Word: toxicants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...river pollution that cross political boundaries. At the federal level, the maze of agencies with conflicting environmental responsibilities must be reordered. While the Agriculture Department pays farmers to drain wetlands, for example, the Interior Department pays to preserve them. Worse, the farm-subsidy program encourages the misuse of toxic chemicals, one-crop farming that destroys ecological diversity, and mechanization that drives jobless rural laborers into packed cities. Federal highway builders, the Army Corps of Engineers?all such official land abusers?need retraining in ecological values...
...which almost totally resist decay?thus poisoning man's fellow creatures, to say nothing of himself. The burden includes smog fumes, aluminum cans that do not rust, inorganic plastics that may last for decades, floating oil that can change the thermal reflectivity of oceans, and radioactive wastes whose toxicity lingers for literally hundreds of years. The earth has its own waste-disposal system, but it has limits. The winds that ventilate earth are only six miles high; toxic garbage can kill the tiny organisms that normally clean rivers...
...carbon monoxide as did 1960 models. To achieve this, however, requires increased engine heat, which in turn will increase the nitrogen oxide emissions. And nitrogen oxides are particularly dangerous: under sunlight, they react with waste hydrocarbons from gasoline to form PAN (per-oxyacl nitrate), along with ozone the most toxic element in smog...
Pollution respects no political bound aries. The Rhine flows 821 miles past the potash mines of Alsace, through the industrial Ruhr Valley to the North Sea. Known as "Europe's sewer," the river is so toxic that even hardy eels have difficulty surviving. The Dutch, who live at the river's mouth, have a stoic slogan: "Holland is the rubbish bin of the world." In Sweden, when black snow fell on the province of Sma-land, authorities suspected that thick soot had wafted from across...
...civilization." Near Marseille, a pair of big aluminum refineries each day discharge 6,000 tons of a red sediment into the Mediterranean. Though 80% of it funnels into a deep submarine trench, the remainder settles elsewhere on the bottom. "The problem," says Bombard, "is that this waste, though not toxic in itself, blankets and kills all living things. Moreover, this is an area where it is essential to have living water to purify the sewage of Marseille...