[PEN-L:28653] Re: The perils of trying to heal the rift

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

ken hanly wrote:

> The report warns that dioxins and furans might concentrate in vegetables
> such as cucumbers and in cattle munching grass grown on land fertilized with
> sewage biosolids. "It is recommended at this time that biosolids application
> not be permitted on land used to grow plants of the cucumber family or on
> grazing lands," the UBC report concludes.
This article is not so much an warning against trying to overcome the
metabolic rift, but a reminder of how paper mills, etc. are threats to
our health under the capitalist system.

----

The New York Times
May 21, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final

E.P.A. Seeks Cut in Paper-Mill Pollution, but Not Elimination

After years of study, the Environmental Protection Agency has
recommended new rules that will require paper mills to reduce greatly
their emissions of dioxins and other toxic chemicals into the water and
air, at an estimated cost of $1.4 billion.

The agency rejected even tighter and more expensive standards, finding
that the added pollution reductions would not be worth the extra
expense, Clinton Administration officials said. The decision by the
E.P.A. Administrator, Carol M. Browner, which is expected to be sent to
the White House for final review this week, is already being denounced
by environmental groups that for years have been seeking more stringent
measures than the ones the agency chose.

The critics say the agency's approach, by encouraging paper mills to
install equipment that reduces most, but not all, of its pollution, will
only delay the time when the industry's waste waters become essentially
pollution free.

In the meantime, they say, American Indian tribes, poor people and
others who feed on fish caught in streams below paper mills will
continue to be exposed to unsafe levels of chemicals that are implicated
in a variety of illnesses and developmental problems.

(snip)

The E.P.A. has calculated that the approach it has chosen will reduce
the discharges of DIOXINS and FURANS from all pulp mills by 91 percent
from today's levels. Adding a requirement for oxygen delignification,
the agency estimated, would have cost an extra $1.3 billion and cut 93
percent of the pollutants. Eliminating chlorine and its compounds from
the process altogether would have cost $4 billion and eliminated all the
principal pollutants.

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org