Word: dioxins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...program with our paper suppliers that will significantly reduce a troubling side effect of magazine production that has plagued publishers. To whiten magazine stock, paper plants have long used a chlorine bleaching process. In 1985 the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that this procedure produces traces of dioxin, a highly toxic chemical, in waste water at the plants. Looking for ways of solving the problem, TIME asked its mills to substitute a different bleaching process that does not produce any detectable levels of dioxin. Most of the paper in this magazine is now produced that way. We have asked our other...
What can be done? Predictably, the two sides in the debate mostly talk past each other, with environmentalists stressing the dangers and water providers focusing on costs and the inflexibility of the laws. For example, the EPA requires testing for dioxin, a possible human carcinogen, but, argues Wayne Kern of the North Dakota department of health, "the industries that are common sources of dioxin just do not exist in North Dakota...
...controversy did not die down, however. Veterans groups continued to blame the dioxin-tainted herbicide for everything from birth defects to degenerative nerve diseases. After a federal judge ruled that the lack of scientific evidence meant the government was not liable for any part of a $180 million award from a class-action suit, advocates pressed their case with Congress and the media...
...however, researchers have developed exquisitely sensitive techniques for sniffing out compounds. Today these tests can detect one part per quintillion -- roughly the same as a tablespoon of liquid in all the Great Lakes combined. At that level of analysis, laboratory studies would probably reveal that virtually all food contains dioxin, for example, because small amounts of the toxic substance are released by volcanoes and picked up through the soil. Yet there is no flexibility in the Delaney Clause to compensate for such a phenomenal increase in scientific capability...
...governor, Clinton frequently ignored calls by environmentalists to challenge EPA decisions in cases of toxic-waste management, water quality and wilderness protection. Jacksonville, located 12 miles north of Little Rock, is home to three Superfund sites that contain high levels of dioxin and other toxic industrial chemicals that have been seeping into groundwater and soil and environmental groups challenge Clinton's conclusions that these sites do not pose a significant health problem...