Green Home Living

EPA says biggest polluters are hard-rock mining companies and coal-burning power plants

From ENN.com
Friday, May 24, 2002

"Bush's 2000 presidential campaign was the biggest single recipient of contributions from the mining and electric utility industries, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics."

WASHINGTON - Hard-rock mining companies and coal-burning power plants are America's largest toxic polluters, responsible for nearly two-thirds of the poisonous contaminants in the nation's air and water, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday.

In its most comprehensive inventory of pollution and its sources, the EPA said mining of hard-rock minerals - gold, silver, uranium, copper, lead, zinc, and molybdenum - was responsible for 3.4 billion pounds of toxic pollutants in 2000. Coal-burning electric generating plants were responsible for another 1.2 billion pounds.

While mines and power plants continued to be the biggest source of pollution, the EPA said the total amount of toxic chemicals released in 2000 declined 8 percent from 1999, from 7.7 billion pounds to 7.1 billion pounds.

EPA's latest annual Toxics Release Inventory was expanded to include eight new toxic chemicals, including dioxin. It also includes new reporting requirements for 20 other chemicals such as mercury and PCBs that are worrisome in even small amounts because they persist and accumulate in the food chain. Dioxin and 11 other chemicals in the EPA inventory are covered under a global treaty banning so-called persistent organic pollutants that President Bush earlier this month sent to the Senate for ratification.

EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said the new data would help citizens make decisions about protecting their environment and assist the agency in analyzing trends nationally and locally.

The EPA focuses on the amount of toxic chemicals that industry reports as having been released into the environment, not the entire amount produced. In 2000, 38 billion pounds of such chemicals in production-related waste were reported as having been handled or processed - an increase of 26 percent over the nearly 30 billion pounds in 1999, the EPA said.

Environmentalists contend many more chemicals are released into the environment after they are managed than is reported in EPA's inventory. They say treatment facilities, incinerators, and landfills don't remove all the toxic chemicals, and that many federal Superfund sites that handle the nation's most hazardous waste are leaking.

"A lot of facilities are managing to get rid of their toxic waste without dumping it into the environment immediately, so they don't have to report it as direct pollution," said Jeremiah Baumann, environmental health specialist for U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy organization. "It gets sent somewhere else where it oftentimes ends up in the environment anyway."

Four mining states, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Alaska, again had the highest volume of toxic releases: Nevada with 1 billion pounds and Utah with 956 million pounds (both states down from 1.1 billion pounds each in 1999); Arizona, 744 million pounds (down from 963 million pounds); and Alaska, 535 million pounds (up from 433 million pounds). The same four states headed the list in 1999 and 1998, the first year when mining wastes were calculated in the EPA report. The National Mining Association said Thursday the data show mining releases are "generally lower" than in 1999.

"We end up reporting a lot of naturally occurring metals that are in the rock," said Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the mining trade group.

Bush's home state, Texas, ranked fifth for toxic releases, based on reporting by manufacturers, the most in that category for any state. During 2000, the last year Bush was governor, the state released 301.5 million pounds of toxic pollution, or nearly 11 percent of all the releases reported by manufacturing industries nationwide, according to the EPA.

Bush's 2000 presidential campaign was the biggest single recipient of contributions from the mining and electric utility industries, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. The Bush campaign received at least $438,989 from electric utilities and $203,696 from mining interests, including $108,821 from coal, the center found. Energy interests as a whole ranked among Bush's top 10 industry givers, the center's analysis found.

EPA officials cautioned that the annual inventory should be used as a guide and not necessarily an indicator of health risk because the report provides no information on exposure or specific toxicity of the chemicals.

Reprinted with permission from ENN.COM

EPRI Sows Seeds of Plant-Based Waste-Cleaning Systems

From GreenBiz.com
Tuesday, May 21, 2002

PALO ALTO, Calif., - Some plants naturally absorb and accumulate trace metals such as chromium, selenium, nickel, mercury, lead, copper, and arsenic. In a process known as phytoremediation, scientists are harnessing the plants' ability to remove these substances to help cleanse contaminated soils and water. A recent project directed by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has measured the capacity of various plants for removing toxic substances from polluted water.

Because plants differ in the extent to which they can accumulate the different elements, judicious selection of appropriate plants can greatly enhance the removal of the desired substance. Selection is based on the type of substance to be removed, the geographic location, environmental conditions, and the known capabilities of the species. Therefore it is important to understand the capabilities of the specific plants under varying conditions.

In the EPRI-directed study, researchers collected plant species from wetlands and nurseries, grew them hydroponically (in liquid nutrients but no soil), and identified the plant species that removed the most toxic substances without harming themselves.

Some of the findings were that:

•Water hyacinth, duckweed, brass buttons, cattail, saltmarsh bulrush, parrot's feather, iris-leaved rush, and smartweed were excellent candidates for remediating wastewater contaminated with trace elements such as manganese, cadmium, copper, nickel, chromium, lead, mercury, boron, arsenic, and selenium. Of the 12 plants tested, smartweed proved the most effective.

• Water hyacinth, an aquatic floating plant that is easily harvested, most efficiently accumulated cadmium and chromium. Brass buttons, a wetland plant, also proved an excellent choice for the remediation of chromium-contaminated water.

•Of the 20 aquatic plant species screened, saltmarsh bulrush, parrot's feather, and iris-leaved rush were identified as the best candidates for removing selenium.

John Goodrich-Mahoney, manager in EPRI's water and ecosystems research program, explains, "The use of hydroponics enabled the investigators to directly compare different plant species under fixed conditions. Plant species that were highly efficient in removing specific trace elements under controlled environmental conditions will likely prove effective for trace element removal under field conditions."

Conventional chemical treatment techniques for metal-bearing industrial discharges are resource-intensive, requiring chemical additives, human supervision, and regular maintenance. Hazardous byproducts, like chemical sludges, can be generated, resulting in potentially high disposal costs. And these systems may not even be able to reduce contaminant concentrations to the levels called for by water quality criteria. "Passive treatment systems containing specially selected plants, by contrast, require significantly less management, says Goodrich-Mahoney. "They eliminate the transport of treatment chemicals on the highways, there are no undesirable byproducts, and the fuel and manpower requirements are absolutely minimal."

EPRI is directing a comprehensive program to develop design and engineering guidelines for remediating metal-containing industrial waste streams using plants. The program includes demonstration projects, such as the Allegheny Power's award-winning Springdale constructed-wetland installation, field and laboratory research to increase understanding of treatment processes, and experimental work to accelerate or otherwise enhance removal of individual chemicals. Though EPRI's tests to-date have focused on power plant effluents, the technology could potentially have applicability for metal-bearing streams from other sources.

Says Goodrich-Mahoney, "EPRI's program is introducing new dimensions to passive treatment technology. Efforts to optimize these processes are on the leading edge of microbiology, plant physiology, genetic engineering, and other disciplines."

The future of this work will involve genetic engineering to develop enhanced plants for phytoremediation. Genetically-engineered plants will have greater capacity to absorb metals and can also survive in waters or soil that are highly contaminated.