Tag: environmental quality

Who Should Watch Big Farms?

  • Hog manure being injected into the ground and tilled under. The manure fertilizes the crops, but if too much is applied it can foul up waterways. (Photo by Mark Brush)

Big livestock operations can raise thousands of cows, chickens or pigs
under one roof. It helps keep the price of food lower. But neighbors
complain the government’s not doing a good enough job of monitoring the
pollution these farms produce. Rebecca Williams reports there’s a
debate heating up in several states over who should be regulating these
big farms:

Transcript

Big livestock operations can raise thousands of cows, chickens or pigs
under one roof. It helps keep the price of food lower. But neighbors
complain the government’s not doing a good enough job of monitoring the
pollution these farms produce. Rebecca Williams reports there’s a
debate heating up in several states over who should be regulating these
big farms:


The days of small farms with different kinds of livestock grazing in
the pasture are fading from the landscape.


They’re being replaced by farms that specialize in one kind of animal –
and raise thousands of them. They’re called concentrated animal
feeding operations, or CAFOs.


There are battles in several states right now over who should be keeping an eye
on the CAFOs. Usually, the state departments of environmental
protection have power under the federal Clean Water Act to enforce laws
and issue permits. But in the Midwest, in states such as Ohio and
Michigan, and in the West, in states such as Oregon and Idaho, they either have transferred or are working to transfer oversight power to the state agriculture departments – and get U.S. EPA approval.


Jerry Van Woerkom is a Republican state senator in Michigan. Right
now, the state Department of Environmental Quality – or DEQ – has the
oversight powers. But Senator Van Woerkom is sponsoring a package of
bills that would put most of the state’s big livestock farms under the
Department of Agriculture:


“Those people tend to be supportive and come with the attitude of we’re
going to try to work together to solve this problem. Whereas when they
work with the DEQ the attitude is more like we’re coming with a
hammer and if we find anything you’ve done that’s out of line, we’re
going to wop you with it.”


The CAFOs are in the spotlight because they can produce tens of
thousands of gallons of urine and manure each day. That liquefied
manure is eventually spread onto farm fields.


The Environmental Protection Agency says that waste can wash from
fields into streams and creeks. That can cause fish kills. Animal
waste has also gotten into drinking water and made people sick.


Lynn Henning runs a small farm. She says there are 13 CAFOs within a
10 mile radius of her Michigan farmhouse. She says the manure odors
are overwhelming:


“We can’t hang laundry when the emissions are in the air. We have
severe fly outbreaks. We’ve had family farmers that have been diagnosed with hydrogen
sulfide poisoning from emissions from the CAFOs.”


Henning says the current oversight system is weak. She says the
Department of Environmental Quality doesn’t have enough funding to
monitor the CAFOs. So that job often falls to residents like her. She
says putting the Department of Agriculture in charge of oversight would
make the problems even worse:


“The MDA has no enforcement authority and they promote agriculture in
Michigan. It’s like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
You can’t give authority to punish to an agency that’s promoting.”


But it could become a wider trend if the states that are proposing the
switch now actually make it happen.


Karla Raettig is an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project.
It’s a group that’s been critical of weakening environmental laws.
She’s been tracking trends in enforcement of livestock farms:


“I think the Farm Bureau and other really large industry advocates are
seeing a chance to get regulation that is perhaps more cooperative,
less regulatory and less on the enforcement side. It isn’t totally
nefarious but I think it could have outcomes that are not anticipated.”


Raettig says you have to wonder what will happen without the threat of
enforcement from an environmental agency.


But Senator Jerry Van Woerkom from Michigan argues that farmers are
more likely to do the right thing if they’re overseen by a friendlier
agency, as he proposes:


“I mean you’re not able to cover up problems that happen, it gets in
the newspaper, people know when problems happen. But I believe that the
agriculture department will work with people, especially if people are
getting a bad reputation. I think they will work with them and if
those people do get out of line, it’s back to the DEQ.”


Environmentalists and small farmers are worried about the idea of
states handing off oversight of CAFOs… from their environmental
watchdog agencies to their agencies in charge of promoting the business
of agriculture.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Environmental Practices Affect Stock Values

A new report has found that utilities with the best environmental practices have higher values on the stock market. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:

Transcript

A new report has found that utilities with the best environmental practices have higher values on
the stock market. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:


The New York-based financial research firm Innovest found a correlation between sound
environmental management and strong financial performance among companies.


The firm compared 26 utilities on environmental factors such as toxic releases.


Researcher Carla Tabossi says they found the companies with the highest environmental scores
outperformed others on the market.


“The environmental quality of corporations turns out to be a very good proxy for the overall
management quality of firms, which happens to be the primary determinant of stock market
performance.”


Tabossi has also found that a growing number of asset managers are considering environmental
issues when constructing investment portfolios.


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

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Officials Overlook Illegal Dumping

  • Junk cars dumped on the banks of the Illinois River. (Photo by Romy Myszka)

Americans generate 14-billion tons of waste each year. Most of that trash winds up in landfills, some of it is recycled. But some of it slips through the cracks, winding up in illegal trash dumps throughout the country. Environmental officials are cleaning up a 7-acre pile of waste that was overlooked for so long that it caught fire a few years ago – and kept burning. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:

Transcript

Americans generate 14-billion tons of waste each year. Most of that trash winds up
in landfills,
some of it is recycled. But some of it slips through the cracks, winding up in
illegal trash dumps
throughout the country. Environmental officials are cleaning up a 7-acre pile of
waste that was
overlooked for so long that it caught fire a few years ago — and kept burning. The
Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:


Tucked away in a non-residential section of South Philadelphia, just around the
corner from the
Philadelphia Airport, lies a heap of construction debris. The material was dumped
here years ago
by a demolition contractor, and left to rot…


Occasionally sparking up into flame, the densely packed wood, metal, carpet, and
other debris has
been smoldering below the surface for the past few years.


Down the street is a police impoundment lot, and the Water Department’s waste
treatment site.
And directly across from the dump is a series of community gardens.


Edward Burnabiel’s been tending vegetables here for two decades.


“We raise everything, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, scunions, onions, celery, squash…”


Burnabiel spends six days a week in his garden. He jokes that it would be seven if
his wife didn’t
drag him to church on Sundays.


A few years ago, he and his fellow gardeners noticed something unusual at the trash
pile across
the street. Every now and again, smoke would billow up from the site — and combine
with the
stench from the nearby sewer plant.


“The smell was awful when it started burning. It would stink, even to go by. It’s
bad enough we
have to smell the poop down there, but then we got to smell that too!”


The gardeners complained to the city. But the trash has been around for well over a
decade.


Kathleen McGinty is Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental
Protection.
She says the contractor responsible for the mess has long-since disappeared. That
contractor,
Harold Emerson, also skipped out on a 5-million dollar fine for illegal dumping.


“About thirteen years ago, Mr. Emerson was contracted to take some houses down in
Philadelphia. As part of the deal, for a one year window of time, the agreement was
that he could
temporarily store some of that construction debris here. What Mr. Emerson
conveniently forgot
was the temporary part. And he just took off without ever having done that.”


Today, the trash pile is sometimes referred to as the “Emerson Dump.”
Environmentalists
worried that the burning trash could be a health risk. Construction debris can
include hazardous
chemicals like arsenic. But city Managing Director Phil Goldsmith says tests showed
the fumes
weren’t dangerous. Still, he says cleanup was long overdue.


“Fourteen years for something like this to be sitting around is far too long. And
it’s become a
nuisance. It’s been a place where our fire department has had to come to put out
fires. We should
not have allowed this to happen in the first place. And once it happened, we should
not have
allowed to have it continue here for so long.”


The Emerson Dump is hardly unique. There are illegal dumps all across the country.
But most
are hidden in forests or other out-of-the-way areas, and don’t have the high profile
that comes
with a flaming pile of trash in an urban setting.


Allen Hershkowitz is with the environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense
Council. He
says illegal dumping is often overlooked for more serious environmental concerns,
such as air
and water pollution, or global warming. But he says it’s still a problem
authorities must deal
with.


“In the next 10 years, this country will have to manage about 140-billion tons of
waste of
different types. More than 2/3rds are managed in ecologically inferiors ways,
landfills, surface
impoundments, or incinerators. When you illegally dump waste, you make it that much
harder
for that material to wind up being recycled or properly disposed of.”


Hershkowitz says illegal dumping is directly related to the cost of proper waste
disposal.
Dumping was most prevalent in the late 70s and early 80s, when strict environmental
regulations
led many landfills to close, driving up the costs of waste hauling. Illegal dumping
still occurs,
Hershkowitz says, but less frequently.


Pennsylvania officials are still hunting for demolition contractor Harold Emerson to
force him to
pay his 5-million dollar fine.


But in the meantime, state and city taxpayers are funding a 3-million dollar cleanup
effort. The
fire’s been extinguished, but cleanup efforts are expected to continue through the
end of the year.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Brad Linder.

Geologists Mapping Underground Resources

Pull out a map and you’ll find the Great Lakes area holds resources that no other place can claim. The region is rich in lakes and forests and scenic views. But a road map just covers the surface. We know much less about what’s under the earth. Now, a team of geologists is working to map the resources under the ground. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:

Transcript

Pull out a map and you’ll find the Great Lakes area holds resources that no other
place can claim.
The region is rich in lakes and forests and scenic views. But a road map just
covers the surface.
We know much less about what’s under the earth. Now, a team of geologists from the
Great
Lakes states is working to map the resources under the ground. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:


Look outside – look out your car window or into your backyard and try to erase
everything you
see. Take away the playgrounds and the concrete parking lots. Strip away the trees
and the grass
and the topsoil in your garden.


This is the way Kevin Kincare imagines the world. A picture of nothing except naked
landforms
– massive hills and cavernous valleys. All created by gigantic pieces of ice that
gouged and
ground their way down the globe from Canada. This would be the picture of Great
Lakes states
about 15-thousand years ago. It’s the picture Kincare is slowly putting down on paper.


“This is a big chunk of granite and you can see this one side is flat and looks
polished. The
glacier was moving across. There’s grooves right here. So this is the direction
the ice was
moving.”


Kincare is a glacial geologist with the Michigan Department of Environmental
Quality. Six years
ago, he helped start the Central Great Lakes Geologic Mapping Coalition. It’s a
group of
geologists from four states – Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio – and the U.S.
Geological
Survey. They’re working to put together a 3-D digital map of the region’s glacial
geology.
They’ll map everything down to the bedrock, which can be hundreds of feet below the
Earth’s
surface.

The first step in geologic mapping is compiling information from local maps. After
that it’s out
to the field.


At Tacy Brother’s Gravel Pit, a massive machine is sorting big scoops of earth into
piles of sand,
gravel and rocks.


Kincare is now working on mapping a small county on Lake Michigan. He says looking
at a
gravel pit is like looking at nature’s record of thousands of years of changes to
the planet’s
surface.


“That starts to pull the whole story together. How the ice retreated across the
county from east to
west and where all the rivers that were carrying the melting glacier ice and
depositing thick
sections of sand, and where the glacial lakes were, where all the silt and clay was
dropping out.”


Geologists say one of the most important uses for the maps is locating water
resources.
Nationally, Michigan ranks first in the number of people who use household wells to
get their
drinking water. Illinois, Ohio and Indiana rank among the top 15 in the nation for
household
water well use.


Gary Witkowski’s job is to protect the environment in his county in southwest
Michigan. He says
the first step in protecting groundwater is knowing exactly where it is.


“It’d be a tremendous help for us if we could just go to a resource like this and
pull that
information. Not only to us, but, I mean, even to the developer, it would be a
major plus that they
could look at.”


Knowing exactly what’s under the ground also helps planners build in the right
places. And it
helps them avoid building in the wrong places. For example, planners can put
neighborhoods
close to supplies of groundwater. They can discourage development on land rich in
minerals and
construction materials, such as sand and gravel. And they can make sure they don’t
build
industrial plants in places that are especially vulnerable to pollution.


Dennis O’Leary is with the U.S. Geological Survey. He’s helping Kevin Kincare with
the map.


“Those kinds of decisions that involve competing interests really can’t be made
rationally unless
there’s a body of knowledge, of fact, that relates to just what the question’s all
about and that’s
what these maps provide.”


But it could be awhile before people have access to maps this detailed. The four
states in the
mapping coalition and the Geological Survey all have to share 500-thousand dollars a
year for the
project. That means Kevin Kincare can map only one county every three years. It
would take
two centuries just to finish his state.


“We’d have to have a lot of medical breakthroughs for me to finish this project.”


Kincare says the maps are too important to wait that long. He says they need
20-million-dollars a
year from Congress. With that money, they could put together a complete geologic
map of the
Great Lakes region in about 16 years. Kincare says he’s not optimistic they’ll get
that kind of
money.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.

Mining Endangers Sand Dunes

The dunes around Lake Michigan draw millions of visitors each year. But
the dunes are more than just a tourist attraction: the sand is a
valuable commodity in manufacturing. And sand dune mining has been
going on since the turn of the century. Today, dunes in Illinois and
Wisconsin are protected since they fall within state park boundaries.
There are some small mining operations in some of Indiana’s dunes, but
by far, most sand dune mining happens in Michigan. The state’s had a
law in place for more than twenty years to regulate the mining… But a
new report alleges that the law isn’t working. And the dunes are slowly
vanishing. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports:

Mining Endangers Sand Dunes (Wrap Version)

Sand dune mining has been going on around Lake Michigan since the dawn
of the industrial age. The sand is used by foundries to make molds for
casting metal. But despite a 1976 law to protect the dunes, a new
report released today (Tuesday 4/20) claims the dunes are in more danger
than ever. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports: