Pollution at Valley Forge

Waste from former industrial plants can pollute some of the nation’s
most natural areas, including state and national park land. Brad
Linder reports that even a treasured historic site made famous by George
Washington is at risk:

Transcript

Waste from former industrial plants can pollute some of the nation’s
most natural areas, including state and national park land. Brad
Linder reports that even a treasured historic site made famous by George
Washington is at risk:


General George Washington and his troops braved cold weather and
starvation for six months in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The site’s now
a national historic park. But for much of the 20th century, part of the
site was also home to an asbestos manufacturing plant.


Attorney Andy Hartzell is with the state of Pennsylvania, which recently
reached an agreement with the federal government to split the 11
million dollar cleanup cost. He says just because the site holds
historic significance doesn’t mean it was safe from industrial waste:


“Since the industrial revolution our country’s had an industrialized
society, and standards were different in the 1800s than they were in
the 1900s, than they are today. So, sometimes things like this happen.”


Much of the asbestos has already been buried on site, and removing it
would be more dangerous than leaving it in place. Only the asbestos on
the surface will be moved.


For the Environment Report, I’m Brad Linder.

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Water Intakes Kill Aquatic Life

Billions of fish and other aquatic organisms
are killed every year by industrial plants located on
waterways. Brad Linder reports that environmental
regulators are hoping to bring those numbers down:

Transcript

Billions of fish and other aquatic organisms
are killed every year by industrial plants located on
waterways. Brad Linder reports that environmental
regulators are hoping to bring those numbers down:


Power plants, oil refineries, and other industrial plants often have
cooling systems that rely on river water. But when water is sucked
into the cooling tanks, so are fish and other tiny organisms.


John Hughes is the state of Delaware’s environmental secretary. He says companies could use systems that recycle water but few want to spend the money:


“Every refinery in America looks up into the air and
worries about their emissions. That’s where the bulk of their
investments go in pollution controls. And when you bring up water, you
get that blank look, like ‘what now?'”


Hughes says federal rules let companies sidestep water regulations if
upgrading is considered too costly. But Hughes says
he is asking local companies to step up… and if that doesn’t work,
his state might pass tougher regulations.


For the Environment Report, I’m Brad Linder.

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Dilemmas for Wastewater Treatment Plants

  • Water contamination from sources that might include some wastewater treatment plants closes some beaches. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Municipal sewer plants are sometimes blamed for high E. coli bacteria counts that close beaches to swimmers. Some cities are working to find better ways to treat the water and put it back into nature. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris McCarus reports:

Transcript

Municipal sewer plants are sometimes blamed for high E. coli bacteria counts
that close beaches to swimmers. Some cities are working to find better ways to treat the
water and put it back into nature. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris McCarus
reports:


(sound of cars moving along a small street and a few people talking)


A typical summer day by the lake: SUVs pull boats on trailers. People saunter from an
ice cream shop to the city beach. Jet skis and water skiiers slice through the waves.
Carpenters raise trusses on homes being built into the remaining lakefront lots.


Just a few years ago it seemed towns like this were just for loggers and locals. But now
people are flocking to the lakes around the Midwest and staying there. And that’s putting
a strain on local sewer plants.


(sound of machines inside the water treatment plant)


For 40 years, the treated waste water from the Boyne City, Michigan sewer plant has
been released into the big lake it was built on…Lake Charlevoix.


“It’s located right adjacent to a public swimming beach, park, marina and some valuable
waterfront property. We are only a block off the downtown district.”


Plant manager Dan Meads wants to stop mixing the end product with the water where
tourists and the locals swim and play. He tests daily for E. coli bacteria. He
doesn’t want anyone getting sick. But it’s still a concern, and there are other concerns.


In recent years, the United States Geological Survey has reported on new kinds of
contaminants that they’ve found in ground and surface water. The USGS says treated
wastewater from sewer plants can contain hormones from birth control pills, antibiotics,
detergents, fire retardants, and pesticides.


USGS microbiologist Sheridan Haack says the effects of all these compounds are still
unknown. Most are found in tiny quantities, but combined they could cause any number
of chemical reactions.


“There are many different chemical structures and it would be very difficult to state for
all of them what we would actually expect the environmental fate to be and how they
would actually be transported through the environment.”


Haack says the medicines people take don’t disappear. They eventually leave the body
and are flushed down the toilet. Those drugs have been tested for safe human
consumption, but the question is: what happens when those chemicals are mixed in with
industrial waste, accidental spills and nature’s own chemical processes? Haack says they
just might come back around to hurt humans, fish and wildlife.


The Boyne City solution is to build a new wastewater treatment plant two miles from the
beaches up the Boyne River. Officials say contaminants will be diluted by the time they
flow back down into Lake Charlevoix.


(sound of the Boyne River)


Larry Maltby volunteers for a group called “Friends of the Boyne River.” The group
doesn’t like the city’s plan to discharge treated wastewater directly into the river. It wants
them to consider some non-traditional methods. They say the new sewer plant could run
a pipe under a golf course or spray the treated water on farm fields… or let it drain into
wetlands to let nature filter it out.


“It will seep into the soils which are very sandy and gravelly underneath the golf course
and then the filtration through the ground will have a great deal of effect of continuing to
purify that water. Much more so than it would be with a direct deposit, straight into the
surface waters of Michigan.”


Lawyers for the Friends of the Boyne River have appealed to the state dept of
environmental quality and filed a lawsuit.


But wastewater treatment plant manager Dan Meads says the city doesn’t want to please
just one group and end up angering another…


“There isn’t any guarantee that you can satisfy everybody. We think we have the best
option available.”


As municipalities are short on funds and personnel, they don’t want to wait for decades
for the perfect solution. Still, nobody wants any amount of pollution to affect their home
or their recreational area.


Sheridan Haack with the USGS won’t take either side in this dispute. She says not only
are the dangers from contaminants unknown, the best way to deal with them is unknown.


“I am not aware of any consensus in the scientific community on the nature or types of
treatment for this broad range of chemicals.”


In the meantime… communities such as Boyne City have the unenviable task of trying to
dispose of their residents sewage without polluting the beaches, the fishing, and the
environment that brought folks there in the first place.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chris McCarus.

Related Links

Tapping Nature’s Cupboard for Pollution Cleanup

Often our first impulse to clean up a mess is to reach for a chemical cleaner. It’s the same kind of approach in environmental clean-ups. Often the experts first turn to chemicals to clean up badly polluted areas. A new approach to cleaning up pollution has been evolving in recent years. Instead of creating new chemicals to clean up contaminated areas, researchers are trying to use what Mother Nature already provides. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Victoria Fenner has more:

Transcript

Often our first impulse to clean up a problem is to reach for a chemical cleaner. It’s the same kind
of approach in environmental clean-ups. Often the experts first turn to chemicals to clean up
badly polluted areas. A new approach to cleaning up pollution has been evolving in recent years.
Instead of creating new chemicals to clean up contaminated areas, researchers are trying to use
what Mother Nature already provides. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Victoria Fenner has
more:


Nathalie Ross is standing in front of a big water tank divided into three sections. She’s a scientist
at Canada’s National Water Research Institute. She’s working on a different kind of approach
towards environmental cleanup. She explains she’s letting Mother Nature clean up different
aspects of pollution in each section of the tank.


“The first one is what we call natural attenuation, which is based on the natural process to
degrade contaminants, so that’s what we can call our control.”


In the second section, nutrients are added to the water to feed the existing bacteria to see if they
can be stimulated to clean up the water that’s polluted with chlorinated products.


“The third tank, in addition to the nutrients, we add bacteria. And those bacteria were shown to
degrade the chlorinated products, so we are hoping that it would speed up and also complete the
process to the end where we are hoping to see no contaminant at all.”


What Ross is demonstrating is “Green Chemistry.” Also known as Green Technology, the
concept is simple – instead of creating brand new chemicals, it’s becoming increasingly possible
to use the chemicals and processes already available in nature. The thought is that naturally
occurring compounds will be less harmful than the ones that we invent in the lab.


There are two streams of green chemistry – one is using environmentally conscious principles in
the production of new products and processes – water based paints and fuel produced from corn
are a couple of examples. Nathalie Ross is demonstrating the other stream – using naturally
occurring substances and biological agents such as bacteria to clean up the pollution we’ve already
created.


Jim Nicell is doing similar work. He’s an associate professor in the Department of Civil
Engineering at McGill University in Montreal. He’s working with enzymes that will clean up
toxic waste. He’s found a surprisingly ordinary source of the enzymes – a piece of horseradish
root.


“You can take your horseradish, put it in a blender, get the horseradish sauce if you want and
have it for supper. But before you do that, squeeze out the juice which is pretty awful, raw,
smelly stuff, which actually has a high concentration of this enzyme. I literally took that juice
and added some hydrogen peroxide and into a solution that contained some pretty toxic materials
and they just precipitate out. And so with a very small quantity of this enzyme we can actually
have a major impact on reducing the toxicity of that waste.”


The simplicity of Green Chemistry has been gradually attracting the attention of scientists and industry over
the past fifteen years. In terms of scientific developments, it’s still pretty young. But it’s a
concept that makes a lot of sense to Nicell.


“Nature is a whole lot smarter than we are. It’s had a lot more time than we’ve had to optimize
the way things are carried out. Now, we have a whole bunch of industrial catalysts that we have
made in the past but we don’t have nearly the time or, I guess, the capability, the experimental
setup that nature has had to produce the optimal catalysts.”


It might seem like an ideal solution, but critics say we need to be careful. One of the concerns
which has been raised is ecological balance – whenever large quantities of any substance are
released, even natural ones, there is often a risk that we’ll change the environment in ways we
don’t want to.


Brian McCarry is a scientist with the Department of Chemistry at McMaster University in
Hamilton, Ontario. He says, despite that concern, we shouldn’t be overly worried.


“They’re natural organisms, they’re not pathogenic. I don’t think they’re going to disrupt the
balance of nature. They’re not like putting in some really vigorous organism that takes over.
These are also not mutant, genetically engineered organisms so I don’t think anybody should be
terribly worried about having all sorts of strange genetic material floating around that are now
going to get into the ecosystem and run amok.”


There’s one other big concern about Green Chemistry: the cost. Both Nathalie Ross’s water
project and Jim Nicell’s horseradish experiments are still in the early stages. It’s not clear yet
whether it will be cost effective for large-scale industrial applications. But given the benefits of
green chemistry, advocates hope that the value of using the simple answers nature offers will also
be considered, not just the cost.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Victoria Fenner.

Related Links

Region Deals With Deadly Nerve Agent

The Army wants to get rid of its stockpiles of chemical weapons because they fear terrorists might get to them. There are eight Army sites across the U.S. that store those kinds of chemicals. At one site in the Midwest, the military is planning to dispose of Nerve Agent VX. To destroy the stockpiles, the Army must first “water-down” the nerve agent. Then it has to be shipped to a company that disposes of industrial wastes. But while the Army says it’s making neighborhoods safer near where the chemical weapons are stored … some people fear having the watered-down nerve agent trucked into their neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports:

Transcript

The Army wants to get rid of its stockpiles of chemical weapons because they fear terrorists might get to them. There are eight Army sites across the U.S. that store those kinds of chemicals. At one site in the Midwest, the military is planning to dispose of Nerve Agent VX. To destroy the stockpiles, the Army must first “water-down” the nerve agent. Then it has to be shipped to a company that disposes of industrial wastes. But while the Army says it’s making neighborhoods safer near where the chemical weapons are stored, some people fear having the watered-down nerve agent trucked into their neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports:


Nerve Agent VX is a clear, odorless liquid with the consistency of motor oil. It was
accidentally created during the Korean War, when British chemists were experimenting
with various concoctions meant to kill lice on North Korean POW’s and refugees. Nerve
Agent VX kills within minutes after contact with the skin. It has never been used in
combat by the United States. Instead, most of the country’s supply sits in a highly-
guarded tank at the Newport Chemical Depot in west-central Indiana. In 1985, Congress
ordered the chemical weapons destroyed because many seemed obsolete. In 1997, the
United States joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits countries from
developing, producing, stockpiling or using chemical weapons.


Then, as U.S. Army spokesperson Terry Arthur explains, terrorists slammed planes into
the World Trade Center towers:


“After September 11th, 2001, because the public suddenly became aware of the possibility
for terrorism here in the United States, folks living near the stockpiles became acutely
aware of that. And the army began to look at ways to accelerate destruction of the
stockpiles.”


The Army is planning to burn some of its chemical weapons in incinerators. The Nerve
Agent VX that’s stored in Newport, Indiana will be destroyed through a neutralization
process. That’s a process that makes the nerve agent no more harmful than a household
drain cleaner.


(Ambient sound fade up)


The watered-down version of the nerve agent is called hydrolysate. It will be shipped by
tanker truck to Perma-Fix Environmental Services, a company in Dayton, Ohio. It’s a
company that usually handles industrial wastes and used oils.


“If you get your oil changed anywhere at a service station near the Dayton, Ohio area,
chances are, the used oil from your vehicle ends up here.”


That’s company Vice President Tom Trebonik. He says the hydrolysate will, simply put,
be broken down by a natural process. It will be eaten by microscopic bugs. And then it
breaks down even more into a form that will be pumped into the sewer system.


But, once word of a “nerve agent” coming to town spread around the small, poor
neighborhood near the plant, environmentalists began working with residents to voice
opposition to its disposal. They tacked up signs in the local supermarket and carry-out
that read “Deadly VX Nerve Agent” is coming to the neighborhood.


(Nat sound)


Martha Chatterton is a young mother of one with another child on the way. She lives in a
small house in a decaying area. Her husband fixes cars in the garage out back. They’re
glued to the news on CNN about heightened terror alerts. They know terrorist attacks are
a possibility. But they don’t want a problem from Indiana shipped to their backyard.


Chatterton is worried about the health effects of living near a plant that deals with such
industrial wastes. She says some days the air is orange and smells of a chemical stew.


“Well, last year we did the whole yard with roses and different flowers, and about a week
after we planted them, all of them died. So there’s got… there’s something wrong with
the ground here, because when I dug the hole for the rose tree, it smelled like gas fumes.”


Chatterton fears Perma-Fix won’t be able to properly handle the hydrolysate. The
company was cited in 2001 for odor violation but has since installed equipment to solve
the problem. Beyond that, the U.S. EPA and the Army see no reason why the treated
nerve agent can’t be trucked into town. Again, Army spokesperson Terry Arthur:


“We understand the concern of the public because it’s derived from a chemical agent.
What we want them to understand is that we have truckers who will be dedicated and
trained specifically for hauling this product and getting it across the state line to the Ohio
facility, where experts have been working with this kind of material for years.”


With the threat of terrorism, there’s little that’s likely to slow the pace of the destruction
of the nerve agent. The risks of leaving it intact seem greater than the risks associated
with destroying it.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Natalie Walston.