In what environmental activists in India are hailing as a major victory, tons of hazardous waste from an abandoned thermometer factory owned by India's largest consumer products company, Hindustan Lever Ltd., is heading to a recycling plant in the United States for safe disposal.

About 300 tons of mercury-contaminated material and waste from the thermometer plant in Kodaikanal town, in India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, will be shipped to the United States.

A ship carrying the material is expected to dock in New York on May 29. The waste shipment is headed to Bethlehem Apparatus Company, in Hellertown, Pa., the world's largest mercury recycling facility.

Ameer Shahul, the corporate campaign coordinator for Greenpeace India, termed the shipment ''reverse dumping,'' referring to a reversal of earlier instances in which hazardous material has been shipped from the developed world to poorer countries.