Citizen sleuths exposed pollution from a century-old Michigan factory (2019)

https://www.science.org/content/article/citizen-sleuths-exposed-pollution-century-old-michigan-factory-nationwide-implications

by hammock • 4 years ago

151 72 4 years ago

science.org

mikeyouse5• 4 years ago

I had an idea when I was younger to use this type of investigative activism as a way to short publicly traded companies and fund an ever-increasing amount of pollution investigation. Unfortunately massive pollution scandals barely dent share prices since enforcement is so lax and slow, and many of the worst offenders have closed shop after pillaging the land. A shame since it's not in the 'public' interest to bring this stuff to light since governments have to pay to clean it up.

kingsloi3• 4 years ago

What an interesting idea! Seems like the only way to have any impact is to upset shareholders.

I've been working on trying to highlight the issue in Gary/Northwest Indiana by trying to be a "citizen sleuth" by tracking air pollution and open sourcing the data. Still a WIP, but recently added gas tracking to the data too https://millerbeach.community

You're right about worst offenders closing shop after pillaging, or they just sell and move on to the next location.

In 2019 ArcelorMittal spilled cyanide and ammonia into a Lake Michigan tributary, closing the National Park, local water intake, killing 3000 fish, etc.

In December 2020, ArcelorMittal was bought by Cleveland-Cliffs for $1.4 billion.

Cleveland-Cliffs made record $20 billion in revenue in 2021. https://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/cleveland-cliffs-mad...

A local news article from today: https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/consen...

The proposed consent decree requires Cleveland-Cliffs to complete "comprehensive operational upgrades to the steel mill to prevent future cyanide and ammonia violations," the environmental groups said."
The steelmaker agreed to improve its notification procedures and pay $3 million in civil penalties, which are to be split between Indiana and the U.S. Treasury.

$3 million, and to prevent future cyanide/ammonia violations... but still dump into Lake Michigan. Aren't we lucky!

hammock3• 4 years ago

That's a cool website. Thanks for putting it together. I plug my nose every time I drive through NWI. And I have seen oil slicks on the water as far away as New Buffalo, Union Pier, etc

maxerickson• 4 years ago

EPA has a bunch of air quality stations in that area (they don't provide real time data though):

https://www.epa.gov/outdoor-air-quality-data/interactive-map...

(from there, click through to the map and then turn on layers of interest)

MattGaiser• 4 years ago

If you found a Volkswagen type thing, then sure. The problem is that it needs to be an utterly massive discovery to move the price of a company that probably has 100 factories.

titzer• 4 years ago

I used to be a libertarian. I used to think that private ownership of property, coupled with a free market (and something vague about an informed citizenship and consumers voting with their dollars) was the solution to most of modern society's ills.

It's articles like this that absolutely refute the idea that private ownership of property leads to good environmental outcomes (it doesn't; it leads to exploitative, destructive extraction of value from land, leaving behind carnage whose damage was estimated at below the bottom line, leaving a comfortable margin for profit) and that citizens would be proactive and well-informed (they aren't; they are constantly stonewalled, lied to, and officials stupid or paid off).

Now, ironically, in this advanced state of tech today, we have finally got the tools that citizens can be informed about the environmental impacts...of decades dead corporations and gluttonous barons that have long since moved on from the smoking, toxic craters they knowingly created. What an exciting future we have now, mining the graveyard of a century of bad policy, dealing with the lies and denial of others, and a complete lack of accountability. Meanwhile, these toxins, here a trace, there a torrent, sit as mute reminder of the horrible cost we've exacted on this planet (so far).

vkou• 4 years ago

Fortunately, Snowcrash's libertarian utopia has a solution to this exact problem, in the form of a little placard.

    SACRIFICE ZONE WARNING

    The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone.
    The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land
    whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value.

hammock3• 4 years ago

Sounds like all the Superfund sites across the country, for most of which remediation is on hold due to cost, etc. Except there are no placards. It's not altogether unlikely you have one in your backyard.

comrh• 4 years ago

It's not even fiction https://www.propublica.org/series/sacrifice-zones

pirate7873• 4 years ago

In real life this is SuperFund, and much of the state of West Virginia.

aksss3• 4 years ago

Libertarian != anarchy. What people mean by libertarian in relation to regulation varies considerably. The main thrusts of it are the non-aggression principle and the belief that there is no instantiation of government that is not systemically corrupt and self-interested (all because of the conflicts inherent in power over people). This doesn't require you to call for the abolition of government, but would not make additional bureaucracy your first solution to a given problem, either. If you tell me you're libertarian, I would assume nothing about where you stand on the EPA, but I would make assumptions about your instinctual reaction to foreign wars, trade policy, civil rights, and your default skepticism of a government's ability to carry out any given task effectively.

intrasight4• 4 years ago

They aren't that far apart - little government vs no self-government

MichaelZuo• 4 years ago

Seems like managing every decommissioned factory or industrial plot of land will require an enormous bureaucracy? Perhaps even larger than present day if we really want to clean them up properly and enforce it?

Sure it could be outsourced in part but that’s just moving around the goalposts because there would, and could only be, one customer.

cogman104• 4 years ago

This seems counter to every libertarian I've encountered in the wild. I've not met a libertarian that thinks any regulation is OK. An agency like the EPA, in particular, enforcing a large host of regulations is a ripe target for libertarian rage.

Most libertarians will say we shouldn't have publicly funded police, schools, or fire departments (and plenty a libertarian city is going without fire departments). How then could you envision a publicly funded environmental protection agency?

"Taxation is theft" is the credo of the libertarian.

chordalkeyboard• 4 years ago

weirdly enough we didn't even need a libertarian social order to result in rich people separating profits from liability.

coryrc2• 4 years ago

In a libertarian view, you aren't allowed to use anyone else's property, including to dump toxic chemicals. With strong property rights, they would be forced by the courts to completely make people whole.

In our system, the EPA allows companies to pollute your land, water, and air... so long as they don't do it too much or they bribe the officials enough.

spaetzleesser• 4 years ago

"In a libertarian view, you aren't allowed to use anyone else's property, including to dump toxic chemicals. With strong property rights, they would be forced by the courts to completely make people whole."

Having to go to the courts for everything will always favor people and institutions with money. The little guy simply can't afford lawyers, expert witnesses and so on to challenge players with deep pockets.

We need institutions like the EPA who enforce the rules and we need them to actually do that and not be captured by industry or underfunded by politics.

cogman104• 4 years ago

With strong property rights, they would be forced by the courts to completely make people whole.

We HAVE strong property rights in the US. If you can prove harm from a company you can make a lot of money from them. The issue is that proving harm is a very costly and time consuming endeavor.

How do you make everyone whole when the damage done by a company exceeds it's ability to repair? What about the irreparable like toxic waste in a water supply?

Even if we granted the premise that this is a better system, how is what we have today made better by installing cronies into the EPA which systematically gum up and deregulate as much as possible before having stronger property rights in place?

woodruffw4• 4 years ago

I thought this part was worth highlighting:

The group, which ultimately named itself Concerned Citizens for Responsible Remediation (CCRR), collected maps, dug into newspaper archives, and filed requests for public records. Members spoke with scientists knowledgeable about tannery chemicals and hired an environmental attorney with a background in geology to help them strategize.

This is a great example of civic action leading to results. But it's an even better reminder that you need nontrivial resources, in the form of time and money, to get companies to admit wrongdoing and to nudge the government (at any level) to do anything about it. For every ex-company town that succeeds in this kind of recognition, there are ten others (usually, but not always, poorer and not as white) that are quietly suffering from externalized pollution.

throwaway0a5e3• 4 years ago

People don't really care about 100yo pollution that makes them and their neighbors marginally more cancerous when $3+ gas actually hurts them today and the wastewater plant is a museum of obsolete equipment. There's a fine (yet blurry) line between suffering an externalized problem and having other bigger problems that are more deserving of resources. They're poor. Not stupid. They have different situational constraints and therefore chart a different course.

mikeyouse5• 4 years ago

Which is a perfect role for a strong regulator -- towns shouldn't have to weigh the tradeoffs of being poisoned. FWIW, Rockford isn't a poor town in any case, median income is like $70k/year which is very comfortable in the Midwest.

munk-a2• 4 years ago

We can do both. And we shouldn't ignore the 100yo polluters because they can make people more aware that the exact same irresponsible waste disposal that happened 100yo is still happening today under the guise of "clean industry".

Also - I'd challenge the fact that people don't care about 100yo pollution if you've ever talked to someone living in the neighborhood of a superfund site.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

having other bigger problems that are more deserving of resources.

They just have fewer resources. But saying they "don't really care" is like saying that somebody who skips buying medicine to buy food doesn't really care about medicine.

Thorrez• 4 years ago

Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, finds that sperm counts have dropped almost 60% since 1973. Following the trajectory we are on, Swan’s research suggests sperm counts could reach zero by 2045.
the average twentysomething woman today is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/18/toxic-...

PFAS though are just one of the chemicals listed as the cause.

mikeyouse5• 4 years ago

The fracking disposal industry will likely be one of the next big dominoes to fall. It's awash in lowest-bidder LLCs dumping all sorts of horrifying chemicals wherever they can get away with it.

A few have been busted so far but with the explosion of fracking / waste in the past 15 years - there's no way for regulators to stay on top of it.

https://www.opb.org/news/article/radioactive-fracking-waste-...

The agency found that Chemical Waste Management dumped nearly 1,284 tons of radioactive waste it received from Goodnight Midstream over a period of three years, totaling over 2.5 million pounds.

Initially, Chemical Waste Management had no records of a relationship with Goodnight Midstream. But it was later confirmed that the North Dakota company contracted a third party, Oilfield Waste Logistics, to dispose of its solid waste. Shipping manifests showed that OWL was sending Goodnight Midstream’s waste to Arlington.

https://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/2014/03/fracking_com...

The owner of a Youngstown oil- and gas-drilling company pleaded guilty today to ordering an employee to dump tens of thousands of gallons of fracking waste into a tributary of the Mahoning River.

pirate7873• 4 years ago

A lot of the salt brine being spread around on the roads to fight ice is radioactive fracking waste.

https://www.ehn.org/fracking-wastewater-spread-on-roads-2573...

germinalphrase• 4 years ago

I believe financial services regulators offer bounties for whistleblowers to expose malfeasance. Do environmental regulators do the same?

virtue3• 4 years ago

https://www.ecowatch.com/watch-viral-video-nebraska-man-asks...

Local Nebraska man shows up with fracking fluid to ask the commission if they would drink it themselves.

dijonman22• 4 years ago

poorer and not as white

You had me until here. Poverty isn’t racist. Correlation!=causation.

praxulus• 4 years ago

They didn't claim causation, they were just pointing out the correlation.

woodruffw4• 4 years ago

Poverty is a econometric descriptor. It isn't racist.

But to state the obvious: distributions of poverty belie the US's long history of racism.

pentae• 4 years ago

My take was that it was a racist comment, its as if OP was implying that non-whites are less likely to do something about it. Either way, I also hated it. Why do people always, always have to bring race into everything lately?

throwawaylinux• 4 years ago

It's sort of astounding that so much work has to be done to even get testing done. If it was well known that PFAS chemicals were used, surely testing would be prudent rather than just taking the word of the company (even if their claims that there were no spills in good faith and they weren't aware of contamination). Is testing really that costly?

For every ex-company town that succeeds in this kind of recognition, there are ten others (usually, but not always, poorer and not as white) that are quietly suffering from externalized pollution.

This caught my eye. What's the evidence for this? Are you saying non-white people are less likely to engage in this type of civic action for some reason?

ta988• 4 years ago

Testing costs between $50-$500 per sample in small amounts depending on the technique (detection quantification). If you have the equipment cost per sample is in the $20 range for quantification + operator time (you can process tens of samples per hour).

chasil• 4 years ago

The Intercept has run a number of articles on Teflon and the precursors.

I highly recommend that anyone reading these disable JavaScript.

https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/

https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/03/new-teflon-toxin-causes-...

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/19/teflon-toxin-contaminati...

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/15/the-teflon-toxin-goes-to...

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/18/pfoa-pfas-teflon-epa-lim...

mturk• 4 years ago

I grew up here. You could smell the tannery from miles away.

In sixth grade, we had a visit from a community member. I forget the nominal purpose, but it was in the sixth grade building which at the time was just down the street from WWW. I remember him saying to us, "Lots of people say the tannery smells terrible. I think it smells like money."

mark-r• 4 years ago

There's one thing I don't understand. These chemicals are ubiquitous in the environment because they're non-reactive - nothing breaks them down. But if they're non-reactive, how do they affect our health?

zejn• 4 years ago

If the chemicals are hard to break down, that does not mean they do not have effects on other chemicals surrounding them.

A good example is platinum: it is one of the least reactive metals, but can serve as catalyst for some reactions.

nosianu• 4 years ago

Chemicals don't need to chemically react. Especially for biology, merely existing is enough. Lots of biological regulation is done by influencing three-dimensional shapes of the huge highly complex structures called proteins. Organic chemistry especially is a science of complex three dimensional structures and its dynamic changes, at least as important as actually altering the chemical structure. Often they are not static but have moving parts, because not all bonds restrict movement of the atoms connected through that bond in relation to the other part.

Many have what's call binding sites - other molecules fitting to those sites won't be altered or alter the chemical structure of the protein. They alter the shape. Proteins are machines, pretty much literally. For example, there are channel proteins, and a molecule docking on a binding site of such a protein might open or close that channel for certain molecules. The variety of those molecular machinery (really, literally) is huge. You can influence machines not just by breaking them down, you can just throw a spanner between their gears.

Things that matter are not just shape and size, but also polarity of the parts. Polar components of a molecule influence polar components of proteins if they can get close enough, which influence the shape.

Binding sites, as only one example:

Description: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Structural_Biochemistry/Protei...

Images: https://www.google.com/search?q=binding+site+protein&source=...

Example - 22 second movie - for a protein-machine whose function it is to move stuff around: https://youtu.be/y-uuk4Pr2i8

Example for ion channels that open and close: https://youtu.be/ZKE8qK9UCrU

Last, a movie showing one of the most important and most famous proteins in any eukaryotic organism in action, the protein that generates ATP: https://youtu.be/kXpzp4RDGJI (Part of a free course: https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cell-biology-mitochondria)

dukeofdoom• 4 years ago

I made an offer on a building lot once. It was besides a peaceful meandering river, with nice nature. It didn't even occur to me that the site might be polluted. Eventually it was revealed to me that around a hundred years ago, it was a mechanical shop and the ground was contaminated with heavy metals.

hilbert42• 4 years ago

It is interesting that this article refers to a tannery and doesn't mention the word 'chromium' in the process.

In the 19th Century chromium was intoduced into the tanning process as an alterative or adjunct to using tannin/tannic acid for converting skins and hides into leather. It turned out that chromium was particularly effective in tanning leather albeit a toxic one. (It has been since abandoned for this purpose.)

I'm therefore surprised not to see mention of large-scale chromium pollution on the site - given the age of the plant it'd be very surprising if chromium wasn't present.

Given the toxicity of chromium salts I'm also surprised it isn't a big deal in and of itself (and that chromium isn't mentioned by name as the principal polluting agent).

BTW, it's a shame that chromium is toxic because it's an excellent agent for preserving leather.

This fact was brought home to me a few years back when I saw a documentary that showed part of a WWI battlefield in Belgium that was being made way for a factory. As part of the preparation, battlefield archeologists were scouring and documenting the area before the factory was built and in the process they came across the bodies of soldiers from that conflict.

Essentially, nothing remained of these soldiers other than their skeletons and their boots - and the boots were in near perfect condition in that the chromium used in their tanning process had preserved them that way under the moist ground for nearly a century. Apparently, the chromium salts in the leather had stopped any bacterial action taking hold, thus keeping the leather well preserved.

Citizen sleuths exposed pollution from a century-old Michigan factory (2019)

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