Word: toxication
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...