Word: toxicants
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Such techniques are, of course, expensive. But the increasing cost of getting rid of dangerous chemicals provides a powerful incentive for manufacturers who use them to find ways to recapture and recycle them. While Government pressure and supervision of toxic-waste sites are vital, the disposal problem will remain intractable unless industry does most of the job itself. By one estimate, 96% of all hazardous wastes never leave the property of the companies that produced them. A number of companies have made some headway in curbing a generation of the poisons. Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co., for example, cut its volume...
...public clamor for quicker, more effective action in the war on toxic wastes is fully justified, the expectation of easy or fast fixes is not. Some 66,000 chemicals are being used in the U.S.; EPA has classified 60,000 of them as potentially, if not definitely, hazardous to human health. They have been dumped or buried for years on the plausible but, as it turned out, ! tragically wrong theory that they would lose their toxicity during the decades it would take them to drift through layers of soil and rock into deep water supplies. There...
...devastation is seldom certain or clear or quick. Broken chromosomes are unseen; carcinogens can be slow and sneaky. People wait for years to find out if they or their children are victims. The fears, the uncertainties and the conjectures have a corrosive quality that becomes inextricably mingled with the toxic realities...
...find out what it is like to live in the same neighborhood with toxic wastes, Associate Editor Kurt Andersen visited three communities with similar concerns but profoundly different circumstances. Times Beach, contaminated years ago, is now a Missouri ghost town; Holbrook, Mass., is discovering that it has a serious problem, but perhaps not a catastrophe; in Casmalia, Calif., toxins arrive each day at a modern treatment site, producing annoying fumes and fears about the future. People from all three places share chronic anxiety. Are they sick? Will they become sick? In all three there is anger, at businesses, at government...
...nation," says O'Donnell, "it was like lightning. I thought, 'I have an answer!' " The same answer, she thinks, explains why Mark's best boyhood friend now has Hodgkin's disease. It might be coincidence, a professionally skeptical out-of-towner suggests. She looks wounded and incredulous. "With a toxic site as impregnated with the yuckos as this...