There isn't anything we don't know about the modern city--its demography, its water table, its engineering design, its art, its slums, its economics, its politics. We just don't seem to know how to make it beautiful, accessible, solvent, safe, and clean.
Harlan Cleveland,
The National Observer, 16 August 1975
In 1984, seven siblings from Tunica, Mississippi, were taken to the emergency room of their local hospital complaining of abdominal pain and diarrhea. A physician diagnosed viral gastroenteritis and sent the children home. But their health continued to deteriorate. A couple of days later, two of the children were in respiratory arrest. The other five children presented lethargy, pinpoint pupils, increased salivation, and respiratory secretions. All had low blood cholinesterase levels. Adults in the household were asymptomatic, but showed mild cholinesterase depression. A more thorough exposure history uncovered that their home had been sprayed two weeks earlier with methyl parathion, a toxic pesticide. Two of the sisters, aged 11 and 4 years old, died as a result of pesticide poisoning.
Dangerous decontamination
. A rash of incidences of exposure to toxic methyl parathion used illegally as a home pesticide has prompted a national alert by federal and state health officials.
Ten years later, a new episode of indoor methyl parathion use came to the attention of federal agencies in Lorain County, Ohio. The EPA and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) decontaminated 232 homes at a cost of over $20 million. The next year, in 1995, a smaller cluster of exposures was discovered in Detroit, Michigan. There, four homes and a homeless shelter were decontaminated at a cost of about $1 million. Then in 1996, the ATSDR and the EPA discovered that more than 1,100 homes had been sprayed with the pesticide in Jackson County, Mississippi. The Mississippi State Health Department opened a hotline for concerned residents and received 1,400 calls. Approximately 835 residences and businesses were inspected for methyl parathion contamination and so far over 600 residents have been relocated on an emergency basis. It is estimated by the EPA that renovation of these homes will cost more than $50 million. Other cases have also been reported in Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, and Louisiana. As recently as April 1997, indoor methyl parathion use surfaced in Chicago, where an estimated 1,000 homes were sprayed by exterminators. The full scale of the problem of indoor methyl parathion use is not known.
Methyl parathion is an organophosphate insecticide used on agricultural crops, particularly cotton. It is sold as a white crystal or brownish liquid that smells like rotten eggs. Although the pesticide is approved only for agricultural crops, it is used illegally in other areas because it is so cheap and effective. As with many of the pesticides in its class, methyl parathion is a highly toxic cholinesterase inhibitor. Skin contact, inhalation, or ingestion of this insecticide can cause acute symptoms including abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, blurred vision, constriction or dilation of the pupils, increased salivation, sweating, and, in severe cases, muscle twitching, respiratory arrest, and death. Chronic exposure can cause flu-like symptoms such as headache, nausea, weakness, loss of appetite, and malaise. Methyl parathion exposure can be assessed by measuring urine metabolite levels of
p
-nitrophenol. Effects can be assessed by measuring cholinesterase activity in blood. Symptoms of poisoning occur when cholinesterase levels are depressed to about half the normal range.
The EPA and the ATSDR joined with state health departments and local officials to remedy this problem and issued a national alert on 12 December 1996 warning the public against indoor use of methyl parathion. The alert was issued via the Internet, as well as through the major news services. According to Andrew P. Lanza, a health education specialist for the ATSDR, "This kind of interagency collaboration has been a positive experience because the quality of the response [to the poisoning problem] has been much higher with better coordination." Together, the ATSDR and the EPA convened an expert panel, chaired by Daniel Hryhorczuk, director of the Great Lakes Center for Occupational and Environmental Safety and Health at the University of Illinois. The panel found several data gaps in such areas as the environmental degradation of methyl parathion, the effectiveness of self-cleaning methods, and the correlation between environmental and exposure data. But because indoor use of methyl parathion represents an emergency situation, regulatory agencies are forced to address it expeditiously. "We often have to make decisions in the face of a lack of data and at times we go to the experts to tell us whether those decisions are reasonable," explains Gershon Bergeisen, a health science advisor for the EPA.
Another recommendation made by the panel was to include community participation in the process of developing and disseminating information materials. Eunice Johnson, the mother of a 17-month-old baby, lives in a house that was sprayed with the chemical in Memphis, Tennessee. She says that upon first contact with the EPA and the ATSDR there was "a lot of information being asked from me and my family, but not enough information being given." This situation causes families to live in a state of anxiety about their situations. "We know that we live in a potentially hazardous situation, but we are not given the information to be able to decide what to do. Should we relocate or what? While the tests are being done, we continue to be exposed," says Johnson.
Agencies are attempting to respond to these concerns by "trying to continue promoting the usefulness of having that community input up front," says Leslie Campbell, an environmental health scientist with the ATSDR. However, this is not an easy task in the case of methyl parathion, where the exposed community is geographically and culturally diverse. As Bergeisen points out, "One can [more easily get] community input at a Superfund site where you have a finite population and some clearly identified community representatives." The federal agencies are consulting affected community residents on the design of communication strategies. "Clearly, there is a commitment to public health education and a recognition that communication is essential to coping with the methyl parathion situation," states the panel's report.
EPA administrator Carol M. Browner has issued a statement that "the EPA will not tolerate the danger to public health caused by such flagrant and illegal use of pesticides." Under the new Food Quality Protection Act, the EPA is required to calculate tolerances for pesticides in food by taking into account not only dietary exposures but also other non-occupational sources of pesticides. It is not clear whether this mandate includes the possible exposures that may arise from illegal use of pesticides, but according to the wording of the act, it probably should. In the Jackson County case, at least 30 federal counts of mishandling pesticides were added to the state charges already pending against two individuals accused of spraying methyl parathion illegally. Charges are also being brought against the people responsible for the cases recently discovered in Chicago.
In early 1997, the United Nations Population Fund (known as the UNFPA) released its annual report on the state of the world population. Included in the report is the 1996 world population estimate of 6.1 billion people by the year 2000, a drop of 137 million from 1992 projections. The revision is due to accelerated declines in fertility, as well as increased mortality attributable to wars, civil disturbances, and the AIDS pandemic. However, the reduced estimated growth is dwarfed by the absolute numbers of people. "I would say that if people are breathing sighs of relief because the annual added population to the world is now estimated at around 81 million a year instead of 87 million a year, that's definitely misplaced optimism," says Stan Bernstein, senior research advisor with the UNFPA. "When you talk about the impact of population growth on the environment, you have to keep in mind that it's not the direct causal linkage that's the primary thing. It's the interaction of population growth with existing policies, with existing and available technologies, and with the policy environment in which countries pursue their development."
Population growth and its effects incite concern particularly in areas where fragile ecologies are already reeling. The deleterious effects of population growth on the environment include overexploitation of natural resources and pollution. Areas that are especially affected include coastal regions with rapidly growing populations. Elsewhere, soil erosion, desertification, water scarcity, and deforestation lead to environmental displacement and migration to urban areas, which do not have the infrastructure to contend with the overload. There are already severe difficulties in handling housing, energy, water, and sewage disposal in cities. Misuse and pollution of water resources constitutes one of the greatest health problems in both rural and urban areas. "There are complex and fundamental linkages between demographic women's and men's ability to have access to quality primary health care, including reproductive health services, and the impact of human numbers, distribution, and movements on environments, both locally and globally," says Bernstein.
Many countries have been frustrated in their attempts to integrate population and environmental concerns with sustainable development due to lack of data, trained staff, and guidelines. Also, Bernstein argues, both developed and developing countries have many unmet reproductive health care needs. "The information is abundantly clear, in both developing and developed countries, that there are millions of women and couples who want to either have no more children or who want to delay the timing of their next birth, [and] who don't have the information, the means, or the community support to use family planning," he says.
Sustainable development requires an integrated approach to policy-making and decision-making in which environmental protection and long-term economic growth are complementary. In addition to economic growth, sustainable development also encompasses the concepts of social development, health, and improved quality of life. Bernstein emphasizes that a full appreciation of women's roles in accomplishing sustainable development is also necessary. "There's a clear recognition that women's involvement, participation, and inclusion in social action is a very important part of the efforts that are needed for sustainable development," he says.
In the last few years, Americans have begun disposing of significant quantities of lumber that has been pressure-treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA). Because CCA-treated wood is difficult to incinerate safely and its potential long-term behavior in landfills isn't fully known,
Environmental Building News
--a bimonthly newsletter on sustainable design and construction published by West River Communications, Inc.--has called for a ban on CCA-treated products. This call, however, has drawn little response from the building community, says Alex Wilson, editor of the Brattleboro, Vermont-based newsletter.
From playground to problem?
Individuals concerned that the disposal of chromated copper arsenate-treated wood may create a health hazard from leaching chemicals have called for a ban on the wood treatment.
Although CCA-treated wood was developed over 60 years ago, it wasn't until the 1970s that it became widely used, often in structures such as decks, playground equipment, and picnic tables. Use of the pesticide-treated wood increased from less than 1 million cubic meters (m
3
) in 1970 to about 8 million m
3
in 1985 and 14 million m
3
in 1995. "Because we've had this massive increase in demand for CCA-treated wood, eventually we're going to have a massive increase in the amount of CCA-treated wood coming out of service," says Carol Clausen, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.
If, as industry researchers estimate, CCA-treated wood has an average life span of 30 years before it is removed from service, about 6 million m
3
of the material must be disposed of each year. By 2020, that figure will climb to about 19 million m
3
. Currently, most of that wood ends up in unlined landfills, Wilson says. But whether that represents a potential hazard isn't clear.
"We do know that treated wood--throughout its life, both in its use and as it decays and disintegrates--leaches those heavy metals," says Cathy Latham, a pollution control specialist for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in St. Paul. Research suggests, however, that CCA's components--chromium, copper, and arsenic--bind to soil, preventing them from migrating more than a few inches. "But if you had a bunch of CCA piled on top of some nonabsorbent, nonreactive material, maybe it could move farther," says Forest Products Laboratory scientist Stan Lebow. "That's why a landfill is so complex to study. There's almost an infinite number of scenarios you can imagine that could influence the results."
This uncertainty underlies the arguments on both sides of the issue. Environmentalists don't want to take a chance on CCA, especially since alternative products exist. Conversely, industry representatives argue that mere suspicions can't justify pulling a successful product off the market. "There's no scientific evidence that [
Environmental Building News
was] able to cite . . . that's able to identify a problem with pressure-treated wood being disposed of in a landfill," says Gene Bartlow, president and CEO of the Fairfax, Virginia-based American Wood Preservers Institute.
CCA, Bartlow says, is popular because alternatives are either more expensive, less effective, or both. And, he adds, potential adverse environmental impacts exist for any wood treatments. Other water-based treatments, such as ammoniacal copper zinc arsenate and ammoniacal copper arsenate, also contain heavy metals. Oil-based treatments, such as pentachlorophenol and creosote, although invaluable for applications such as utility poles and railroad ties, shed oil and are unsuitable for human or animal contact.
Even if banned, CCA-treated lumber would continue to enter the waste stream for at least the next 20 years as existing structures are taken out of service. And with the exception of Minnesota, which has banned CCA-treated wood effective 1 July 1998 in anticipation of legislation that forbids lead, mercury, cadmium, and hexavalent chromium in fungicides, such bans don't appear to be forthcoming. To cope with these materials, researchers are investigating ways to extract CCA through such methods as bacterial fermentation. Other possibilities include incorporating used CCA-treated wood into composite structures or simply building new structures from used wood, which often is removed from service before it has deteriorated.
Effectively recycling treated wood, however, would require both an infrastructure of collection and processing facilities and a way to reliably distinguish different types of chemical treatments. Although new treated wood is tagged or stamped with the product's chemical composition, these marks are often lost by the time the wood is removed from service. "The whole recycling, reuse, disposal issue," says Lebow, "is one that needs a lot more work for CCA."
Thanks to a process initiated a few years ago by the United Nations, more than 100 countries, including the United States, are set to forge an international treaty that would ultimately prohibit use of some of the world's most dangerous persistent organic pollutants (POPs). These chemicals, which are either natural or artificial, can survive for decades and travel thousands of miles from their sources--characteristics that enable them to contaminate the environment, as well as accumulate in the fatty tissues of humans and animals.
In May 1995, the governing council of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) directed several international agencies to begin evaluating POPs, starting with twelve of the most hazardous known substances, including DDT, PCBs, and dioxins. At a January-February 1997 meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, the UNEP governing council concluded that a "global legally binding instrument is required to reduce the risks to human health and the environment [posed by these twelve pollutants]." The resolution calls for international negotiations to begin early in 1998, leading to a treaty banning or restricting the use of POPs to be in effect by the year 2000.
The UNEP decision is a significant step, according to chemist Bill Moomaw, a professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. "There is no treaty right now that controls the handling of POPs or other toxic organic chemicals except as wastes. No international laws restrict the production, sale, or exportation of these chemicals," Moomaw says.
A POPs treaty will be of major import, agrees Jerry Poje, NIEHS director of international programs, as it will "represent our chemical safety legacy to the world's children." Regulating these substances on a global basis is crucial, he adds, because the chemicals do not respect boundaries between countries. "It doesn't do much good for one nation to ban a substance, as the U.S. did with DDT in 1972, when it's widely used elsewhere in the world. That's especially true given how readily these substances travel through the air and water," Poje says.
While applauding the resolution for action on POPs, Poje stresses that the agreement basically just says that this process should begin, without specifying exactly what outcome is expected. Thorny issues need to be addressed, particularly with regard to pesticides such as DDT that are still used for disease control. "If we don't deal with public health issues in a thoughtful way, we might actually do more harm than good," he says. A May 1997 meeting of the World Health Assembly also endorsed a rapid phaseout of POPs.
Polly Hoppin, a public health specialist with the World Wildlife Fund, views the impending ban on DDT as an opportunity to promote integrated vector control strategies along with the restrained use of pesticides. "There are cost-effective alternatives to DDT, but shifts are needed both in research funding and in the infrastructure for implementing disease-control programs," Hoppin says. She believes a ban can ultimately lead to alternative solutions that meet both public health and environmental health objectives.
With some 20,000 chemicals in use today, criteria have to be developed for determining which of these substances go on the POPs hit list. The process established to deal with the initial dirty dozen can set an important precedent for regulating other persistent pollutants. Moomaw, who is also a member of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, maintains that a comparable scientific body is needed to provide technical advice. "By bringing together scientists from a broad range of countries, you can pretty much cancel out national interests and also assure that the research done in all the countries of the world gets considered," he says.
Lawrence Susskind, an environmental policy expert at MIT and Harvard Law School who is training participants in the upcoming POPs negotiations, believes the time before these deliberations can be wisely spent assessing the scientific work that has been done on POPs and integrating that knowledge into the process. He also recommends that informal brainstorming sessions be held in advance of the proceedings, before people have taken set positions.
"Most treaties that have been adopted to date have been rather minimal, doing little more than acknowledging that there is a problem," Susskind says. He is more optimistic in the case of POPs regulation for two reasons. First, many POPs substitutes are already available. Second, there are powerful economic incentives to produce other substitutes because the market for those products will be huge. Susskind says, "There are economic benefits to be had here, as well as environmental and health benefits, that . . . make us more hopeful this time around."
In opening the United Nations Special Session to Review Global Efforts for Sustainable Development in New York City on June 23, Razali Ismail, president of the U.N. General Assembly, commented that the five-day conference would be a time for "critical reflection and concrete action" on the environmental problems threatening the earth. However, by the close of the session, most participants and outside observers agreed that the meeting, like its predecessor five years ago in Rio de Janeiro, had accomplished far less than would be necessary to preserve a healthy global environment. Though the heads of state who attended bemoaned the lack of progress made toward sustainable development, few would commit their nations to any new measures to protect the earth.
"It was a meeting of hot air, of pompous speeches," said Karan Capoor, a policy advisor with the Environmental Defense Fund, of the special session. "It all sounded very nice . . . but when you really look at it, there really wasn't anything concrete that was done there."
In 1992, representatives of 178 governments met at the unprecedented United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Rio Earth Summit, and agreed on a program of action called Agenda 21--a blueprint for how humankind must operate in order to avoid environmental devastation. The special session in New York gave many of these same representatives and others an opportunity to assess the progress that had been made in implementing the covenants of the Rio agreement and to reaffirm a global commitment to heal the ailing environment.
"Five years on from Rio, we face a major recession; not economic, but a recession of spirit," Ismail told the assembly, "a recession of the very political will that is essential for catalyzing real change. The visionary ambition of Agenda 21 is tempered by somewhat damning statistics that show that we are heading further away from, and not towards, sustainable development."
Over the five days of the special session, 199 speakers addressed the assembly, enumerating the accomplishments that had been made toward implementing Agenda 21 and pointing out the many areas where the worldwide effort has fallen short. Many representatives lamented the fact that the developed countries have not supplied the economic help to developing countries that was pledged in Agenda 21. "On the world level, aid for development was being reduced. Few of the [developed] countries are complying with the target of 0.7 percent of their [gross national product] for this purpose," Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo, the president of Nicaragua, told the assembly. "The developed countries are not fulfilling their Rio commitments; new resources are not forthcoming, technology transfer is minimal, and the burdens of external debts constrain the ability of the developing world to invest in sustainable development."
Other speakers pointed out that five years after the Earth Summit in Rio, one-third of the earth's population still does not have access to safe drinking water, that controls on transboundary movements of hazardous and radioactive wastes called for in Agenda 21 have been ineffective, and that deforestation continues while the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases is not being effectively controlled.
The participants at the special session, however, were able to announce that some goals of Agenda 21, particularly in the areas of consensus building and infrastructure development, had been met. Multinational conventions on climate change, biodiversity, and desertification have been signed since the Rio conference, and agreements have been reached on protecting fish stocks and the marine environment. However, no new treaties or commitments were produced as a result of the events in New York.
In his speech to the assembly, President Clinton emphasized the steps the United States has taken toward sustainable development. "We've passed new laws to better protect our water, created new national parks and monuments, and worked to harmonize our efforts for environmental protection, economic growth, and social improvement," the president said.
On climate change, Clinton admitted that the record of the United States, the world's biggest producer of carbon emissions, was not adequate. "We have been blessed by high rates of growth and millions of new jobs over the last few years, but that has led to an increase in greenhouse-gas emissions in spite of the adoption of new conservation practices," said the president, who had recently announced the strengthening of the Clean Air Act. "But we must do better, and we will." With a major international conference on climate change scheduled for later this year in Kyoto, Japan, many anticipated President Clinton's speech as a preview of the position the United States would assume at that meeting. Though Clinton did not commit the United States to any specific reduction levels or dates in his speech, Capoor said that the president's comments were the most positive thing to come out of the special session. "Basically," said Capoor, "he said that something . . . would be done. He reaffirmed that he would commit to a legally binding treaty."
While the speakers addressed the U.N. General Assembly, other representatives worked to finish the final outcome of the special session, a 46-page technical program containing suggestions on how to better implement the recommendations of the Rio conference. Disagreements over the wording in portions of this document caused participants to work past the 8:00 p.m. Friday deadline and into the early hours of Saturday, in many cases, critics charge, substituting vague phrases for more concrete goals mentioned in the original draft. "All the changes were basically to remove any mention of specific levels or specific reductions," Capoor said. "I don't think there's anything significant at all in there now."
Sticking points included the wording in the portions of the document that refer to poverty and women, to the World Trade Organization, to population and reproductive health, to land degradation, and to financial instruments. The conference was expected to produce a second document as well--an eight-page political declaration that was to sum up the technical program--but disagreement among the representatives caused this document to be scrapped entirely.
In the remaining document and in their speeches to the assembly, the world's leaders only managed to agree that a serious worldwide commitment to the ideals of Agenda 21 is needed but that no progress would be made on such a commitment until a later date.
Turning Brownfields Green
Old, polluted sites, or brownfields, are not easy to deal with. They can be very expensive to clean up, especially to the levels of cleanliness called for under Superfund legislation. A landowner who sells a brownfield before the pollution is removed may become embroiled in liability suits that can be even more expensive. So the easiest and cheapest thing to do with the site is most often to do nothing. In communities across the country, abandoned plots of polluted land are exacerbating urban decay. Even in cases where the land is not a public health threat or where an industry could put the land to safe use, federal laws can hamper the owner's ability to sell or improve it.
In his 5 February 1997 State of the Union Address, President Clinton reaffirmed that a goal of his administration would be to "restore contaminated urban land and buildings to productive use" by providing federal assistance to develop brownfields and by restructuring the federal laws that cause them to flourish. The administration first made federal funds available for brownfields reclamation in November 1993 with a $200,000 EPA grant to Cleveland, Ohio, to spur development of polluted sites there. Since that time, similar grants have been awarded to 112 other communities and, in May, Vice President Gore announced that grants would soon be made available to 34 additional communities. Although the grants are not large enough to completely redevelop a brownfield, they do provide an attractive bonus for private investors who are interested in putting the land to use.
However, attracting investors requires making information about the brownfields initiative available to the public. One way the Clinton administration is doing this is through the EPA's Brownfields Home Page on the World Wide Web. Located at
http://www.epa.gov/brownfields/
, the brownfields site, which is run by the EPA Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, provides information on the grant program, legislative reform, and the federal interagency partnership that is being formed to tackle the brownfields problem.
The EPA Major Milestones/Accomplishments Checklist link on the brownfields home page takes users to the EPA's agenda for eliminating brownfields. The first item on the agenda is a link to a list of the 64 communities that have received pilot grants ("60 pilots funded") from the EPA as well as a list of 49 that have been sponsored by regional EPA offices. Each community listed is linked to a short summary of the pilot project there, and these summaries are linked to more in-depth descriptions. Known brownfields that have not received EPA improvement grants are listed in a database linked from item 7 on the accomplishments checklist, Archival of 24,000 Sites from the Federal Inventory. This database could be a helpful resource for developers looking for sites that could be improved with the assistance of EPA grant money.
Photo credit: Cuyahoga County Planning Commission.
|
Timelines for submitting grant applications and a description of the criteria by which the EPA evaluates them can be found by following the Brownfields Pilots link on the brownfields home page. Also available via the Brownfields Pilots link is advice from other pilot program participants and a resource for securing additional funding for a brownfields project, both from public and private sources.
The EPA grants, however, are just one part of the Clinton administration's initiative to eradicate the nation's polluted and abandoned lands. The Brownfields National Partnership Action Alliance, an alliance of at least 15 federal agencies, will make some $300 million available, in addition to the EPA grants, to combat the problem. The funding, which could come in the form of redevelopment and housing funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development or as job training funds from the Labor Department, is expected to generate at least $5 billion in additional private investments. Information about this part of the brownfields initiative is also available from the brownfields home page via the Brownfields National Partnership Action Agenda link.
Though the partnership and the EPA grants provide some of the necessary funding, many technical and legal questions must still be answered before a brownfield can be cleaned up and put to better use. To make such questions easier to address, the EPA has provided a link to a page about geographic information system (GIS) software that can be downloaded and used to analyze the physical characteristics of a site. In addition, the Liability & Cleanup link on the home page leads to pages that explain the legal implications of developing brownfields.
As the Clinton administration pushes to further spur development of brownfields with new tax incentives, the What's New on this Site and Announcements links on the brownfields home page will keep users informed of any legislative changes. In addition, users can subscribe to the EPA's brownfields listserv mailing list by following the Subscribe to the Brownfields Update Notification System link on the home page.
Last Update: August 1, 1997