope found their way into more than 20 factories, including shrimp being packed into refrigerated containers by one of Indonesia’s largest seafood exporters and at a big factory producing shoes for brands including Nike and Adidas.

The revelations set off protective recalls of the seafood at stores including Walmart and Kroger. Shrimp exports from western Indonesia temporarily ground to a halt, stranding hundreds of containers in waters far from Indonesia.

Things continued to spiral. In late August, a container of contaminated Indonesian cloves turned up in Long Beach, California - sourced from a farm far from the industrial estate. Weeks later, as Indonesia enhanced port checks out of concern that cesium might have been illegally imported, port authorities in Jakarta twice intercepted containers of radioactive zinc powder sent from the Philippines. Their intended destination: the industrial park.

It’s not clear yet if the events are connected. The detection of man-made Cesium-137 at different locations in such quick succession is highly unusual.

A key question is whether radioactive material had been entering unnoticed into Indonesia’s export network long before these incidents - and whether other products and countries might still be affected, including in places with less sophisticated detection networks. The case lays bare shortcomings with oversight in Indonesia’s growing scrap-metal trade, and underscores how a single industrial mishap can reverberate through global supply chains.

This reconstruction of how radioactive cesium slipped into consumer products bound for different countries is based on interviews with investigators and officials familiar with the probe - most of whom requested anonymity to discuss confidential findings - and government reports viewed by Bloomberg News.

For Indonesia - a member of the Group of 20 and leading supplier of seafood, nickel and other critical commodities - the stakes are high. The contamination raises doubts about two multibillion-dollar export industries and Jakarta’s efforts to ensure industrial safety. While cesium leaks have occurred elsewhere, they are exceedingly rare.

“This case has tarnished our country’s reputation internationally,” Evita Nursanty, a lawmaker, said at a parliamentary meeting this week. “If America hadn’t detected it, we wouldn’t have known,” said Nursanty, a member of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, which supports President Prabowo Subianto but isn’t formally part of his coalition.

Prabowo’s office didn’t immediately comment on the oversight issues. Bara Krishna Hasibuan, a spokesman for a government task force leading the response to the radiation incidents, said this week ‘we’re tightening distribution controls and taking precautionary measures.’ ‘There are many lessons we need to take from this incident,’ he said at a briefing in Jakarta.

Cesium-137 is produced during nuclear fission, and large amounts were released into the atmosphere during weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as in reactor meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima. It’s also used in industrial gauges and older medical radiation devices, the improper recycling of which can spread contamination.

The cesium levels in the shipments to the US were well below thresholds considered immediately harmful. Still, the Food and Drug Administration warns that prolonged or repeated exposure can be dangerous. Cesium-137 chemically mimics potassium in the body, allowing it to accumulate in soft tissue and muscle, where it irradiates cells and raises the long-term risk of cancer.

Investigators believe the chain of events began in the first half of May, at an otherwise unremarkable factory inside the industrial estate. Workers at a small Chinese smelter known as PT Peter Metal Technology - whose ultimate owners are unknown but believed by authorities to be in China - appear to have smelted scrap metal that was mixed with a direct source of cesium, such as an industrial gauge. In a furnace the cesium was released into the air, leaving it to drift over the surrounding area. Waste and scraps from the plant were used as landfill around the estate, further spreading contamination.

Attempts to reach representatives of the scrap metal company were unsuccessful. Cikande owner PT Modernland Realty didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The incident went unnoticed within the estate, a loose cluster of hundreds of factories west of Jakarta built on former agricultural land that’s surrounded by rice fields and densely populated small towns. Tens of thousands of employees continued to work at Cikande, home to everything from a Cargill sweetener plant and a Charoen Pokphand Group food facility to metals processors and auto parts specialists.

Soon after, Jakarta port operators about 60 kilometers (37 miles) away missed an opportunity when the offending containers were loaded onto ships. At least two containers were flagged by radiation detectors, according to a person familiar with the matter. Whether those readings were missed or ignored isn’t clear.

Elsewhere, however, the event was detected, if not immediately noted. Radionuclide monitoring stations more than a thousand kilometers away in Malaysia and in the remote Australian territory the Cocos Islands - part of a global network of sensors deployed by the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation - picked up traces of radiation, Indonesian officials would later be informed. A unit of the US Department of Energy would say in a preliminary assessment seen by Bloomberg News that detections by two different stations at that distance suggests “a significant airborne release” of Cesium-137.

Weeks after the first problem container arrived in Los Angeles, the US notified Indonesia. Teams from Indonesia’s national research agency, its nuclear regulator and others fanned out across shrimp farms in western Java and southern Sumatra. They found no contamination in ponds or feed. But around the shrimp factory, detectors began to chirp - readings hundreds of times higher than international safety limits.

Investigators traced the radiation 2.5 kilometers away to Peter Metal, which had been in operation for less than a year but had shuttered just weeks earlier for reasons unclear. The company had repeatedly applied for an import permit and been unsuccessful, according to Indonesia’s industry ministry.

Investigators found more than 20 factories were contaminated to varying degrees, along with a smattering of junkyards and landfill sites. At one site, the detected radiation was 33 millisieverts per hour - enough to deliver a nuclear worker’s maximum permitted average annual dose within about 36 minutes.

Authorities tested more than 1,500 people, ultimately treating three workers of the shrimp factory and six from the metal smelter with Prussian blue pills, a compound used to bind radioactive cesium. More than a dozen families were temporarily relocated. Police questioned a representative of the smelter, who later left Indonesia for China, according to a person familiar with the matter. No one has been charged and the investigating is ongoing.

As the probe continued, news came of the cloves. This time, investigators traced the radiation not to the industrial park but more than 70 kilometers away, to a farm in southern Sumatra. There, across the Sunda Strait, a stretch of land at least five kilometers long that included clove crops and a cemetery was contaminated with Cesium-137.

There were no obvious sources of cesium in the area; a lone metal factory was clean. Strangely, radiation levels were much higher than found on the shrimp - especially when investigators dug into the soil.

One theory is that cesium from the industrial park was carried by winds across the channel that separates Java and Sumatra, near the volcanic islands of Krakatoa, and dropped to the ground in rain. There it could have sunk into the soil and contaminated the roots of the clove trees.

Still, investigators are looking for more clues. “We probably shouldn’t rule out anything at this point,” said Hasibuan, the task force spokesman.

By then, port officials had enhanced checks where they could; only a handful of the country’s international ports had radiation detectors. Almost as soon as they did, they found containers of zinc powder arriving at Jakarta’s main port - on at least two different occasions - emitting low-level radiation. The sender was a Chinese trading company with offices in the Philippines. The intended recipient was another small smelting company at Cikande, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The trace elements in the exports to the US and Europe were in shipments from three companies with global reach. PT Bahari Makmur Sejati is one of Indonesia’s largest exporters of Penaeus vannamei, the whiteleg prawn that anchors the country’s aquaculture industry and accounts for most of its roughly $2 billion in annual shrimp exports. The footwear came from PT Nikomas Gemilang, a unit of Taiwan’s Pou Chen Group that employs tens of thousands of workers and is part of Indonesia’s $7 billion shoe-export industry. The cloves were exported by PT Natural Java Spice, which ships globally.

A US record of flagged cargo viewed by Bloomberg News indicates most of the contaminated shrimp was returned to Indonesia, while most of the footwear remained in the US. A spokesperson for Nike said the company moved quickly to isolate the shoes and ensure they would be responsibly destroyed. The incident was not specific to Nike or its supply chain, the spokesperson said, and the company obtained outside expertise to confirm the contamination levels did not pose a risk to human health. None of the shoes reached the marketplace.

Dutch authorities said the radioactive parts of the shoes intercepted at Rotterdam were to be removed and sent to a government-owned nuclear waste processing and storage company. A spokeswoman for Adidas said a small portion of footwear in the container was found to “marginally exceed certain limits,” none of the products entered the market and the shoes were being disposed of.

Bahari Makmur Sejati and Natural Java Spice didn’t respond to requests for comment. Pou Chen declined to comment on the footwear exports but said in a statement its unit’s factory had been tested, with operations “now running normally.”

Accidents involving cesium-tainted scrap are rare but not unprecedented: in 1998, an industrial gauge was melted down with scrap metal at a steel mill in southern Spain, setting off radiation alarms across France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy.

Some investigators think a direct source of cesium could have been the cause of the Indonesian contamination. One person familiar with the matter said there are more than 100 licensed gauges using cesium in the province where the park is located - used to check the density of steel or measure paper thickness, for example. The industry ministry has also said it may have come from medical equipment.

Indonesia has no nuclear power plants and only limited radiation-handling infrastructure. And mishandling of local materials is not without precedent: in 2020, authorities discovered Cesium-137 buried in the yard of a housing complex outside Jakarta, prompting the removal of several tons of contaminated soil.

Now, with confidence in Indonesia’s oversight under scrutiny, the question facing investigators - and trade partners - is whether or how it can prevent further incidents. The US is accepting imports of shrimp and spices from the companies and regions in question under new requirements they’re certified cesium-free. Other countries have reached out with queries or to express concerns, some directly to Indonesian authorities, about the safety of exports, according to people familiar with the matter; one person said that included China, Malaysia, Australia and nations in Europe.

Challenges remain: tracking down the owner of Peter Metal to learn how cesium entered the industrial estate. Identifying the cause of radiation at the clove farm in Sumatra. Working out how containers of radioactive zinc dust were processed in the Philippines, and how they escaped scrutiny there.

Indonesia has halted imports of scrap metal, and there are questions about where it sources from going forward. Large amounts of scrap were redirected to Southeast Asia after China enacted a ban on imports in 2018 out of concern about contaminated materials.

At the very least, investigators said, Indonesia needs to add radiation monitoring equipment at all of its international ports.

Cikande, meanwhile, is being cleaned up, with operations for most companies running normally. The most immediate task is finding a permanent repository for the contaminated material, stored for now inside the shuttered smelter. Ultimately, the waste - around 1,000 tons and counting - will need to be sealed, some potentially for hundreds of years. Officials haven’t decided yet where they’ll store it.

“My question is, who is responsible for the cost of decontamination being carried out now? The industrial estate?” said Nursanty, the lawmaker. “Because the company is already closed, avoiding responsibility. If they’ve shut down, who will be held accountable? Something doesn’t add up here.”