#107: What We Must Do--Part 11: Reducing The Use Of Toxics.

=======================Electronic Edition========================

RACHEL'S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #107
---December 12, 1988---
News and resources for environmental justice.
------
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org ==========
RACHEL-4CM = DIOXIN FOCUSED DIRECTORY Remote Access Chemical Hazards Electronic Library. Dioxinnz.com
========================Original Source========================

The use of toxic chemicals is more common and more unnecessary than most people think. The names are familiar: carbon tetrachloride, trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, benzene, and so forth. These chemicals are useful and relatively cheap. Unfortunately, they are also hard to contain and, when they escape, dangerous. Many of these chemicals cause cancer, but they also cause deterioration of the central nervous system, headaches, lethargy, seizures, and a wide range of other nonlethal but serious effects.

A startling array of American industries are now using such chemicals. We recently compiled a 288-page book entitled WHAT CHEMICALS EACH INDUSTRY USES, which lists, industry by industry, what toxic chemicals each type of industry has reported using. (The reporting occurred under the New Jersey right to know law, but NJ industries are no different from industries elsewhere, so the NJ reveal something about industry everywhere.) Industries are designated by "standard industrial classification" (SIC) codes. The most benign-sounding industries now use toxic chemicals. For example, the manufacture of dolls and stuffed toys (SIC 3942) uses substantial quantities of 1,1,1-trichloroethane, dichloromethane, trichloroethylene, toluene, and tetrachloroethylene. The "chocolate and cocoa products" industry (SIC 2066) uses carbon tetrachloride, diethyl ether, acetone, chloroform, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, xylenes, toluene, lead acetate, and a long list of other toxics. And so it goes, industry by industry. These lists do not even include the use of plastics because plastics themselves are not reportable under right to know laws; they are not considered particularly dangerous to humans. The impression that one gets from these lists is that American industry is saturated with toxics. One wonders, did we have stuffed toys and chocolate bars before we had toxic chemicals to make them with? Of course we did.

Barry Commoner has argued that, with few exceptions, the entire petrochemical industry, at least on its present scale, is largely unnecessary. The consumer products created with petrochemicals have replaced earlier items made with naturally occurring materials. Products made from cotton, wood, leather, paper, glass and metal have now been replaced by synthetic materials made from petroleum. We could still return to these earlier kinds of products with little or no loss in "quality of life."

Industry may argue that we do not need to reduce the use of toxic materials, we simply need to manage them better and discharge a smaller fraction of them to the environment. This is what "waste reduction" is all about--use the same amount of toxics but dump less of them into the environment.

Unfortunately, waste reduction will not suffice. The production of synthetic organic chemicals is increasing by a factor of 10 every 35 years; American industry produced 50 billion pounds in 1950 and 500 billion pounds in 1985. There is no sign of a letup in this steady rate of growth. At this growth rate, the use of synthetic organics will grow by a factor of 100 within one human lifetime (70 years). It must be obvious to everyone that the earth cannot sustain such an increase.

Even aggressive waste reduction will not do the job. In an eye-opening move, the Monsanto Chemical Corporation recently announced that they plan to reduce their toxic discharges to the environment by 90% in the early 1990s. (NY TIMES Nov. 13, pg. F3). Monsanto is saying that, by the mid-'90s, its waste production will be only 10% of what it was in 1987. This a laudable waste reduction goal. Unfortunately, even if all industries could achieve Monsanto's goal quickly, which is very unlikely, within 35 years we would be right back where we are today because total output will have grown by a factor of 10. Thirty-five years later our situation would be 10 times worse than it is today, which would clearly be intolerable. Therefore, we can see that simply restricting discharges, even by drastic cuts like 90%, will not solve our problems. We will have to reduce the total use of toxic materials, not just their discharge into the environment at manufacturing sites. Thus we can see that waste reduction is the wrong goal. We must aim to reduce the use of toxics.

Reducing the use of toxics is going to require new approaches. We have already discussed two. In RHWN #102 we advocated a tax on toxics; in #106 we advocated zero discharge, or "no dumping allowed" (an idea already embodied in the Clean Water Act of 1972 [33 U.S.C. 1371(b)] which stated the goal as, "discharge of pollutants into the [nation's] navigable waters will be eliminated by 1985").

If industry wants to argue that zero discharge is not achievable, that some fraction of all toxics will always be released into the environment, then our only remaining option is to reduce the use of toxics.

How can we reduce the use of toxics?

The use of certain chemicals will have to be banned. As Barry Commoner has pointed out (RHWN #30), the only time we have seen significant reductions in environmental contamination by individual chemicals is when they have been banned. An international treaty banned atmospheric dumping of strontium-90 through weapons tests; DDT use has been banned in the U.S.; PCB production has been banned. Now the levels of these toxins in air, water and human tissue are decreasing markedly. Banning chemicals is effective. Furthermore, the legal authority for banning chemicals already exists in federal law: the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA; 15 USC 2601; P.L. 94-469), Sections 6 and 7.

We can offer industry a wide range of carrots and sticks to force reduction in the use of toxics. However, no matter what approach we take, we will have to measure the production and use of toxics. No matter what we do, we will have to measure success or failure. Furthermore, it is essential to measure toxics in relation to a plant's overall production. If we don't measure toxics in relation to overall production, we won't know whether a measured reduction in toxics is due to efficiency (fewer toxics used per pound of useful product), or whether the plant simply had a bad year and produced less useful product. Measuring chemical production and use is the most fundamental step for learning whether any toxics use reduction program is achieving its goals. Such measurement could be required by local, state, or federal law. Our new report, WHAT CHEMICALS EACH INDUSTRY USES (Princeton, Nj: Environmental Research Foundation, Dec., 1988), is available for $25.00; among its 288 pages is a section on how to find the SIC code that covers your local industry; then, for each SIC code operating in the state of New Jersey (which is most all of them), a list of toxic chemicals they reported using, including the quantities reported. For each chemical, we give the name, and we give the Chemical Abstract Services (CAS) number so you can learn more about the characteristics of each chemical through standard sources such as the REGISTRY OF TOXIC EFFECTS OF CHEMICAL SUBSTANCES (rtecs). Rtecs is sold by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, Dc 20460; phone (202) 783-3238. Ask for USGPO No. 017-033-00431-5. Rtecs is 7 paperback volumes: a $68.00 bargain.

--Peter Montague, Ph.D.

Descriptor terms: sic codes; waste reduction; toxics use reduction; pollution prevention; waste avoidance; waste minimization; zero discharge; goals; agendas;

#106: What We Must Do--Part 10: No Dumping Allowed.

=======================Electronic Edition========================

RACHEL'S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #106
---December 5, 1988---
News and resources for environmental justice.
------
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org ==========
RACHEL-4CM = DIOXIN FOCUSED DIRECTORY Remote Access Chemical Hazards Electronic Library. Dioxinnz.com
========================Original Source========================

During the past year, our readers have been sending suggestions for "what we must do" to take control over the toxics crisis. For the most part, our readers are not legislative lobbyists or armchair environmentalists; they are grass roots activists struggling in the trenches to protect their children, their homes, and their health from brutal assaults by individuals and corporations who are, directly or indirectly, trying to kill or maim them. If this sounds overly dramatic to you, you are probably reading this from the sidelines.

In our series, "What we must do," we set out to explore the nature of the problem(s) our readers face. We have seen that the poisoners are not merely ignorant, well-meaning bumblers: the poisoning of America has not occurred by accident, and it has not occurred out of ignorance. It has been deliberate. We have also seen that the polluters are continuing to grow in strength and numbers, that the quantity of pollution is continuing to grow exponentially at a steady 6% to 10% per year, thus doubling every 7 to 11 years. We have seen that government has largely abandoned its role as protector of the people. In general, modern government acts as a wholly owned subsidiary of the polluters, licensing the poisoning, and running interference for the poisoners. We have seen, in short, that though we are winning many local battles, we are losing the war.

We have seen that the earth is being damaged on a massive scale, that the number of animals and humans being poisoned is continuing to grow, and that leaders of the older environmental movement (as distinct from the movement for environmental justice) have allowed themselves to get caught up in no-win debates such as cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment. In their well-meaning but misguided desire to be viewed as "reasonable" in terms defined by our adversaries, the leaders of the environmental movement have fallen into snares laid by industry lawyers and technocrats. Industry has been allowed to frame the debate in narrow, technical terms. No wonder they're winning.

It is time for new departures, new ways of thinking. As the burgeoning "movement for environmental justice" begins to see itself as a coherent, connected whole, it is right and good to establish new goals, new visions of where we want to be 10 years from now. Do we want to be hunkered in conference rooms debating what constitutes "best available control technology" with engineers employed by some poisoner? Do we want to be arguing with an army of lawyers whether it's OK to kill one in a million of us at random, versus killing one in a hundred thousand? If we force some government agency to give us the lip service of one more public hearing before they issue the next license to the next poisoner, is this what we will call "progress" and "success?" We think not.

From our readers, and from other friends of the movement for environmental justice, here is a series of ideas that can stoke the engines of change, and may--if we will adopt them--make a difference:

We must establish our right to a clean environment. Who gave the polluters all the rights anyway? We can transform the environmental justice movement into a civil rights movement. The principle of "no dumping" must be established. This has been advocated most eloquently by Dr. John Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, and former Associate Director of the Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Gofman says, "The no-dumping principle simply means no one has any right to dump anything into the world's common supply of air and water.... The point is that the no-dumping principle and highly industrial societies can become compatible, if the will exists to do it. Of course it cannot happen overnight, which is all the more reason to adopt the principle immediately. Then you apply it gradually. It's both practical and fair to be gradual in the transition to new rules, because current operations began in good faith under the old rules. But there is all the difference in the world between adopting a good principle gradually, versus denying the principle, which is what we do today. Today people are claiming polluters have a right to kill some people, at random, for the economic benefit of some others. Only the exact number is debated. [For example, see RHWN #41b and #95.--P.M.] It's called the 'risk-benefit' doctrine. I call it premeditated random murder," says Dr. Gofman.

Dr. Gofman says, "The key to stopping every type of pollution begins with convincing people to agree on a really simple principle of human rights, whose fairness is self-evident. It can be stated in one sentence:

"All peaceable people (that excludes criminals) are entitled to hold themselves and their property free from coercion, intrusion, and fraud, provided they secure the identical right for each other. This definition of human rights clearly prohibits people who own property from letting it intrude on anyone else's body or property, which includes the common air and water.

"We've all known the headache of owning some pieces of unwanted property, say a derelict car or an old mattress. But we clearly have no right to dump them in someone else's driveway or in the public forest, although neither is even toxic.

"Unwanted medical, chemical and radioactive wastes also belong to someone. They are the property of whoever owns their source, until title has been transferred to some willing recipient. So the owners of waste are obliged to do whatever it takes, regardless of cost, to keep their property from intruding into either common or private property.

"It is not the obligation of other humans to prove that the dumping would be lethal or even a hazard at all. There is just no right to let your property intrude on others, and you'd better consider that before you make it or buy it."

Dr. Gofman has put his finger on two important principles: first, we have an inherent right to clean air and water, the polluters do not have a right to dump on us. Second, the burden of proof is not on us to show that exotic chemicals are harmful. It doesn't matter whether exotic chemicals are harmful or not--no one has a right to dump them into our air or water. Period. We can say, "I don't want to be dumped on, and that's that." We don't have to prove that 1,1,1-tri-whatever is bad for us; it's sufficient that we don't want our children and ourselves exposed to it. Who gave the polluters all the rights in the first place? We must take back America from the polluters, starting with first principles: no dumping allowed.

(To be continued next week.) #107

Dr. Gofman heads the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (CNR), P.O. Box 11207, San Francisco, CA 94101; CNR has no phone. Donations to CNR are tax deductible. Dr. Gofman is the author of what we think are the best books on the effects of radioactivity on humans, including RADIATION AND HUMAN HEALTH (1981), X-RAYS: HEALTH EFFECTS OF COMMON EXAMS (1985) and RADIATION-INDUCED CANCER FROM LOW-DOSE EXPOSURE: AN INDEPENDENT ANALYSIS (1989). To see where the "no dumping" principle could take us, read Theodore Taylor and Charles Humpstone, THE RESTORATION OF THE EARTH (NY: Harper & Row, 1973).

--Peter Montague, Ph.D.

Descriptor terms: what we must do; no dumping; regulation; philosophy; principles; radiation; landfilling; releases;