Word: toxicity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...natural cynicism of the disaffected young. He was too quick, it was said, to detect the smell of society's insulation burning -- and to sigh "So it goes" -- when there was nothing more in the air than, say, a harmless whiff from a distant war or the neighborhood toxic-waste dump. No more; his news in Hocus Pocus is that our charred insulation no longer smolders. It has burned itself out, and civilization's great, tired machine is not dying, but blackened and dead...
Government officials and businesses are looking for ways to reuse waste water. With the aid of advanced technology, even highly contaminated water can be made drinkable again. Alcoa has just begun to market a new claylike material called Sorbplus that helps clean water by adsorbing toxic materials...
...upstate New York, not far from the infamous Love Canal, you can follow your nose to Forest Glen, a trailer-park settlement built on heaps of foul- smelling hazardous waste that the Environmental Protection Agency says may contain as many as 150 toxic compounds. Under the streets of the densely populated semi-industrial section of Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the Mobil Corp. has begun recovering a sea of oil -- 17 million gals. -- that for decades has been leaking from underground storage tanks and pipelines...
...apathetic to prevent their communities from becoming the repository of everybody else's detritus. The result, according to a landmark 1987 study by the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, is that 3 of every 5 black and Hispanic Americans live in areas with uncontrolled toxic-waste sites. Many of the most notorious dumping grounds are located in the South. Among the worst is "cancer alley," a 75-mile stretch along the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, that is lined with oil refineries and petrochemical plants. The alley's abnormally high cancer rate...
...California, Juana Gutierrez and her 400-member Mothers of East Los Angeles are fighting a proposed toxic-waste incinerator slated for nearby Vernon, which every year would spew some 19,000 tons of potentially health- threatening ash on their community. Why, she asks, should East Los Angeles, poverty-pocked and largely Hispanic, be subjected to this environmental atrocity? "Why not Beverly Hills...