INDEX PCB Digest - 5/30/02
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1) The Globe and Mail - 5/29/02
Canada slips behind U.S. on pollution control
2) The Mirror - Serving Black River-Matheson
Communities - 5/24/02 - Front Page
NO TOXIC WASTE – RESPECT THE NORTH
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1) The Globe and Mail - 5/29/02
Canada slips behind U.S. on pollution control
Canadian Press
Wednesday, May 29 – Online Edition, Posted at
2:04 PM EST
Ottawa — Canada fared significantly worse than
the United States in controlling toxic pollution in recent years, a
NAFTA report indicates.
Even though chemical releases remain large in both
countries, totalling 3.4 million tonnes in 1999, emissions in
the United States were falling, while those in Canada were rising.
Toxic releases declined 6 per cent in the United
States from 1995 to 1999 while Canadian emissions rose 6 per cent,
says the report, released Wednesday by the NAFTA Commission for
Environmental Co-operation.
The figures reflect a strengthening of U.S.
regulations under the administration of Bill Clinton, particularly
amendments to the Clean Air Act, and a weakening of Canadian rules,
Mark Winfield of the Pembina Institute in Alberta said.
"To the degree that any progress has been shown,
it's on the U.S. side," Mr. Winfield said in an interview.
"Over the study period, the United States has been moving
forward on a number of regulatory things, whereas we were standing
still or in fact weakening regulations in many of the provinces."
Industrial pollution in Ontario increased more than
that of any other province or state, and it retained its ranking as
the fourth-worst polluting jurisdiction in Canada and the United States.
Ontario reported a 19-per-cent increase in releases
and transfers of chemicals while a number of other high-pollution
jurisdictions — such as Texas and Alabama — achieved
substantial declines.
Safety-Kleen in the southern Ontario community of
Corunna, Ont., was the facility with the largest increase in chemical
releases and transfers in North America during the period.
Overall, toxic pollution from the two countries
registered a 3-per-cent decline during the five years from 1995 to 1999.
"A lot of effort is going into reducing the
pollution, but we don't seem to be making much headway," Janine
Ferretti, executive director of the Commission for Environmental
Co-operation, said in an interview. "In fact we seem to be
treading water."
In 1999, polluters released almost 223,999 tonnes of
chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.
They also released 13,000 tonnes of chemicals known to
damage the ozone layer.
Electric utilities were the biggest source of toxic
releases, with coal-fired electricity plants in Ontario among the
culprits. Ottawa has long been pressing the province to clean them up.
Total air emissions in the two countries declined by
25 per cent during the five-year period, but that was offset by
increased discharges to rivers, lakes, landfill sites and underground sites.
Ms. Ferretti said it is not known why companies are
disposing of more waste chemicals in water and land rather than in
the air, and the question deserves investigation.
"We're making a great effort in one area, and
this is being offset," she said. "Are we really making
progress, or are we involved in some kind of shell game, just
switching the medium around?"
Mr. Winfield said there has been a big increase in
chemicals sent to Canadian landfill sites, and this reflects weaker
regulations in Canada compared with the United States.
The report is the most comprehensive inventory of
pollution in North America, covering 210 chemicals for which there
are comparable U.S. and Canadian figures. It doesn't cover Mexico or
small sources such as cars.
It has been published for the past five years, partly
in the hope that publicly identifying big polluters will embarrass
them into improving their performance, or better arm citizens to
press for improvement.
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2) The Mirror - Serving Black River-Matheson
Communities - 5/24/02 - Front Page
NO TOXIC WASTE – RESPECT THE NORTH
By Ruth Anthony
“It’s an antiquated system.” That is
how Dr. Neil Carman described the proposed toxic waste incinerator
that Bennett Environmental wants to build near a residential area in
Kirkland Lake.
About one hundred people from Cochrane to Cobalt
gathered at the Hembruff Civic Centre on May 16 for an information
session about PCB’s, dioxins and how they can safely be
destroyed. The local group R.A.I.N. (Recycling and Investing in
Nature), in partnership with Public Concern Temiskaming (PCT),
welcomed Dr. Neil Carman, formerly with the Environmental Protection
Agency in the USA, now working with the Sierra Club. R.A.I.N. member
Merv Anthony opened the meeting by introducing Joe Gold of PCT who
said that this project will damage our children and our
grandchildren. He said that we must defend our way of life and our
very survival, as our governments cannot be counted on to look out
for us.
Dr. Richard Denton, former mayor of Kirkland Lake,
said that thirty-six doctors in Temiskaming oppose the incinerator
because it is a public health issue. He said that Murphy’s Law
promises that accidents happen, despite all of the promises from
Bennett Environmental, and that incinerators like this just don’t
go in residential areas. The theme repeated through the evening was
that dangerous chemicals fall on the ground, are ingested by us and
by the animals we eat, are concentrated in fat, and later result in
birth defects, behaviour problems, and later cancers and leukemias.
Dr. Carman said that when he worked for EPA in Texas
inspecting these incinerators, every single incinerator had problems,
often malfunctioning at night or on weekends, due to electical,
computer or control system glitches or operator error, causing the
shutdown of critical systems. He repeatedly referred to the sacrifice
zone around an incinerator where the levels of contamination are
always too high. In the sacrifice zone around an incinerator in
Jacksonville, Arkansas which operated for only one year, everyone in
the neighbourhood had high levels of dioxins in their blood.”No
one is safe, not even thirty, forty or fifty miles from the
incinerator.,” said Dr. Carman.
PCB’s (polychlorinated biphenols) have not been
produced since 1977 because they were found to be so dangerous to our
health. For over fifty years before that they were considered
harmless and were dumped into the soil, so there are thousands of
‘hot spots’ around North America and Mexico that need to be
cleaned up. As a result of this dumping, there are persistent low
levels of PCB’s found around the world. These levels are higher
in cold regions because they are condensed out of the air and as a
result Polar bears have high levels in their blood, as do whales in
the oceans. Because humans are at the top of the food chain, the
levels become concentrated and a breast-fed baby gets the highest
dose of its lifetime. Dr. Carman said that kids pay the biggest price
in cancers and leukemias which often occur in clusters around hot
spots like Aniston, Alabama where Monsanto produced PCB’s
(insulating oils for transformers) and Agent Orange pesticides. The
employees of that community were poisoned and the dioxins are still
there fifty years later. When Agent Orange was sprayed in Viet Nam at
minute levels of only three or four parts per million, mothers
exposed to even these low levels produced infants with terrible birth
defects. It also caused sterility and other health problems. A
hospital there still has jars filled with deformed fetuses caused by
Agent Orange, proof that hormonal and reproductive systems are
disrupted by dioxins.
Dr. Carman said that we must stop putting these
chemicals into our atmosphere. When PCB’s are heated, the
chemical formation breaks apart, forming dioxins. There are
seventy-five different dioxins, depending on the number of chlorine
atoms and where they are attached to the benzene atoms. Benzene is
one of the first recognized cancer-causing agents. All PCB’s and
dioxins are PBT’s –Persistent, Bioaccumulative and Toxic.
Persistent because they can survive in our bodies for our lifetime,
in nature for decades, and they can migrate in nature, being blown
around by the wind. Bioaccumulative because little bits of them in
the environment are taken up by feeding fish or moose or beef, are
concentrated in their fat and then are passed on to whoever eats
their flesh. A cow is a giant accumulator and can build up levels to
twenty-five million times above the initial level of contamination,
then pass it on to humans through its milk or meat. Toxic because
these substances are very toxic at extremely low concentrations.
But there is a way around this problem of destroying
the toxic waste. PCB’s can be safely broken down at room
temperature using a solution of catalytic agents. A process developed
at Princeton University and patented in 1994 breaks down PCB’s
and generates chlorine and hydrochloric acid that can be sold and
used. The biphenols that are left are less toxic and can be treated
and degraded. Truck mounted technologies can do on-site destruction
so the waste does not have to be transported. If a truck transporting
these wastes were to burn anywhere along the route to the
incinerator, “the contamination would be catastrophic”, and
accidents do happen along Highway 11. However, these safe
technologies are more costly, and as one person at the meeting
suggested, the incinerator owners belong to the B.M.and G. club. They
take our Blood and our Money (property values plummet so no one can
afford to move away) for their Greed. The U.S. Army and the Japanese
government have approved alternate technologies.
According to Dr. Carman, with incinerators everything
that goes in and everything that comes out is considered toxic and
must still be disposed of in toxic landfills. Meanwhile, all of the
workers have high levels of exposure to dioxins because the plants
are operated at full capacity to maximize profits. Carman said that
no machine, even of new manufacture is built to work that hard, and
according to Mr. Danny Ponn of Bennett Environmental some parts of
their incinerator will be previously used. Dr. Carman also said that
every incinerator he knows of has had catastrophic breakdowns and
that is why thousands of them are being shut down in the USA as the
government there enforces more stringent controls and lower
acceptable levels of these toxins. Meanwhile, the acceptable levels
are much higher in Canada so more of this material will come here
where incinerator operators can get away with more. “ The
smartest way to control this is to stop the permit” which would
allow the construction of the incinerator.
Chief McKenzie of the Wahgoshig First Nation told the
group that the incinerator will affect all of us and that his people
will not stand for it. Paul Chokomolin of Wahgoshig said that this is
another case of big business picking on all of us. This incinerator
will affect us for generations to come, and especially those who live
off the land. The First Nations support everyone in saying no. “I
will support you even by blocking roads, which I’m good
at.” said Mr. Chokomolin.
Chuck Angus of Cobalt, member of PCT, ended the
evening by performing his song made famous during the Adams Mine
blockade and protests. It tells those who would pollute out northland
that although they may already have taken our silver, our gold, our
white pine, our free-flowing rivers for hydro and our youth to work
in the south, they will not take our watershed.
All participants in the session agreed that we must
actively oppose these schemes to use our beautiful country as a dump.
Write to your Provincial Government, the Ministry of the Environment
to oppose the issuing of the necessary permits to Bennnett
Environmental. Help to support R.A.I.N. and PCT in their struggle to
keep the north clean for our children and their future.
NO TOXIC WASTE RESPECT THE NORTH
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PCB Digest
http://members.fortunecity.com/toxic/
PCB Information
http://www21.brinkster.com/nopcb/