toronto - The Environment Report

Canada Lags Behind U.S. In Pollution Control

A new environmental study has found toxic emissions increased in Canada during the late 1990’s, while pollution in the United States decreased over that same period. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports, critics say the findings reflect the differences in the governments’ commitment to cleaning up the environment:

Transcript

A new environmental study has found that toxic emissions increased in Canada during the late 1990’s while pollution in the United States decreased over that same period. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports, critics say the findings reflect the differences in the governments’ commitment to cleaning up the environment:

Between 1995 and 1999, the amount of toxic waste released into the environment by American manufacturers decreased by about seven
percent. However, in Canada, toxic releases increased by six percent. That’s according to a new study conducted by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. It was established under the North American Free
Trade Agreement. The study compares industrial pollution in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, where the system is voluntary. Ken Olgivie is the executive director of Pollution Probe, an environmental group based in Toronto. He says the findings reflect the tightening of environmental regulations during the Clinton years. And the simultaneous
budget-cutting that was going on in Canada.

“When the U.S. is going down and we’re going up, I think that raises a serious question on Canadian policy and Americans should be aware of that because I’m sure you’re told all the time by our politicians how we do such wonderful things and we’re ahead of you, but I don’t think that’s true.”

For instance, the Ontario progressive conservatives cut their
environmental budget in half in 1995. Such cuts are significant because the regulation of air and water pollution in Canada lies with the provinces, rather than the federal government. That leads to different laws all across the country. An independent inquiry blamed the Ontario cutbacks for the deadly E. coli outbreak that occurred in the town of Walkerton in 2000.

The NAFTA report found Ontario had the largest increase in pollution of any state or province – at 19 percent. It remains the fourth largest polluter in North America and is the biggest recipient of American toxic waste. But it’s not the only place in the Great Lakes highlighted in the report. The study’s director, Erica Phipps says the region is responsible for a significant amount of North America’s pollution.

“Five Great Lakes jurisdictions, Ohio, Ontario, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, represent one quarter of the facilities and one quarter of the total releases that we’re looking at in this report…when we’re looking at the toxic releases and transfers coming from that region, it is certainly of concern.”

Phipps says that close to half of the landfill disposals of toxic waste occur in this region. Landfills in Ontario, Michigan and Ohio are the
biggest recipients. But at least one government is considering a change. Ontario’s new premier, Ernie Eves, is promising to pour new funding into the province’s environment ministry and tighten its enforcement.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.

Congressman Tries to Stop Garbage Imports

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that state governments could not prevent waste management companies from importing garbage across state lines. That has upset residents in states like Michigan, who complain that hundreds of trucks are hauling garbage into their state every day. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports, a Michigan congressman is using a new tactic in his battle to stop the imports:

Transcript

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that state governments could not prevent waste management companies from importing garbage across state lines. That’s upset residents in states like Michigan, who complain that hundreds of trucks are hauling garbage into their state every day. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports, a Michigan congressman is using a new tactic in his battle to stop the imports:

Last year, 3.6 million tons of garbage were imported into Michigan landfills. That equals about a football field of garbage piled a mile high. Half of that waste came from Canada on the more than 160 trucks that cross the U.S.-Canada border every day. That number is expected to increase to 250 a day when the city of Toronto begins exporting all of its waste into Michigan at the end of the year. Michigan congressman John Dingell says the rise in garbage imports has angered his constituents.

“I am outraged that the amount of trash from Canada is going to increase above the 150 percent increase that it’s already undergone in the last few years and I’m troubled that our government is not protecting our cities and states from unwanted trash coming in from other countries.”

For several years, Dingell has introduced legislation in the House to give states more control over trash imports, but it has never passed. So, he’s trying a new tactic. His staff discovered a 1986 agreement signed between the U.S. and Canada, which requires both countries to notify the other of hazardous waste imports. It’s called the Agreement between Canada and the U.S. Concerning the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste. And it was amended in 1992 to include notification of nonhazardous waste imports, or garbage. Once notified, the recipient country has 30 days to respond, approve or reject the shipments. Canada and the U.S. do notify each other about shipments of hazardous waste. But Dingell says garbage continues to cross the border unnoticed.

“The Canadians have not once notified the U.S. nor has the U.S. questioned this oddity. Quite frankly, it’s outrageous that it has not taken the steps necessary to control the handling of this waste from Canada under an effective administrative process now in place.”

However, officials at Environment Canada contend they are complying with the treaty. They point to a clause that states the agreement is contingent upon both countries passing legislation that creates a notification system. Joe Wittwer of Environment Canada says they are only now in the process of creating those regulations.

“I think both Canada and the U.S. take this agreement seriously. And I don’t think you can fault either country for not notifying right now because both countries need to put the appropriate regulations in place before this notification mechanism can be implemented.”

In order to achieve that in Canada, Wittwer says the regulations were included in an overhaul of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which was completed in 1999. The revisions took 11 years.

Now, Environment Canada is developing draft regulations on garbage imports, which will soon be made available for public comment. It expects the new notification tracking system will become law sometime in 2003. But Congressman Dingell says it shouldn’t have taken 10 years to implement such a system. He maintains the Canadian government is ignoring its obligations and he’s asking the EPA to step in.

“I’ve sent a letter to the administrator of the EPA demanding that administrator insist that no more Canadian trash or hazardous waste be permitted into the U.S., until both the states affected and the local units of government have agreed to that importation.”

The agreement doesn’t give state governments veto power over garbage shipments. But Dingell says EPA Administrator Christine Whitman could grant them that power – enabling residents of border states to stop the flow of garbage into their communities. EPA officials say they’re considering the request.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly in Ottawa.

Critics Say Clean-Up Money Not Enough

As U.S. states look for more money to clean up the Great Lakes, the province of Ontario, has come up with some, albeit not a lot. Ontario announced that it will spend about $35 million to clean up the Great Lakes over the next five years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk has more:

Transcript

As U.S. states look for more money to clean up the Great Lakes, the province of Ontario has come up with some, albeit not a lot. Ontario announced that it will spend about 35 million dollars, U.S., to clean up the Great Lakes over the next five years. Dan Karpenchuk reports:

Ontario’s environment minister, Elizabeth Witmer, says the money will be spent in several areas, including the clean up of contaminated sediment at seventeen sites on the Ontario side of the Great Lakes. She says the goal is to make the Lakes swimmable again.

Witmer says there will also be more monitoring and reporting of water quality, and the health of fish and wildlife in and around the Great Lakes region will be studied, but it’s not the first time that the province has pledged a huge clean up of its share of the world’s largest body of fresh water. More than half of the seventeen sites targeted by Witmer were supposed to have been cleaned up by the year 2000. So far only one has been cleaned up, and work is underway on only one more.

Opposition politicians and environmentalists call the plan a pathetic effort, and say the amount of money pledged isn’t nearly enough. They say it could be used up just by the city of Toronto in one day.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.

Parental Common Sense

Two recent medical studies have shed some light on the cause and possible prevention of childhood asthma. The first, a Canadian study, examines the relationship between breastfeeding and the risk of developing childhood asthma. The second study out of southern California indicates a connection between smog and childhood asthma rates. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Suzanne Elston says that the reports confirm what the parents of many asthmatic children have understood all along:

Transcript

I’ll never forget the day that the pediatrician marched into our infant daughter’s hospital room and demanded that I stop breastfeeding her. Sarah had been in intensive care for several weeks in an attempt to control her asthma – without success. Her doctor turned to the only remaining variable he could identify – breast milk. My husband and I were convinced that the immunological benefits of breastfeeding offered Sarah the best chance for survival. We put up such a stink that within 24 hours Sarah was allowed to resume breastfeeding. Months later, a specialist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children not only commended our decision – he felt that breastfeeding had probably saved Sarah’s life.

Eight years later a new study out of the same Toronto hospital confirms our parental intuition. According to the report, breastfeeding actually protects children against asthma. The longer they breastfeed, the more protection they’re offered. The study found that when infants were breastfed for nine months or longer, the risk of asthma and wheezing was reduced by 50%.

The results of the study are no surprise to me. It has been eight years since Sarah first left the oxygen tent that was her home as an infant. Today, her once life-threatening condition has been replaced by a mild asthma. It’s only triggered when she has a bad cold or if she’s exposed to high levels of air pollution.

Which leads me to a second study out of Southern California. Researchers there have spent eight years studying the effects of ground level ozone on childhood asthma. They’ve concluded that ozone not only triggers asthmatic attacks, it can actually cause it.

What both these studies confirm is that environmental factors – both positive and negative – can have a dramatic effect on the incidence and severity of asthma. As the parents of a severely asthmatic child, these are common sense lessons that we learned by carefully observing our daughter. For us, they simply confirm what we already knew.

The big lesson here is that parental observation and intuition provide us with valuable tools for protecting our children’s health – often years before the scientific community reaches the same conclusions. Unfortunately, this anecdotal evidence is too often dismissed as being unscientific -as if that were the watermark that everything should be measured by. In light of these recent studies, maybe its time we considered the importance of good ol’ common sense.

Suzanne Elston is a syndicated columnist living in Courtice, Ontario. She comes to us by way of the Great Lakes Radio Consortium.

WEBSITE INFO:

“Breastfeeding and Asthma is Young Children – Findings from a Population -Based Study”, Sharon Dell, MD, Teresa To, PhD., (November 2001) can be found at the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine website at www.archpediatrics.com

Information about the Children’s Health Study can be found at the National Institute of Health Studies at www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/news/ozasth.htm and the California EPA site at arbis.arb.ca.gov/newsrel/nr013102.htm

Canadian Enviro Enforcement Criticized

An environmental lobby group in Canada says the Ontario Ministry of Environment watches industrial plants pollute the Great Lakes, but rarely enforces pollution laws. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has the details:

Transcript

Between 1995 and 1999, polluters’ violated Ontario’s water pollution laws ten thousand times, but only eleven plants faced any penalties. Elaine McDonald is a staff scientist with the Sierra Legal Defense Fund, based in Toronto, which published a report on the findings. She says the problem started when the government cut the Ministry of Environment’s budget by about 40-percent:

“This resulted in lax enforcement in the field and– basically a policy of lax enforcement and therefore we saw this sudden increase in violations and very few charged being made.”

The Sierra Legal Defense Fund is calling on the Ontario government to crack down on Great Lakes polluters. The environmentalists say they do see signs of improvement, with more charges being filed in recent months against repeat pollution offenders. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Lester Graham.

Scientist Tracks Air Mysteries

The Great Lakes region is home to major power producers. But along with the electricity they make comes some amount of air pollution. When coal-fired power plants in Illinois and Ohio emit sulfur dioxides, prevailing winds blow them to the Northeast, where they can fall as acid rain. Several northeast states are suing those power plants to clean up their emissions. Earlier this summer, a professor at Clarkson University in northern New York coordinated a unique study to learn more about the life cycle of air pollution, from where it’s produced to where it lands. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Sommerstein has the story:

Transcript

Earlier this summer, a professor at Clarkson University in northern New York coordinated a unique study to learn more about the life cycle of air pollution, from where it’s produced to where it lands. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Sommerstein has the story.

Chemical engineering professor Phil Hopke will take any opportunity to get out of his office and over to his field lab. It consists of a concrete slab amongst the weeds in a corner of the local airport. Installed on the concrete are monitors he uses to find out exactly what’s in the air we breathe.

(sound of opening lock)

Hopke unlocks a gate in a chainlink fence. You can already hear a strange hum in the distance. It gets louder as Hopke strides up to one of three white machines the size of dishwashers.

“Come out and change the filters once a day. This one’s for organic constituents in the air.”

He pulls out what looks like an air filter for your furnace. These machines suck in air. They leave a unique footprint of chemicals on the filter that represents what was in the air in this place on this day — chemicals like sulfur dioxide and mercury. Hopke will send these filters to specialty labs around the world to be analyzed.

There are hundreds of stations like this in North America. Groups of researchers study daily air quality for every region of the country. They examine how things like traffic and smokestacks might affect the air we breathe.

But Hopke says they mostly focus on their own areas. They don’t often coordinate studies to see how the chemicals they find move from region to region.

“It struck me a couple of years ago, particularly in the Northeast, that we have these groups talking to one another.”

Working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Hopke convinced 26 sites in the East, from Texas to Toronto, to measure the same stuff on the same days. They chose the whole month of July.

It’s perhaps the largest simultaneous air sampling effort ever conducted in this country. When the data’s complete, the study will track the lifespan of pollution, from when it leaves a smokestack or a car’s tailpipe to when it is taken up by a tree or your lungs.

But scientists can’t just follow one molecule of pollution from a car in St. Louis to a lake in Michigan. They have to make models of how the chemicals move, like how meteorologists make weather maps to trace storm systems. As if that’s not complicated enough, says Hopke, naturally occurring chemicals make the job even tougher.

“You have to keep in mind that the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia are blue because of natural photochemical smog, particles being formed because of the pine materials that come off. Those materials that you smell are chemically reactive and will undergo the same type of smog reactions as human emitted materials.”

So researchers use techniques to separate out the “man-made” pollutants from the “natural” pollutants. Next they look for high concentrations of, say, sulfur dioxide in Chicago on July 15th. Then they follow those high levels east with prevailing winds. They look for high sulfur dioxide levels in Ohio or New York a few days later. After doing this many times in July for many types of chemicals, the researchers hope patterns will begin to emerge.

Hopke sits on a scientific advisory committee that helps the EPA develop pollution standards. He says this coordinated study will bring stronger science to the EPA’s sometimes controversial decisions.

“Suppose I require all power plants to reduce their sulfur dioxide emissions by twenty percent. What does that do for me for particle concentrations in New York City? What will that do? Will that get us where we want in terms of clean air?”

With a study this large in scope, the answers to those questions won’t come quickly. The massive amount of data gathered in the study will take a few years to interpret.

In the meantime, Hopke and the EPA are planning another cooperative sampling effort for wintertime, when temperatures and people’s habits are different from summer.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m David Sommerstein.

Sadness on the Peace Train

The terrible events in New York City and Washington have left a legacy of personal tragedies. For Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Suzanne Elston, the story of September 11th began as a journey of peace:

Transcript

The terrible events in New York City and Washington D.C. have left a legacy of personal tragedies. For Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator, Suzanne Elston, the story of September 11th, began as a journey of peace.

I’ve never been to New York City. So when we got an invitation to visit the Big Apple and participate in a children’s peace festival, we jumped at the chance. My husband Brian and two of our kids, Peter and Sarah, were going to be part of a church service marking the opening of the 56th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Sarah was going to carry the Canadian flag and Peter was going to give a reading. The kids were wired and so were we.

Our plan was to leave Toronto Tuesday morning by train. The daylong trip would take us to New York City. We’d have all day Wednesday to do touristy things before the service on Thursday. We’d even managed to get tickets to a Broadway play. It all sounded so exciting that I couldn’t believe that it was actually going to happen.

We’d been on the train for about an hour when we first heard the news. Our traveling companions were 18 members of the Toronto Children’s Peace Theatre, also en route to the peace festival. The director of the company received a cell phone call that gave us sketchy details of the initial attack on the World Trade Center.

At first I refused to believe it. Here we were heading for an international children’s peace festival.

It felt like we were on the voyage of the damned. We continued on our journey, barreling down the tracks to a destination that we knew we would never reach. We heard rumors – the border was closed, there was shooting in the streets. People with cell phones were frantically trying to get a hold of somebody they knew who could give us an update.

The children from the theatre group were particularly upset. For most of them it was their first time away from home, and they were scared. As we discussed the latest details that we’d heard, one of the kids started to throw-up.

We moved to another car and tried to explain to a group of university students from England that they wouldn’t be flying home the next day from New York. As the news continued to filter in, we soon realized that they wouldn’t be flying home from anywhere. An elderly couple at the back of the car sat in stony silence. Their daughter worked at the World Trade Center and they were frozen in fear.

The conductor was stuck like a moose in headlights. Most of the passengers still didn’t know what was going on. My husband finally took him aside and explained that he had to make an announcement. People needed to make arrangements, to talk to their families. But he was just a kid and as scared as the rest of us. He wanted to wait until he had something official from Amtrak’s head office.

Finally, at 11:00 a.m., he made a formal announcement. The border was closed and we all would be disembarking at Niagara Falls. It was Tuesday evening by the time we got home and saw the horrific images of what had happened.

It wasn’t until then, when we were safe and home and together that we had a shocking revelation. The first stop on our sightseeing trip was going to be the World Trade Center. For the sake of a mere 24 hours we could have been buried at the bottom of that rubble like so many others.

Our great journey of peace ended with many prayers. We prayed for the victims and their families, we prayed for peace. Finally, we gave a prayer of thanks that we’d all made it home safely. After witnessing Tuesday’s horror – that was a gift beyond measure.

Time to Scrap Kyoto

Since signing of the Kyoto Agreement in 1997, governments around the world
have struggled to reach carbon dioxide reduction targets. But as Great Lakes
Radio Consortium commentator Suzanne Elston points out, targets and quotas
leave most consumers out in the cold:

Commentary – Recycling Must Pay

There is an increasing demand for recycling and other waste reduction initiatives to be cost effective, but as Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Suzanne Elston points out, nobody ever questions the cost of simply dumping our garbage:

Commentary – Disposable Pride

Modern inventions are designed to make our lives easier. But as Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Suzanne Elston points out, sometimes easier isn’t always better: