Chlorine Carted Out of Canada

  • A Canadian chemical manufacturer shipped rail cars of toxic chlorine away from Vancouver and is storing them in rural Washington State. (Photo source: Wikimedia Commons)

Environmental groups suspect tight
security at the Vancouver Olympics
has shifted an environmental risk
from Canada to the US. Shawn Allee reports:

Transcript

Environmental groups suspect tight
security at the Vancouver Olympics
has shifted an environmental risk
from Canada to the US. Shawn Allee reports:

A Canadian chemical manufacturer shipped rail cars of toxic chlorine away from Vancouver and is storing them in rural Washington State.

The company says it’s part of a long-planned renovation of the chemical plant. Environmental groups suspect the rail shipments were timed to move tanks away from the Olympics.

Fred Millar is watching this development for Friends of the Earth. Millar says terrorists have shown interest in rail cars filled with chlorine gas.

“And that’s what people are mostly worried about because just one chlorine tank car could put out a cloud over any city at a lethal level that’s 15 miles long by 4 miles wide.”

US rail companies make 100,000 shipments of chlorine and similar toxic chemicals per year. Their safety record has largely been good, but accidents have released deadly chlorine gas.

One derailment in South Carolina killed nine people.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Questions About New Water Disinfectant

  • Karen Lukacsena owns an aquarium store outside of Pittsburgh. She's recommending that customers filter their tap water. This is because Chloramine, a new chemical more utility companies are using to purify water, kills the fish (and could be toxic to humans, too). (Photo by Katherine Fink)

The way your tap water is disinfected might be changing. Federal regulations to improve water safety are leading water utilities to switch the kind of chemicals they use. But Katherine Fink reports one of those chemicals might do more harm than good:

Transcript

The way your tap water is disinfected might be changing. Federal regulations to improve water safety are leading water utilities to switch the kind of chemicals they use. But Katherine Fink reports one of those chemicals might do more harm than good.

Elmer’s Aquarium has tanks and tanks of fish.

“These are all freshwater; these fish come from all over the world.”

Karen Lukacsena is the Vice President of Elmer’s Aquarium here in a suburb of Pittsburgh.

“Elmer’s has been here for 40 years, and Elmer was my father.”

A lot has changed since Elmer started the business. For instance, there are different products that purify tap water for aquariums:

“Because we don’t really know when someone comes in here what their water’s treated with–whether it’s chlorine or chloramine. And they can always call and check, but to be safe, we just think everyone should go ahead and treat their water.”

Chlorine poisons fish. But if you set water out for a few days, the chlorine will dissipate. Chloramine is different. It’s what you get when you mix chlorine and ammonia. And it does not dissipate. It sticks around.

That’s one reason drinking water providers like it. Paul Zielinski is with Pennsylvania-American Water:

“We don’t see the decay through the distribution system reaching our furthest customers like we do with chlorine; it tends to stay longer in the system and provide a higher disinfectant level, if you will.”

That means even if the water stays in the underground pipes for a long time, chloramine will still be doing the job, disinfecting the water. Until recently, only about one-fifth of water providers used chloramine. Soon, two-thirds of them might be using it. That’s because of new federal rules that take effect in 2012. The Environmental Protection Agency found when organic matter—such as vegetation—mixes with chlorine, it increases the risk of bladder cancer and reproductive problems. So Zielinski says water providers like his are being ordered to limit that risk:

“So one of the ways to do it is obviously to switch from chlorine, which generates these byproducts, to chloramines, which doesn’t.”

But all disinfectants have their downside. For one thing, chloramine corrodes lead and copper pipes. Many water providers add other chemicals to prevent that from happening. But a few years ago, when Washington D.C. switched to chloramine, lead got into the water. Lead is toxic. It can cause learning disabilities. So much lead got into the tap water that researchers believe some young children lost IQ points.

The EPA’s regulatory arm says chloramine’s safe. But an EPA chemist, Susan Richardson, says she’s not so sure:

“Personally, as a private citizen, I would be a little bit concerned myself, and might have a filter on my faucet.”

Richardson’s research found that chloramine also creates byproducts in drinking water. And those byproducts appear even more toxic than the ones created by chlorine:

“I’m really hoping that some of the toxicologists at EPA carry this further to really help us assess that.”

“And in the meantime, we’re going to be drinking this water.”

Susan Pickford is an attorney who doesn’t want her town’s water to be disinfected with chloramine.

“Bathing in it, using it in cooking, and exposing ourselves to huge toxins until the EPA gets around to regulating them.”

Pickford is fighting plans to use chloramine in her central Pennsylvania town. She says there’s a better way to reduce toxic byproducts, and no one’s talking about it: filtering the water.

“If they could filter, and they can, there is filtration available that would help them filter 70 to 80 percent of those organics out of the source water, then when the chlorine cleans the water, it wouldn’t be creating all these byproducts.”

But better filtration systems are expensive. And utilities say water bills would go up for customers. That’s not popular. So they say it’s a matter of customers deciding how much of a risk they’re willing to take, and how much they’re willing to pay.

For the Environment Report, I’m Katherine Fink.

Related Links

Pushing Chemical Plants to Cut Mercury

Environmental groups say it would make financial sense for chemical
plants that emit a lot of mercury pollution to go mercury-free. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

Transcript

Environmental groups say it would make financial sense for chemical
plants that emit a lot of mercury pollution to go mercury-free. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:


Environmentalists have been zeroing in on businesses that use mercury to make
chlorine for industrial processes. In many cases, the mercury escapes into the
atmosphere and eventually gets into the food chain. Some chlorine producers
have switched to mercury-free technology, but a report by the group Oceana
zeroes in on five US plants that haven’t made the change.


Oceana spokesperson Eric Uram admits going mercury-free can cost tens of
millions of dollars. But he says the firms can often save money on energy:


“Which they can either pass on to their shareholders or they can increase their
profitability.”


But the manager of one chlorine plant says the amount of money needed to
make the change has her corporate headquarters proceeding cautiously.


For the Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

Sewage Blending Stirs Up Debate

  • Many environmentalists fear the practice of sewage blending would become more routine if a new EPA policy is enacted. (Photo by M. Vasquez)

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering a new policy for sewage treatment plants. Many environmentalists say if the policy is adopted, it will lead to increased water pollution and greater risk to public health. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports on the debate over sewage blending:

Transcript

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering a new policy for sewage treatment plants. Many environmentalists say if the policy is adopted, it will lead to increased water pollution and greater risk to public health. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports on the debate over sewage blending:


(sound of water in sewer)


Some sanitary sewers are tied in with storm sewers. So when there’s a big rainstorm, or when there’s a fast snowmelt, all that water can inundate some sewage treatment plants. To tackle this problem, some treatment plants have adopted a practice known as “blending.” The excess sewage is re-routed around the slower parts of the treatment plant. The dirty water is then mixed with the water that’s been cleaned. It’s sometimes given a shot of chlorine, and then released into creeks, rivers, and lakes.


Kurt Heise oversees the operation of a sewage treatment plant on the Detroit River. He says the practice of blending is necessary in order to keep the plant from being overwhelmed.


“When you have a wet weather event, an extreme wet weather event, if we were to allow all of that combined water in through the normal process the treatment process would be ruined.”


Sewage blending has been around for a long time. To plant operators, it’s a necessary step in handling large amounts of dirty water. But to some people, blending is not seen as a good option. They want the practice to stop.


Instead, they say, cities should invest in their systems to make sure they can fully treat all the water that comes to the plant. Kurt Heise says, if his plant were required to do this, it wouldn’t make sense economically.


“It would almost result in doubling the size of our plant and spending just untold amounts of dollars for an event only happens a few times a year.”


Sewage treatment plant operators say you have to weigh the costs and the benefits before spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expanding the treatment plants. The decision of whether or not to allow blending has been left up to state and local regulators. But recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has weighed in on the subject. And ever since they suggested new guidelines for allowing blending, environmentalists have been critical of their plan. Mike Shriberg is the Great Lakes advocate for the Public Interest Research Group. It’s an environmental consumer activist organization.


Shriberg says the draft blending policy, the way it’s written now, is too broad. And will allow the practice of blending to become routine.


“Our fear is that when you’ve got a treatment plant that uses blending, they’re never going to upgrade to full treatment sewage. And so if a treatment plant is allowed to blend they’re not going to go up to full treatment capacity they have no incentive to do that anymore. It’s sort of the cheap way out.”


Sewage treatment operators say blending is better than seeing the raw sewage overflow into waterways. And they say it’s better than spending large sums of money to fix a problem that only occurs a few times a year. But critics say the EPA doesn’t have a good handle on how often blending is used, and what kind of health risks are associated with the practice.


Some initial studies have been done on blended sewage and how it might affect public health. Joan Rose is a water microbiologist at Michigan State University. She’s written a report on the health risks associated with blended sewage.


“So what I found was that if people were actually swimming in the water and there was a discharge of a blended sewage upstream, that their risk of getting sick, actually getting sick with a virus or a parasite was about a hundred times greater – when there was a blended discharge as opposed to if the water was fully treated.”


Rose says some of these viruses, such as Hepatitis-A, are highly contagious. At this point, there are no good estimates on how many people get sick from blended sewage each year. It’s never been studied, so the impact of blending on public health is unclear. Ben Grumbles is the Assistant Administrator for water at the EPA. He says the EPA is considering the billions of dollars at stake in expanding the nation’s sewer treatment plants versus the risk to public health.


“What we’re trying to do is to clarify what’s legal and what isn’t legal and to recognize the economic realities that sewage teatment plants face across the country in terms of their infrastructure needs, but foremost and above all what leaves the facility has to meet Clean Water Act permit limits.”


But the Clean Water Act permit limits don’t measure all the viruses, bacteria, and parasites found in blended sewage. And so some environmentalists and scientists say meeting the limits doesn’t necessarily mean protecting public health. Grumbles says officials are still reviewing the tens of thousands of comments they received after releasing the draft blending policy.


He says he doesn’t know what the final rule will look like, or if they’ll issue a rule at all. One thing is likely, if the policy is finalized the way it’s written now, it’s expected that environmental groups will take the EPA to court.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Stronger Invasive Law on the Horizon?

Congress is considering legislation that would create national standards for fighting invasive species. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:

Transcript

Congress is considering legislation that would create national standards for fighting invasive species. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:


Two Republican house members and a Democratic Senator are sponsoring the legislation. If the bill passes, it would create nationwide standards designed to keep foreign species from overrunning native plants and animals.


The legislation would extend the ballast water exchange standards currently in effect in the Great Lakes to the entire country. It would also improve screening protocols for importing plants and animals.


The bill also includes some funding to test new technologies. They include using chlorine, filters, and ultraviolet lights to kill off foreign species at some entry points to U.S. waterways.


A staff member for Michigan Senator Carl Levin says the bill is intended to be a first step toward developing international rules to stop the spread of invasive species. The lawmakers plan to introduce the bill when they return from their August recess.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.

New Threats to Indoor Air Quality

Consumers are becoming more aware of indoor air quality problems that can be
caused by emissions from materials like particle board, paint and carpeting.
But a new report identifies more threats. The study found that household
appliances like dishwashers, washing machines and shower heads can release
chemicals from the water into the air…and add to the air pollution inside
your home. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports:

Drinking Water Linked to Miscarriages

A new government-sponsored study of three California towns has turned up a potentially serious finding: that some tap water could be dangerous for pregnant women. The study is the first to find that high levels of chemicals used to disinfect water could increase the risk of miscarriage. That’s raised a red flag at the Environmental Protection Agency. And now the EPA’s moving quickly to see if the California findings hold true elsewhere. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Edelson Halpert reports: