Rachel’s News #186, June 20, 1990 (Revised)

When Love Canal broke into headlines in 1978, American manufacturers must have suffered nightmare visions of themselves noosed up to lamp posts by vigilante mobs. Better than anyone else they knew what poisons they had been dumping into holes in the ground (or in near-by creeks) for the past twenty years. AND THEY ALSO KNEW THEY COULDN’T STOP DOING IT ANYTIME SOON. The present generation of manufacturing plants is based upon inefficient technologies that produce enormous quantities of waste, and not much can be done about that until America rebuilds its factories, which happens once every 50 years or so. Until a new industrial apparatus can be constructed, based upon closed-loop technology with zero discharge as its design goal, the old plants will continue spewing industrial poisons into the environment. [Any given plant can make the change anytime the managers decide to spend the money, but without pressure, they’ll wait 50 years.]

Meanwhile, manufacturers in 1978 faced this serious problem: With thousands of dumps being discovered each year, and with manufacturing wastes being created at an accelerating pace (the rate of waste production increases at a steady 6% per year, which means that total waste production is doubling every 12 years–see REHN #149), how could industry survive decades of confrontation with a newly-awakened, and outraged, public? How could industry finesse all the poisoning that had gone on, and at the same time keep pumping out new poisons at an accelerating pace? The public might be gullible, but were they really that gullible?

Luckily, Congress came to the rescue almost immediately by creating the Superfund law and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Superfund was to find “solutions” to old dumps, and RCRA was to assure the orderly creation of new ones.

Starting in 1980, Superfund created a brand new “site remediation” industry, which now spends roughly $2 billion per year and employs thousands of engineers and lawyers who spend their lives conducting technical studies and debates that go on for years (literally). The debates are, for the most part, conducted behind closed doors; the public is excluded; periodically, a public relations flak for the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) (or for the state regulatory agency) emerges and holds a press conference to assure the public that “cleanup” is proceeding apace and all is well in the republic. “Cleanup” is never defined; the Superfund program still has no official answer to the question, “How clean is clean?” Meanwhile, across town a different group of EPA scientists (or state agency scientists) are closeted behind polished doors with a small cadre of industrial lawyers, putting the finishing touches on a new RCRA permit which allows the creation of yet another “state
of the art” landfill or deepwell-injection hole. Or, as an alternative, the regulatory officials are signing off on a new scheme to dump chemical wastes into the local sewers (which is perfectly legal and entirely exempt from RCRA control), or are sanctioning the shipment of hazardous wastes to a cement kiln or to some other RCRA-exempt incinerator which was never designed for destruction of hazardous wastes.

America’s manufacturers can now sleep peacefully, secure in the knowledge that very few of them will ever be brought to justice for their past crimes (though they may be suffocated by paperwork), and they can continue dumping into pits, ponds, lagoons, landfills, or deep holes in the ground because the RCRA process has made it all perfectly legal and has deflected public outrage. While Superfund and RCRA have accomplished some good by raising awareness of these problems, they have also built a wall of government sponge around the guilty parties, insulating them from direct confrontation with the affected publics. At the few public meetings that ARE held, industrial decision-makers are not required to appear; it’s the regulatory officials who face the public, take the heat on behalf of industry, and officially explain why it’s got to be this way. (After a few years of loyal service as a lightning rod for public outrage, those regulatory officials will be invited to pass thro
ugh the revolving door where they will be rewarded with cushy, safe jobs inside the industries they have “regulated” so faithfully, and a new generation of youngsters will be hired by government to face the angry public, to explain away the permitting of new sources of poisoning, and to finesse the nearly-universal failure to clean up old dumps in a timely fashion).

Is this a paranoid fiction we have manufactured? Not at all. It is the way the nation’s hazardous waste system actually works today. Since 1980, with more than $7 billion spent, fewer than 50 Superfund sites have actually been cleaned up. And in the intervening 12 years since Love Canal was discovered, American industry has pumped out a total amount of toxic waste equal to all of the toxic waste created prior to Love Canal (during the period from 1830 to 1978). The vast majority of wastes created since Love Canal has been placed (perfectly legally) in landfills, or deep-well injected, or dumped down a sewer (another perfectly legal means of disposal), or has been sent as fuel to an incinerator that was never meant to handle hazardous waste– another perfectly legal means of disposal which EPA calls “recycling.” Throughout the decade, armies of scientists, engineers, and lawyers have gotten wealthy by wringing their hands, scowling into the cameras and intoning, “These are ver
y complex problems, which the public is not able to understand, but believe us, all the regulations are being met and everything is under control.” Meantime, the public is in fact not able to understand what’s going on because there’s so much razzle-dazzle, so many deals being cut behind-the-scenes, and so much fancy footwork by all the highly paid scientists and lawyers and EPA flaks. ALL OF THE PUBLIC IS AFFECTED BY WHAT’S GOING ON, BUT MOST OF THE PUBLIC STILL DOESN’T KNOW IT YET. Those members of the public who do know they are affected have turned out in droves and they have become the Movement for Environmental Justice (though many of them may not even know they’re part of something larger–they’re often just focused on trying to stop the company down the block from spewing glop into their drinking water).

If you don’t believe this picture of reality is overly cynical, take a careful look at an excellent video called TESTING THE WATERS, cited in our last paragraph, below. This video examines the process that started in 1978 for cleaning up the Niagara River, near Love Canal. Cleanup of the Niagara River is important. The Niagara is a short river with tremendous flow (200,000 cubic feet per second) because it connects Lake Erie with Lake Ontario. It is also an important river because twenty- five percent of all Canadians (including everyone in Toronto, Canada’s second-largest city) take their drinking water from Lake Ontario. All together, some 5 million people (Americans and Canadians) take their drinking water either directly from the Niagara River or from Lake Ontario, below the Niagara.

The Niagara River is known to most of us because it’s the site of Niagara Falls, a romantic symbol of America’s power and promise. What many of us don’t know is that about a mile above the falls on the American side, there’s a huge industrial complex–a cluster of enormous chemical factories–that began to grow in the 1890s and continued building throughout this century. The industry grew there because the site offered cheap hydroelectric power and a convenient place to dump chemical wastes.

It was the owners of this industrial complex who created Love Canal and 65 other huge chemical dumps along the banks of the Niagara River. The Niagara River hosts the greatest concentration of toxic dumps anywhere on the North American continent. Love Canal is not even the biggest of them–it is just the most famous. The Hyde Park dump contains 80,000 tons of toxins, compared to Love Canal’s 20,000 tons. The S site contains 70,000 tons; the 102nd Street Site contains 80,000 tons; and all stand within a few hundred yards of the river.

Now decisions are being made in the name of cleaning up the Niagara area. Here lessons will be learned and precedents will be set for the rest of the country, which is why this video is such an important teaching tool. If offers us a crystal ball into the future of Superfund cleanups, and into the continued production of industrial poisons.

[To be continued next week.]

Get: TESTING THE WATERS produced by Lynn Corcoran. Educational version (an hour-long video in three 20-minute segments designed for classroom use) from Bullfrog Films, Oley, PA 19547; phone (800) 543-3764. $350 purchase or $75 rental for schools and citizen groups. An outstanding piece of work. –Peter Montague

Descriptor terms: niagara river; hazardous waste system; epa; rcra; superfund; remedial action; canada; love canal; hyde park, ny; landfilling; lake ontario; zero discharge; chemical industry; lynn corcoran; groundwater;

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Rachel’s News was published by Environmental Research Foundation (E.R.F.) from 1986 to 2009. All together, 1000 issues appeared. Unless otherwise noted, they were written by Peter Montague.

Over the years the name of the publication changed slightly, starting as “Hazardous Waste News,” then “Rachel’s Hazardous Waste News,” then “Rachel’s Environment & Health News” and finally “Rachel’s Democracy & Health News.” In this archive, we have simply used “Rachel’s News.”

E.R.F. changed its location over the years from Princeton, N.J., to Washington, D.C. to Annapolis, Md. and finally to New Brunswick, N.J.

To contact E.R.F. or Peter Montague, send email to pm8525@gmail.com.