Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) celebrated its 40th birthday. And as we have already pointed out, the EPA should be given mad props for all the good work they have done. Among other accomplishments via thankyouepa.com, the EPA has reduced more than 60 percent of the dangerous air pollutants. It has prevented 18 million children from suffering from respiratory disease. And the agency has prevented 205,000 premature American deaths by cleaning up the land and air.

But as the Erin Brockovich types among us might note, the work of cleaning up the Earth is never done. After all, cleaning up after 304 million or so Americans requires some vigilance and extra elbow grease. So here’s a look at seven problems on which we’d like to shine a bright light.

Chromium-6 Is Widespread in US Tap Water
Speaking of Erin Brockovich – did you know that Chromium-6, or hexavalent chromium, is actually a common ingredient in American water? Chromium-6 was the chemical that poisoned residents in the Brockovich case. In fact, as many as 31 of 35 major American cities carry the chemical in their water system. As the Environmental Working Group (EWG) points out, “In all, water samples from 25 cities contained the toxic metal at concentrations above the safe maximum recently proposed by California regulators.” Luckily, just after the EWG made this announcement, the EPA issued a plan to help water facilities deal with this problem.

Chesapeake Bay Phosphorus Pollution Worsens
The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States and is now plagued with dead zones. Why? Because it serves as the dumping ground for large amounts of phosphorus, nitrogen and sediment from the six states that feed into the bay. These deposits choke oxygen and deplete life from the water. The EPA has urged states to develop plans to cut back on deposits, but the EWG notes that most of the plans are seriously deficient. As the EWG points out, “sufficient reasonable assurance that pollution controls identified could actually be implemented to achieve the nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment reduction targets by 2017 or 2025.”

Chemicals Are Still Common in Beauty Products
Phthalates, triclosan, parabens and more are still prevalent in beauty products. As the EWG points out, “studies link these chemicals to potential health effects including cancer and hormone disruption.” Teenagers are particularly influenced by these chemicals at a time when their bodies are most venerable, as they tend to use more beauty products than adults. As the EWG urges, “The federal government must set comprehensive safety standards for cosmetics and other personal care product.”

Protections Rolled Back as Western Drilling Surges
Oil and natural gas companies are drilling at higher rates than ever before in the American west, often leaving toxic chemicals, tainted water, and clawed-out landscapes in their wake. But the companies are exempt from most major federal environmental laws. As the EWG points out, oil and gas drillers enjoy waivers “under the Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Superfund, the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.” Experts predict drilling will only increase as gas and oil prices rise.

California Chemical Makers Get a Boost
In 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed two bills that would eliminate toxic chemicals as the “inevitable byproduct of industrial production, lowering the risk of exposure to synthetic chemicals for California’s people and the environment.” But recently, the California Department of Toxics Substances Control (DTSC) issued a whole new set of regulations that essentially “gut” the Green Chemistry program – leaving it worse off than before.

Mercury in the Air and Food Chain Is Still Prominent
All fifty states have fish-consumption advisories due to mercury in fish. The EPA doesn’t have standards for the coal-fired plants that produce most of the mercury. As The New York Times points out, “Scientists know that coal-burning power plants, industrial boilers, cement kilns and other facilities produce much of the mercury in the environment.”

EPA Denies Petition to Ban Lead in Fishing Gear
Recently, a petition was brought to the EPA to ban the manufacturing, use and processing of lead in fishing gear. The EPA denied it on the basis that “petitioners have not demonstrated that the requested rule is necessary to protect against an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment, as required by the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).” The petition was brought in part by the American Bird Conservancy.

Images: compujeramey, idhren, bensonkua

The post 7 Things We Can’t Believe the EPA Dropped the Ball On appeared first on EcoSalon.

When the peace of a community is shattered by man-made disaster – an oil spill, a toxic gas leak, a nuclear meltdown – a scar is left that may fade with passing decades but will never fully heal. While some may be able to clean up and return to a sense of normalcy, others stand fenced-off and unchanged like a silent memorial. Located around the globe, these seven catastrophic environmental disasters have had a profound effect upon the earth and local residents that continues today, as many as 50 years later.

Love Canal Community Contamination

In the late 1950s, the little neighborhood of Love Canal, New York seemed idyllic. Located just miles from the picturesque Niagara Falls, the land was purchased by the city from Hooker Chemical Company for a dollar. It was worth much less. The residents of the neighborhood’s 100 newly constructed homes had no idea that they were living atop one big hazardous chemical dumping ground.

But the consequences of building homes and a school where over 21,000 tons of toxic waste lurked just beneath the surface became all too clear by the 1970s with shockingly high rates of miscarriages, birth defects, cancer and nervous disorders. Resident Lois Gibbs led a campaign to uncover the cause, and a federal health emergency was declared, demolishing houses and relocating more than 800 families.

As a result of the tragedy, the Superfund Act was passed by Congress to hold polluters responsible for severe environmental damage. In 2004, Love Canal was finally declared clean, though most of the neighborhood remains abandoned – even though hundreds of similar toxic Superfund sites still sit waiting for their turn.

Three Mile Island Nuclear Meltdown

March 28, 1979 marked the beginning of a three-day series of “mechanical, electrical and human failures” that produced a catastrophic meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility in Pennsylvania.

Though the radiation released wasn’t significant enough to cause a public health crisis, the accident brought a general lack of oversight and emergency response planning in the nuclear power industry to light and led to a huge spike in local opposition to the construction of new nuclear power plants.

Cleanup and decontamination of the Three Mile Island accident site cost $975 million and wasn’t completed until 1993. Today, Three Mile Island is still in operation, though the generating station involved in the meltdown is no longer used. A radiation leak was investigated in November 2009, but federal officials say there was no threat to public safety.

Minamata Mercury Poisoning

It’s not common knowledge amongst Westerners, but the Minamata mercury incident in Japan was severe enough to get a disease named after it. A chemical company called Chisso Corporation disposed of thousands of tons of industrial wastewater containing methyl mercury in the town of Minamata from 1908 to 1968, which poisoned the local population through consumption of contaminated seafood.

What’s now known as Minamata Disease was discovered in 1956, when clusters of victims in fishing hamlets along the bay came forward with strange symptoms. Severe cases of the disease led to paralysis, insanity, coma and death within weeks of symptoms first appearing. Similar effects were seen in local animals like cats and birds.

Over 2,265 victims have been officially certified by the Japanese government – 1,784 of whom have died – but over 17,000 people have applied for certification. Chisso Corporation, which stopped using mercury in 1969, has spent $86 million compensating over 10,000 victims and was ordered to clean up the contamination in 2004.


Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill

Who can forget the Exxon-Valdez oil spill? 11 million gallons of sticky black crude oil fouled the pristine Prince William Sound in Alaska on March 23rd, 1989 after a tanker crashed into an iceberg as the captain napped. While it’s far from the largest oil spill in history, it caused the most environmental damage, and images of wildlife suffocating in oil hit the public hard.

10,000 workers spent four summers cleaning up 1,400 miles of coastline, and recent images of Prince William Sound seem to show total recovery. But swaths of oil are still buried just beneath the surface of many beaches and many species affected by the spill are still struggling. If there’s one positive thing that came out of this disaster, it’s the federal Oil Pollution Act, which changed critical industry practices and standards to prevent similar damage from subsequent spills.

Bhopal Gas Leak

The death toll may be as high as 35,000 and the nightmare still continues for victims of one of the most horrendous environmental disasters of all time. Half a million residents of Bhopal, India were poisoned on December 3rd, 1984 when the Union-Carbide pesticide manufacturing plant released extremely volatile methyl isocyanate gas and other toxins into the air due to lax safety standards and budget cuts. Bodies lined the streets and thousands more suffered agony, blindness and permanent health problems.

Many survivors unwittingly passed Bhopal’s legacy to their own children in the form of congenital defects, but that’s not the only way the incident still haunts the population. Union Carbide – now owned by Dow Chemical Company – never cleaned up the contamination and the factory site continues to leak deadly chemicals into the air, soil and water.  The company has eluded charges of culpable homicide in Bhopal for over 20 years.

TVA Coal Sludge Spill

America’s worst man-made environmental disaster occurred on December 22nd, 2008 at the Kingston Tennessee Valley Authority power plant as 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic coal sludge burst over a dam wall, invading the Emory River and 400 acres of nearby homes and farmland.

Coal ash, a waste product, contains arsenic and potentially carcinogenic heavy metals, yet is not regulated by the EPA. That was supposed to change within a year of the spill, but the agency has delayed action. Meanwhile, experts say the spill could have severe lasting health effects for area residents.

TVA estimated that it would have all 2.4 million cubic yards out of the area by 2013, but announced in March 2010 that a complete cleanup is “technologically impossible.”

Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster

Nobody knows exactly how many people died as a result of the catastrophic nuclear meltdown at the Chernobyl Power Plant in Ukraine on April 26th, 1986. Officials count 56 direct fatalities and 4,000 cancer deaths, but these estimates are likely on the low side. 1,100 buses evacuated area residents the day the accident occurred, but they had already been exposed to radiation that was high enough to set off alarms in Sweden.

Today, the adjacent city of Pripyat is a disturbing ghost town full of rusting metal, peeling paint and evidence of lives seemingly abandoned in mid-step. Gas masks and baby dolls litter the hallways of a school, clothes still flutter in the wind on a clothesline at an apartment complex.  The displaced survivors may be going on with their lives in other cities, but they’re often doing so with brain tumors, debilitating headaches and birth defects.

People are officially forbidden to live within the 17-mile “Exclusion Zone” around Chernobyl, and radiation levels in the area are still 10-100 times higher than normal “background levels” but several million people continue to live on contaminated land.

Images: coal-ash-spill.com, google sightseeing, Three Mile Island via wikimedia commons, Chisso Factory Effluent via wikimedia commons, Exxon Spill via wikimedia commons, Dow Chemical Banner via wikimedia commons and View of Chernobyl via wikimedia commons

The post 7 Biggest Environmental Disasters – Where Are They Now? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Imagine the consequences of 20 years of nuclear waste dumping in the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea that surround the Italian Peninsula and its islands.

It’s an unfolding crisis that has the international community alarmed, including the fishing interests in Japan.

We’re talking about the coasts of 22 countries in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and a pending ecological and public health disaster which is being allegedly swept under the rug by the Italian government.

I only learned about it recently in a Counterpunch post on the nightmare, passed along to me by a devastated reader. Meantime, the disaster is also catching on in the mainstream media.

The post writer, Michael Leonardi, is a university educator who lives in Calabria with his wife and baby. He says after returning from a visit to the States, he was alarmed to learn that the Tyrrhenian Sea – which his daughter has been bathing in since birth – was intentionally poisoned with toxic waste.

“How shocked and dismayed we were to discover that government officials have known about it all along,” he shares. “And how enraged we are that a journalist has been killed, possibly for trying to reveal the truth about the disposal of waste by the international Ecomafia and their colluding government and corporate interests.”

The journalist described was Rai television reporter Ilaria Alpi. Leonardi says she was following the trail of arms and toxic garbage trafficking from Italy to Somalia in 1994 when she and her camera man, Miran Hrovatin, were gunned down and killed in Mogadishu.

“Many here believe, including the Mafia pentito, Franceso Fonti, that she was killed because she learned too much about the collusion between the Mafia and Italian military,” argues a bold Leonardi.

So how is the dumping engineered by the bad guys?

Leonardi says dozens of ships with the radioactive and toxic cargoes have been intentionally sunk by organized crime syndicates.

Leonardi says epidemic levels of cancerous tumors and thyroid problems have occurred in the area and along the coasts of the Mediterranean – where fishermen make a living by selling their catch throughout Italian and on the international market.

The public outcry is heating up as Greenpeace and the Italian environmental organization Legambiente work to bring the disaster to the surface. CNN reported on the scuttled hips, as well, last week. The report says it is believed between 32 and 41 of the ships sunk in international waters between Italy, Greece and Spain.

Lending credence to the sinking, testimony by Franceso Fonti, who admitted his role in helping to sink three ships in the fishing waters, including the Cunsky.

Last week a robot sub was sent down off the coast of Centraro to shoot photos of the ship thought to be the Cunsky. The images document the presence of drums like those used to transport and store radioactive and toxic wastes. The hope is that the barrels are still in tact but no one knows for certain what they contain.

“Traces of Mercury and Cesnium 137 have recently been found near the town of Amantea in Calabria further south of Cetraro by about 50 kilimeters,” explains Leonardi. “Amantea is considered a “hot spot” for tumors and ground temperature around the contamination area is six degrees warmer than normal.

“The population is demanding the truth and government action,” he says, adding international cooperation is needed.

Images: enigmachck1, Wiki, Wiki

The post Ecomafia Radioactive Waste Dumping in Mediterranean: International Catastrophe Coming to Light appeared first on EcoSalon.