DK GreenRoots

Projects that discharge harmful chemicals or pollutants into our environment are allowed to proceed without consideration of the costs to people and environment.  Eventually, after the delay and obstruct game is exhausted, people learn the truth about the harmful nature of the pollutants. It may be decades later, after many people have suffered the pain and suffering of illness or the death of loved ones. So, the companies get corporate welfare in the form of a free waste disposal system while the projects are operated, and after the injustice of contaminating people and environment, taxpayers get to pay for closing down towns that are just too toxic. People, communities, environment are all just so disposable. But what do you do when glaciers have stored chemicals for decades and now release these pollutants banked for years?

Melting Alpine glaciers are now releasing pollutants. In the 1970s, chemicals were discharged into Oberaar Lake in Switzerland primarily from the production of plastics, electronics, pesticides and fragrances. After it was realized that the compounds were toxic, they were banned in the 1980s and 1990s. However, researchers found that some of the banned chemicals, such as pesticides linked with Parkinson's disease, have been released into the lake at increasing rates during the 1990s. Researchers have concluded that the culprit is climate change:

Bogdal reckons that a glacier feeding the lake has been storing these chemicals for decades, and is releasing them as it melts. This process could be dramatically sped up by global warming, he warns.

This may not be an isolated case of pollutants coming back to haunt people and environment.

The problem isn't limited to Alpine glaciers. Since these chemicals would have been transported great distances via the atmosphere before they were frozen into ice, many other glaciers around the world may be contaminated. Toxic chemicals have previously been found in polar regions - putting arctic wildlife at risk.

Melting glaciers are not the only sources of a "reawakening" of pollutants. Rural communities in 9 states are still suffering from groundwater polluted by a chemical called trichloroethylene or TCE used for cleaning and maintaining nuclear missile sites. TCE is linked to a number of health problems:

Exposure to high concentrations of the chemical could cause nervous system problems, liver and lung damage, abnormal heartbeat, coma and death, according to the Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. TCE also may cause cancer, other government agencies say.

The government did not "identify TCE as a high priority" until 1989 when the EPA adopted a drinking water standard to regulate the chemical. After 4 years of study, a preliminary report in 2001 by EPA scientists reached the "alarming conclusion" that TCE was "as much as 40 times more likely to cause cancer than the EPA had previously believed." Instead of implementing tough new standards to reduce public exposure to TCE, the Pentagon engaged in battle mode to delay regulation and by 2003, the EPA's TCE "assessment was cast aside." The ticking health clock continued as a 2003 internal Air Force report "warned that the Pentagon alone has 1,400 sites contaminated with TCE."

As a result, any conclusion about whether millions of Americans were being contaminated by TCE was delayed indefinitely. … If the EPA's 2001 draft risk assessment was correct, then possibly thousands of the nation's birth defects and cancers every year are due in part to TCE exposure, according to several academic experts.

The Camp Lejeune tap water was toxic for 3 decades. Even after the military discovered the tap water was tainted, they allowed military families to continue drinking the water for 5 more years before shutting the wells down.

It is not just the military bases that face TCE contamination:

The public is exposed to TCE in several ways, including drinking or showering in contaminated water and breathing air in homes where TCE vapors have intruded from the soil. Limiting such exposures, even at current federal regulatory levels, requires elaborate treatment facilities that cost billions of dollars annually. In addition, some cities, notably Los Angeles, have high ambient levels of TCE in the air.

The U.S. is now also awakening to the reality of mining operations contaminating people with lead. The residents live in a town surrounded by hundreds of acres of chat or contaminated mining waste "left over from the mineral extraction process":

Residents of the mine-waste polluted town of Treece have about 60 percent more lead in their bloodstream than the average Kansan, according to the results of medical tests performed last month.

Tests indicate that children have lead poisoning:

One of the 16 children tested last month showed a blood-lead level higher than 10, the point at which state health officials define lead poisoning. …Combined with test results from 2005 to 2008, the health survey estimated that 8.8 percent of children in Treece would have lead levels of more than 10, compared with 3.8 percent of children across Cherokee County, which includes Treece, and 2.9 percent of children across the state.

Last month, the Senate passed a bill to remedy the contamination by authorizing the EPA to "buy out the community" just like it did for another town. The same corporate welfare that created the injustice is used to ostensibly solve the mess.