Tag: dump

The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez

  • A NOAA scientist surveying an oiled beach to assess the depth of oil penetration soon after the spill (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Twenty years ago this week, an oil tanker ran aground on a rocky reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Exxon Valdez spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude oil. It’s considered to be perhaps the biggest ecological disaster in US history. Ann Dornfeld has this look at how oil spill prevention and preparedness have changed in the two decades since Valdez:

Transcript

Twenty years ago this week, an oil tanker ran aground on a rocky reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Exxon Valdez spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude oil. It’s considered to be perhaps the biggest ecological disaster in US history. Ann Dornfeld has this look at how oil spill prevention and preparedness have changed in the two decades since Valdez:

The call came in just after midnight.

“Ah, evidently leaking some oil and we’re gonna be here for a while.”

Court records indicate Captain Joseph Hazelwood was likely drunk when the Exxon Valdez ran aground.

There was hardly any clean-up equipment on hand. No plan for action. The location was remote.

Oil polluted a stretch of Alaskan coastline the length of the entire west coast of the U.S. The oil killed fish, sea otters, harbor seals and an estimated quarter of a million birds. Today, there is still oil on some beaches.

Twenty years later, a cargo vessel has just reported a spill of 160
gallons of oil in Washington state’s Commencement Bay. Investigators
have filled the “Spill Situation Room” in the state Department of Ecology.

“Who’s responsible for actually maintaining
the bow thruster, when was the last time they performed maintenance on it?”

“You mean one of the staff on board?”

“Yeah.”

Spill Response Manager David Byers says coastal states learned a lesson from Exxon Valdez, and developed rapid response systems like this.

“We’ve got crews headed up in a helicopter to do on-
water observations, we’ve got response resources on the water headed out to do containment when we find the location of the oil.”

Byers says the state handles dozens of spills this size each year, making it somewhat of a well-oiled machine.

After the Exxon Valdez, the state of Washington put in place some tough prevention standards. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the state.

The court ruled the state was making safety demands of oil companies that only the federal government could make.

Mike Cooper is Chairman of the state’s Oil Spills Advisory Council. He says that ruling is one reason why small oil spills are common in Washington’s bays. He says other states have come up against the same restrictions.

“When the Massachusetts legislature passed strict laws,
the United States Coast Guard and the industry did the same thing that they did to the people of Washington state. They sued the people of the state of Massachusetts and said, ‘We’ll decide if industry has to pay.'”

The federal Oil Pollution Act did raise industry’s liability and the amount of federal money available in the event of a spill. It also requires oil tankers and barges in U.S. waters to be double-hulled by 2015. The Exxon Valdez’ single hull was easily gouged open when it ran aground.

Today, most U.S.-flagged tankers and barges are double-hulled. Most foreign tankers aren’t yet.

But there’s no law requiring a second hull on cargo ships. Bruce Wishart is Policy Director for People for Puget Sound. He says it’s cargo vessels that are most likely to spill oil.

“It’s commonly assumed that oil tankers pose the
single greatest threat in terms of an oil spill. There are actually many, many more cargo vessels plying our waters that pose a very significant risk simply because they carry a lot of fuel on board.”

In 2007, the cargo vessel Cosco Busan spilled 53,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay. Thousands of birds died, including endangered species. A fully-loaded cargo ship can contain 40 times more oil than what leaked from the Cosco Busan.

So, while oil tankers have become safer in the two decades since the Exxon Valdez, the nation’s waterways still remain at risk of a major spill.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Recycling Your Christmas Tree

  • (Photo courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)

Most cities discourage you
from throwing your Christmas tree
away. Rebecca Williams takes a look
at what you can do with your tree:

Transcript

Most cities discourage you
from throwing your Christmas tree
away. Rebecca Williams takes a look
at what you can do with your tree:

In a lot of cities you can drop your tree off, or a city truck will come and
pick it up. Then they’ll run it through a big chipper and make mulch. Cities
use the mulch for parks or zoos. And sometimes you can buy some of that
mulch for your own yard.

Bryan Weinert is a solid waste coordinator in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He
says you’ve got to make sure you take all the ornaments and tinsel off the
tree before you put it at the curb.

“You know that compromises the quality of our finished product and in
some cases can actually damage our grinding equipment.”

Other places use the trees to create fish habitat. And this year, when the
Vatican is done with its 108 foot tall Christmas tree, it’ll use it to make
wooden toys.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Sagging Mattress Recycling

  • The city of Toronto has started collecting old mattresses at a central recycling center. (Photo by Julie Grant)

One of the bigger things we
throw away are old mattresses. Landfills
are stuffed full of them. Julie Grant
reports that new companies are springing
up to recycle the steel and cushioning
from old mattresses. They say the government
could help, but it’s lying down on the job:

Transcript

One of the bigger things we
throw away are old mattresses. Landfills
are stuffed full of them. Julie Grant
reports that new companies are springing
up to recycle the steel and cushioning
from old mattresses. They say the government
could help, but it’s lying down on the job:

(sound of a mattress factory)

Simon Zysman has been working with mattresses for more
than half-a-century. For the past 16, he’s been running a
business in Toronto that tears old mattresses apart so the
pieces can be reused.

“i’ve only dismantled with my own hands 3,000 used
mattresses and my enterprize in the 16 years has only
dismantled 40,000 mattresses, and therefore i know very
little. I’m just learning.”

Yeah, like Lance Armstrong is just learning to ride a bike.

Now, apparently dismantling mattresses is not a cushy job.

(sound of mattress deconstruction)

Workers pull mattresses from a big pile. I watch one as he
makes a long cut all around the edge, snips material where
it’s connected to the coils. And then pulls the entire face of
the cushioning away from the springs. It’s kind of like
filleting the mattress.

When he’s done, the cushioning goes on one pile. The steel
springs on another.

Zysman sells the different parts to companies in the U.S.
that rebuild mattresses. Other people in the business just
recycle the steel and sell the cushioning for things like
carpet-padding and oil filters.

Zysman used to toss and turn when he thought about the
huge numbers of mattresses out there, but his supply’s not
been steady.

When you buy a new mattress, a lot of times the company
that delivers it will pick up your old mattress. Most
companies just send them to the dump. Only a few pay
people like Zysman to have them dismantled.

Until recently those few have provided Zysman’s only
supply.

But the city of Toronto has started a pilot program to collect
old mattresses from residents at the curbside for companies
like Zysman’s.

“The city’s pioneering mattress recycling program has been
a great boost to us and a great help to us. That is a
wonderful development.”

(sound of a recycling center)

The mattresses the city picks up are stockpiled at a recycling
center.

Bryan Farley runs the city’s new program. He says Zysman
and other people like him are getting paid to keep
mattresses from stuffing the landfill.

“Landfill space in Ontario is a premium. It’s hard to find.
And there are laws and regulations that are more focused on
not putting materials into the landfill.”

Farley figures getting mattresses out of the waste stream will
help the city to meet its ambitious goal of reducing trash by
70%.

Mattresses take up a lot of space. They’re big and bulky and
don’t smash down all that well in a landfill.

South of the Canadian border, in Ohio, Chuck Brickman has
been piecing together a mattress recycling business.

He wishes the government here would help increase the
supply of used mattresses. Brickman can get some from
local hotels and furniture stores, but it’s not enough so far to
run a steady business.

“There’s two companies right now in New Jersey that are
sending 2 to 5 thousand mattresses a month by rail from
New Jersey to a landfill in Michigan.”

Why? It’s cheap.

A few cities and states have special landfill fees for bulky
items like mattresses, but most don’t. So, it’s usually
cheaper just to dump them.

Brickman wants local or state governments to create more
‘incentives’ for the mattresses to be recycled. In other
words, higher fees to dump mattresses.

“It’s easier and more economically feasible for them to throw
them in a couple rail cars and send them a couple states
over because there are no established tipping fees in some
of the Midwestern states like Ohio and Michigan.”

Mattress recyclers say government officials can raise those
fees on dumping mattresses. That would make the mattress
recycling business less of a dream, and more of a reality.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Looking for Answers at the Dump

  • The city of Chicago has hired the company Camp Dresser and McKee to dig through residents' trash and figure out what exactly people are throwing away (Photo by Michael Rhee)

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

Transcript

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

(sound of trucks beeping)

This is a waste transfer facility on Chicago’s South Side. It’s kind of a temporary dump.

Garbage trucks pick up trash from people’s homes and pile it up here. The piles are then packed
onto even bigger trucks and hauled to landfills far away.

Chris Martel looks over the mounds of trash here. Martel is an engineer, and a solid waste
expert.

“There’s a lot of different paper types here, there’s a plastic bottles, all things that are recyclable.”

But they’re probably not going to be recycled. They’re going to a landfill. That’s why Martel is
here.

He works for a consulting firm called CDM, or Camp Dresser and McKee.

The city of Chicago has hired the company to dig through residents’ trash and figure out what
exactly people are throwing away. Martel has been doing waste sorts like this for more than a
decade.

As we walk to another part of the building, he remembers his first one fondly.

“That’s where I fell in love with my wife, after giving her flowers out of the trash and stuffed
animals out of the trash.”

She didn’t mind they were recycled.

We get to the waste sorting area. There’s a group of workers surrounded by dozens of large and
small bins.

(BOOM)

(laughs) “That boom was the tipper dropping the waste load.”

A rugged, yellow loader dumps about 300 pounds of garbage at our feet. It’s a sample from one
of the large piles in the facility.

A team starts sorting through the garbage.

Scott Keddy is one of them. He picks up a plastic garbage bag.

“We just open it up and see what kind of surprises lie inside, like it could be this #1 plastic PET
bottle, or this rigid, plastic thinga-ma-jobber that did something for somebody at some point,
which is different from that.”

They’re sorting them into 81 different containers. Each one is for a kind of paper, plastic, metal,
food or some other piece of trash.

The point is to figure out how much of each material people are throwing out. And where it’s all
coming from.

Suzanne Malec-McKenna is commissioner for Chicago’s Department of Environment.

She says the tough thing about creating a recycling program in a city like Chicago is the diversity.
Not only do you have residents and businesses creating waste, but restaurants, prisons,
manufacturers for car parts. Each of these creates a different kind of garbage.

The city has been trying to come up with a recycling program that works for everyone for 20
years. Malec-McKenna says the study will help the city decide how to manage it all.

“You can’t have a cookie cutter approach for a city this diverse. You’ve got to come up with a
range of different kind of program options for it. We’ll come up with the right mix.”

But while the city figures recycling out, the garbage will keep piling up in landfills.

Martel, the waste expert, says he hopes that waste is reduced soon. He says most people don’t
understand the sheer quantities of garbage that are out there.

“Unless you physically see and touch it you don’t realize what a large amount it is and what the
implications are and how easy it is to divert these materials.”

Big cities around the country are realizing this, and working on a solution.

For The Environment Report, I’m Michael Rhee.

Related Links

Paddling Through Pollution

  • Dredgers, a group that gets together to canoe on the Gowanus, hope that if people see the state of the canal, they'll be inspired to help clean it up (Photo by Samara Freemark)

A group of New Yorkers is trying
to convince people to get out on one of
the most polluted bodies of water in the
country – literally out there, in canoes.
Samara Freemark reports that they hope once
people see the water up close, they’ll
realize just how dirty it is. And maybe
then they’ll help clean it up:

Transcript

A group of New Yorkers is trying to convince people to get out on one of the most
polluted bodies of water in the country- literally out there, in canoes. Samara
Freemark reports that they hope once people see the water up close, they’ll realize
just how dirty it is. And maybe then they’ll help clean it up:

(sound of water, paddling)

You wouldn’t believe the stuff people have pulled out of the Gowanus Canal.
Refrigerators. Bathtubs, rusted cars. A 5000 pound dead whale. A suitcase full of
human body parts. Sewage floods into the canal all the time. So you see everything
people flush down their toilets. The water itself is a sickly, opaque green.

And that’s just the stuff you can see. The canal used to be a dumping ground for the
factories that line it. And the sediment at the bottom is still full of a laundry list of
toxic chemicals: cyanide, mercury, lead, asbestos. Scientists found strains of
gonorrhea in a water sample just last year.

And I’m sitting in a canoe in the middle of it.

(water noise, “Ewww, oh, God, gross. It’s like a subway down here.”)

The Gowanus is a 2 mile long trough of murky water that flows into the New York
Harbor – though the word ‘flowing ‘ is a bit optimistic, since the water mostly just sits
there.

You wouldn’t think anyone would want to canoe in this kind of water – much less
see it as a good way to spend a lazy summer afternoon.

(Laughs.) “ My first day was like, hell no. I knew it was going to be nasty.” (Laughs.)

That’s Alex Kovaleski. She’s a Dredger, a member of a group that gets together to
canoe the Gowanus.

“But I’m always looking for an adventure or a way to see things from a new
perspective, so I went out. And then I started having dreams about it, and it was all
over.”

Kovaleski knew she had to do something.

So almost every summer weekend she and the Dredgers gather at a makeshift pier
and paddle up and down the canal.

They invite others along. Anyone who shows up can jump in a borrowed canoe and
take it for a paddle. They get a lot of first-timers, New Yorkers who have heard about
the trips and come for the novelty or to get a taste of nature in this most urban of
cities.

That’s why Stephen Kline and Beatrice Aranow came. This is their first time at a
Dredgers event. I speak with them on the pier, before they step into a canoe. They
say they came because they love nature, they love being out on the water, and they
want to see their city from a whole new perspective.

Stephen and Beatrice are in for a big surprise. Twenty minutes later, they had their
new perspective.

(talking over each other) “ There were like dead rats, turds. It was a lot worse than I
could have ever imagined. It wasn’t that mysterious. I actually thought I was going
to have a pleasant time going out but it was pretty intense. It was repulsive.”

This doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of the Dredgers.

But Alex says Stephen and Beatrice’s reaction isn’t that bad – it’s actually kind of the
point.

“Part of it is just being out there with the poop and the trash, like, hah, here it is,
there’s no getting away from it. When you’re in it, you’re naturally longing to see it
restored.”

A week later I came back to the Gowanus canal for another Dredgers event. This
one’s a cleanup day, and volunteers are out with rubber gloves and bags, picking up
trash. It’s kind of a festive scene- there’s music and free pizza. And there’s a group of
high schoolers who came to spend the day canoeing and helping out.

(students talking about canoeing, cleaning)

Alex says those students are who the Dredgers really want to reach. The Gowanus
isn’t going to be clean anytime soon. But those kids are going to grow up, and they’re
going to be tax payers and voters. Soon they’re going to make the decisions that
decide the future of the canal.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Part One: Canada’s Take on Trash

  • Jen Spence's collection of trash/ recycling containers on the east side of Toronto. The city has retooled its recycling program in recent years to make it easier for residents. The big blue container is for recycling, the green hanging pail is for compost. Toronto only picks up trash twice a month - but Spence's family doesn't even fill that small trash can. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Sometimes it takes a little public
embarrassment to get on the right track.
Back in 2000, the city of Toronto couldn’t
find a place to send its garbage – so it
started trucking trash across the border
to the US. Julie Grant reports that inspired
Toronto to create one of the most aggressive
recycling programs in North America:

Transcript

Sometimes it takes a little public
embarrassment to get on the right track.
Back in 2000, the city of Toronto couldn’t
find a place to send its garbage – so it
started trucking trash across the border
to the US. Julie Grant reports that inspired
Toronto to create one of the most aggressive
recycling programs in North America:

Some days Toronto has sent as many as 150 trucks full of
trash 300 miles to a landfill in the U.S. For those of you
counting at home, that’s 90,000 highway miles a day. That’s
not only bad for the environment. As gas prices have risen,
it’s also bad for Toronto’s bottom line.

But the bigger issue was Toronto wasn’t taking care of its
own trash. It wasn’t even keeping it in Canada. It was
trucking it to Michigan.

And the people in Michigan – they didn’t like it too much.

They’ve complained about the stink of Toronto’s trash for
years.

They even got the U.S. Congress to look at ways to stop it
from crossing the border.

But, free trade even covers a commodity such as garbage.

The people in Toronto are a little embarrassed by it all.

(sound of a neighborhood)

David Wallett looks perfectly pleased with the landscaping in
his small lawn in east Toronto. But his eyes tilt downward
when he’s asked about shipping the city’s waste to Michigan.

“The downside of that is all those trucks ripping down the
401. I mean that can’t be good for the environment to have
lots of trucks burning gas just getting it there.”

But the City of Toronto had signed a contract with a
Michigan landfill. So the trucks kept ripping down highway
401, even as fuel costs got higher and higher.

Geoff Rathbone is Toronto’s general manager of solid waste.
He says the contract is a dark cloud – but it got the city and
residents on-board with recycling.

“The shipment to Michigan really became a wake up call that
allowed us to set very aggressive waste diversion targets.
And to realize that what we were shipping out of our country
was really more of a resource than a waste.”

Rathbone says Toronto set a tough goal – to reduce the
waste stream by 70%. And the city put up nearly a half-
billion dollars to do it.

But a funny thing happened as they started increasing their
recycling stream. Oil prices kept rising. That meant
commodity prices kept rising, too. Metals, plastics, and
paper have started to gain real value. Recycling paid!

And Toronto kept re-tooling its recycling program to make it
really easy for people.

(sound of a neighborhood)

On the east side of Toronto, Dick Wallett and his neighbors
each have one of those huge cart-like garbage barrels – the
ones with a handle and wheels. But it’s not for trash. It’s for
recyclables.

Jen Spence says it’s much easier than it used to be.

“For awhile it was very complicated. We had to put
newspapers in one bin and glass and bottles and jars in
another bin.”

Now they just throw everything into that one big container
and wheel it to the street. The city picks up and sorts the
recyclables. For free. It also picks up compost. You know,
food waste. Spence takes out a small pail from under the
kitchen sink to show me. It’s latched shut.

“This is the green bin. The city of Toronto sends this out to
anyone who’s going to be producing garbage. It collects
flies really badly, and it’s hard to clean, so they send out
these bags that are perfectly for it. It’s a nice size. It fills up
pretty quick and doesn’t stink. We used to have a huge can
and now it’s just that little guy that goes out every two
weeks.”

The city makes it kind of hard to take out regular trash –
things that can’t be recycled or composted. Like Spence
said, it’s only picked twice a month. And you pay as you
throw. The more you make, the more you pay.

Toronto has been able to cut the number of trucks headed to
the landfill in Michigan in half. And it’s moving toward it’s
goal of reducing the waste stream by 70%.

The city even plans to make energy out of the compost it’s
collecting.

The city plans to generate electricity and eventually make a
biofuel from the compost. That will be used to run Toronto’s
trucks to the landfill.

Oh, but those trucks won’t be going to the landfill in
Michigan.

The city has finally found a Canadian landfill that will start
taking Toronto’s waste in 2010.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

From the Trash to the Tank

  • Ethanol can be made from material that would end up in a landfill (Source: Patrick-br at Wikimedia Commons)

For the past few years, ethanol’s been
a political darling, but lately it seems the
party’s over. There’s concern the industry’s
using too much corn. That’s contributing to
rising food prices. Well, some companies want
to avoid the controversy. Reporter Shawn Allee explains they want to make ethanol from
stuff we leave behind at the dinner table:

Transcript

For the past few years, ethanol’s been
a political darling, but lately it seems the
party’s over. There’s concern the industry’s
using too much corn. That’s contributing to
rising food prices. Well, some companies want
to avoid the controversy. Reporter Shawn Allee explains they want to make ethanol from
stuff we leave behind at the dinner table:

To give you a sense of how touchy the ethanol issue’s gotten, consider what happened to Presidential
candidate Barack Obama. Last year, he supported mandates to add billions of gallons of ethanol to our
fuel stream. But recently, on ‘Meet the Press’, he was defensive.

“If it turns out, we got to make changes to our ethanol policy to help people get something
to eat, that’s the step we take. But I also believe ethanol has been an important
transitional tool for us to start dealing with our long-term energy crisis.”

Obama and other ethanol backers say we’re not stuck with corn-based ethanol. We can use wood chips
or energy crops like switchgrass.

But this cellulosic ethanol is a ways off.

First, the technology’s expensive. Plus, farmers don’t even grow energy crops now.

So, some companies hope to make ethanol from stuff that doesn’t need farms at all. It would come
from garbage cans, like this one at a coffee shop.

“In that receptacle there’s a lot of paper, and there’s some food bits and there’s some
scraps. So, we’re able to turn that into sugar. And the weak sugar, then we ferment, we distill into alcohol, and we get the ethanol.”

Zig Resiak is with a start-up company called Indiana Ethanol Power. He says garbage could compete
with corn.

“If you have a corn-to-ethanol facility, you’re going to pay for the feedstock. Trash, as a feedstock, we don’t
pay for it. The municipalities actually pay us to take the trash, just like a
landfill will take the trash.”

Resiak’s company isn’t the only one to figure this out. At least three other ethanol firms are asking
cities to hand over their trash, and cash. Besides being cheaper, there might be other advantages to
using garbage for ethanol.

Bob Dineen is with the industry group the Renewable Fuels Association.

“We have garbage all across the country.”

Here’s why that matters.

Before it makes it to the pump, ethanol needs to be blended at refineries. Dineens says those
refineries are far from corn farms and rural ethanol plants, but refineries are often close to big metro
areas, and big-city trash.

“A company that is able to produce from local landfill refuse – he’s clearly going to have an
advantage in terms of transportation, feedstock costs, and all the rest.”

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. The market hasn’t tested garbage-based ethanol yet.

So, what exactly is stopping companies like Indiana Ethanol Power from giving it a go?

Resiak says it’s simple – cities just haven’t been willing to part with their trash.

“Municipalities are very comfortable with putting it in the back of a truck and letting it go to the landfill. They don’t think about it twice. But for us to come in and say we’re going to
take it cheaper and we’re going to save you millions of dollars a year on your tipping fee – that’s different
and that’s kind of scary, and they want to take a good, strong look at that.”

Resiak predicts by the time cities do come around to the idea, there will be even more companies ready to
take garbage bags out of their hands.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Living Downstream From Dow Chemical

  • A Dow Chemical sign on the Tittabawassee River stating 'Enter At Your Own Risk' (Photo by Vincent Duffy)

It’s been more than 50 years since Dow
Chemical Company stopped dumping dioxin into the
river flowing past its plant in Michigan. But the
company and government regulators are still arguing
over how to clean it up. Vincent Duffy reports:

Transcript

It’s been more than 50 years since Dow
Chemical Company stopped dumping dioxin into the
river flowing past its plant in Michigan. But the
company and government regulators are still arguing
over how to clean it up. Vincent Duffy reports:

(sound of backyard)

Kathy Henry’s backyard runs down to the bank of the Tittabawassee River.
It’s a beautiful view, but that’s not what Kathy Henry sees.

“When I look back there now, I see dioxin.”

You can’t really see the dioxin, but it is there. Dow Chemical started
dumping dioxin into the Tittabawasee river in the 1890s. Dioxin is believed
to cause cancer and damage reproductive systems. And, there are high
concentrations of dioxin not only in the Tittabawasee, but in all the water
and floodplains between the chemical plant and Lake Huron 50 miles
downstream.

Kathy Henry first found out about the dioxin seven years ago when a
whistleblower at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality
warned local environmentalists about the contamination. She has wanted to
sell her house ever since.

“We’ve lived here for 24 years. We loved living in here. Now I’m afraid to
go out in my own yard. I just, psychologically, couldn’t stand living here
anymore. I had to get out.”

Dow says it will clean up any dioxin that’s proven to be dangerous to human
health, but the company has spent decades fighting with Michigan and the
US Environmental Protection Agency over how much of it is a threat.

Dow spokesman John Musser says there’s no proof anyone has gotten sick
because of the dioxin.

“We’re not seeing any impacts. We’re not seeing any cause for alarm. We’re
not seeing any imminent health threat. If it’s not a problem for humans or
the environment, then maybe the best thing to do is to leave it alone.”

But Michigan environmental officials are not so laissez-faire about the
contamination. They continue to warn residents about eating fish from the
rivers, about eating wild game killed in the region, and about swimming at
some beaches.

Robert McCann is with the state of Michigan. He says science is way past
the point of debating whether dioxin is dangerous.

“Study after study has shown that there are some very serious potential health
effects from being exposed to it, even at some lower levels over a long
period of time and those health effects do include things like cancer and
diabetes as well as some more minor health effects that can be caused from it.”

But Dow does debate whether dioxin is dangerous. John Musser says
Michigan and the EPA are using bad science based on dioxin exposure to lab
animals. He says Dow has human data from employees that show dioxin is
not as dangerous as people think.

“They were exposed at extremely high levels. And we’ve tracked their
health and their death records for 60 years and we’re not finding any ill
health effects.”

Attacking regulatory science is a common defense for industries. David
Michaels is an epidemiologist at George Washington University. He says
just like big tobacco questioned the link between smoking and lung cancer,
big business always questions the science.

“Companies know that by putting off the scientific debate for as many years
as they can they can keep doing the work that they’re doing and not be
disturbed. It works.”

For example, a recent meeting supposed to update residents about clean up
efforts turned into more of a debate between government scientists and scientists
hired by Dow. One member of the audience got sick of it.

“I’m not a geologist, I’m not a toxicologist, I’m just a resident that lives on
the river. And the last I knew dioxin was the most toxic substance known to
man. And what I’m seeing here is you guys trying to find excuses to justify
poisoning us.”

The EPA recently forced Dow to clean up four hot spots along the river,
including one spot with the highest concentration of dioxin ever found in the
United States.

But the last few months have had more set backs than
progress. In January, the EPA gave up trying to negotiate a clean up
agreement separate from Michigan’s. It said Dow’s proposals were going
backward.

Earlier this month the Region 5 director of the EPA was fired. Mary Gade
says it was because of her tough stance against Dow Chemical.

For The Environment Report, I’m Vincent Duffy.

Related Links

Bush to Block Sewer Funding

Congress appears poised to approve billions of dollars to help
cities renovate their aging sewage systems. That could prevent a lot
of sewage dumps into lakes and rivers. But the funding – if approved by Congress –
might not get the President’s signature. Tracy Samilton reports:

Transcript

Congress appears poised to approve billions of dollars to help
cities renovate their aging sewage systems. That could prevent a lot
of sewage dumps into lakes and rivers. But the funding – if approved by Congress –
might not get the President’s signature. Tracy Samilton reports:


Many American cities have sewage systems that dump untreated sewage
into nearby waters during heavy rainstorms. The problem contributes to
beach closings, and in some places, sewage even backs up into people’s
basements.


But the price tag to fix one mid-size sewage treatment system can be
hundreds of millions of dollars. Without federal help that can be out
of reach for many cities. Katherine Baer of American Rivers says the
problem will be worse soon:


“We have systems all around the country kind of hitting that place
where there’s a lot of population growth and older systems, and all of
a sudden they’ve kind of come up with a perfect storm causing a lot of
sewage.”


There’s considerable support for the funding in the Senate, but no
support at all in the Bush Administration. The President has
indictated he will veto the bills if they reach his desk.


For the Environment Report, I’m Tracy Samilton.

Related Links

Call to End Sewage Overflow Into Lakes

An Illinois Congressman says all cities should follow
Chicago’s example and end sewage system overflows into the
Great Lakes. The GLRC’s Tracy Samilton reports:

Transcript

An Illinois Congressman say all cities should follow Chicago’s
example and end sewage system overflows into the Great Lakes. The GLRC’s
Tracy Samilton reports:


Many cities in the Great Lakes watershed have aging sewage systems that
can’t cope with heavy rains. That can result in untreated sewage being
dumped into the Great Lakes.


Illinois Congressman Mark Kirk says Milwaukee dumps a billion gallons of
untreated sewage into Lake Michigan every year. But he says cities in Indiana
and Michigan have also dumped sewage into the Lake. Kirk has co-authored a bill
that would give all cities in a Great Lakes watershed twenty years to fix problems.
After that, they’d would face fines of 100 thousand dollars a day per incident.


“The dumping of raw fecal matter into the lake, the alarming rise in beach closings…
20 years from now, that should all be part of our past and not our future.”


In the meantime, the bill would also require cities to let the public know
when they dump sewage into the Great Lakes.


For the GLRC, I’m Tracy Samilton.

Related Links