Word: toxicants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some critics contend that putting off the admittedly expensive cleanup effort will mean greater expense in the future. "Delay not only prolongs the time that people are exposed to toxic hazards," says Michael Podhorzer, director of the National Campaign Against Toxic Hazards. "But every day it means that more toxic chemicals are released into the soil, air and water. The longer we wait, the greater the damage will be and the higher the final cleanup cost will...
Consider the meager six sites deemed to have been cleaned through the Superfund. After a nine-month-long spill of chemicals into the Susquehanna River starting in 1979, it was found that a small Pennsylvania company had / been systematically, and illegally, dumping toxic wastes into shafts that fed into the Butler Tunnel, an outlet for waste water from abandoned coal mines near Pittston, Pa. Three men were convicted of violating the state's Clean Streams Act, and one was sent to prison. The three and their company were fined $750,000. EPA supervised the cleanup of the river pollution...
...some 40 years, beginning in the 1930s, the Velsicol Chemical Co. (formerly the Michigan Chemical Co.) had dumped and burned toxic industrial chemicals on a 3.5-acre site along the Pine River near St. Louis, Mich. A county golf course was developed beside the dump. By the mid-'60s, fish in the river contained high levels of such known or suspected carcinogens as PBB, PCB and DDT. Working with EPA, the company in 1982 agreed to spend $38.5 million to clean up the area. At the golf course, all soil was removed to a depth of 3 ft. below...
...spreading realization that there is no easy way simply to bury the toxic-waste problem has fed the ever present NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome. "Something's got to give," protests Christopher Daggett, EPA administrator for New York and New Jersey. "Either we aren't going to have cleanups, or someone's going to bite the bullet and start accepting wastes. But Lord knows, no one wants to be first." Daggett and his boss, EPA Director Thomas, contend that there is no ready technology that can promptly solve the disposal problem. "We can't wait around until we have...
...fiber-glass liners are being placed inside the cylinders. In the past, such wastes were merely poured into noxious surface lagoons. (In other ways, Waste Management is no ideal disposer. It agreed to pay $2.5 million last April to settle an EPA charge that it had illegally disposed of toxic chemicals in Ohio...