Word: cleanups
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...essential ingredients for the great cleanup are all there. Every sort of pollutant, from heavy metals like mercury and cadmium to heated water from electricity plants, is defined and limited. The bill provides up to $18 billion for municipalities to build new sewage-treatment plants, with 75% of the money being paid by Washington and 25% by states and cities. It would finance the removal of toxic sludge from river and lake bottoms and also provide low-interest loans to small businesses for antipollution equipment...
...cleanup would take place in two stages. By July 1, 1977, industries would have to install the "best practicable" antipollution devices on all their waste systems. "Practicable" means what industry can afford-or what the Environmental Protection Agency says industry can afford. In effect, Congress is promising that the need for antipollution equipment would not put small and antiquated plants out of business, but it is also warning that even relatively unprofitable factories must begin to curb their wastes. The real crunch would come with the second deadline. By July 1, 1983, all industries must upgrade their antipollution equipment...
...enforcer," said President Nixon when he appointed William D. Ruckelshaus as the EPA'S first administrator. The clean-water act uses him as just that. His biggest job would be to police the efforts of the individual states, which would be directly in charge of the cleanup. The states would issue permits, written to meet EPA standards, specifying limits on every plant that discharges wastes into waterways. If a state is too lenient with a polluter-violations can cost $25,000 a day (plus a year in jail for plant officials)-the EPA chief could intervene and even take...
...been aptly described as an "open cesspool." Rather, the local water-quality-control board's sole public member, Ellen Stern Harris, pointedly began inviting taxpayers and television reporters to board meetings. Under this public scrutiny, the embarrassed board immediately toughened its antipollution policies, putting potential polluters on tight cleanup schedules. As a result, says Cecil Muchmore of the harbor pollution patrol, "the fish are coming back...
Though Washington has its success story-the cleanup of Seattle harbor with $145 million worth of sewage-treatment plants-Puget Sound is still being polluted by discharges from pulp and paper mills. Indeed, the mills have been granted up to eleven years to comply with federal and state water-quality laws, mainly to avoid straining the state's already depressed economy...