mirror of
https://github.com/nhammer514/textfiles-politics.git
synced 2024-12-28 00:39:23 -05:00
52 lines
3.3 KiB
Plaintext
52 lines
3.3 KiB
Plaintext
DUMPING OUR TOXIC WASTES ON THE THIRD WORLD
|
||
|
||
Exporting hazardous and toxic wastes to Third World countries is
|
||
a growth industry. The exported material includes heavy metal residues
|
||
and chemical-contaminated wastes, pharmaceutical refuse, and municipal
|
||
sewage sludge and incinerator ash. The risks involved for countries
|
||
that accept our wastes range from contamination of groundwater and
|
||
crops to birth defects and cancer.
|
||
Traditionally, the majority of U.S. toxic waste exports have gone
|
||
to Canada where regulations are less stringent than in the U.S. But
|
||
now the most abrupt increase is in shipments to the Third World where
|
||
the regulations are either nonexistent or sketchily enforced.
|
||
Creating the search for new overseas markets is an explosion in
|
||
the volume of recorded hazardous wastes beng produced in the U.S.
|
||
According to the General Accounting Office, the amount rose from about
|
||
9 million metric tons in 1970 to at least 247 million in 1984; other
|
||
experts place the current figure close to 400 millon metric tons.
|
||
U.S. officials, aware of the sensitive legal and foreign policy
|
||
questions involved, are reluctant to crack down on illegal dumpers
|
||
and, in fact, the government itself is reponsible for generating a
|
||
significant portion of the hazardous waste exports. One large illegal
|
||
operation broken up last year received more than half its toxic wastes
|
||
from various branches of the Federal government, mainly the military.
|
||
Some examples of what is happening as discovered by the authors
|
||
using court records, interviews, and the Freedom of Information Act:
|
||
Philadelphia is planning to ship 600,000 tons of ash residue a
|
||
year from its municipal incinerator to Panama which plans to use the
|
||
materials as landfill for roadbeds;
|
||
U.S. sludge may end up in the tiny British Caribbean colony of
|
||
Turks and Caicos Islands which proposes to use it as fertilizer;
|
||
L.P.T., a company with offices in American Samoa and California,
|
||
is seeking approval to build an incinerator in American Samoa to burn
|
||
U.S. wastes and export the ash to the Philippines where it would be
|
||
used as landfill;
|
||
Western Pacific Waste Repositories, based in Carson City, Nevada,
|
||
is poposing to build a hazardous waste storage and treatment plant on
|
||
Erikub atoll, an unhinhabited area of the Marshall Islands.
|
||
The key U.S. government officials responsible for monitoring
|
||
waste traffic claim they are powerless. "Under the federal system, we
|
||
only have control over what's in the country," says Wendy Grieder, an
|
||
official in the EPA's Office of International Activities. "Once it
|
||
leaves, we can't do anything about it."
|
||
Finally, exported wastes may return to haunt us in a very direct
|
||
way. "It's possible that we could send sludge to the Caribbean and
|
||
they might use it on, say, spinach or other vegetables," warned
|
||
Grieder. And since the Food and Drug Administation checks only a
|
||
small portion of foods and vegetables that come into the U.S.,
|
||
exported hazardous wastes could easily end up on our dinner table.
|
||
|
||
SOURCE: THE NATION, 10/3/87 "The Export of U.S. Toxic Wastes," by
|
||
Andrew Porterfield and David Weir, pp front cover, 341-344.
|
||
|