"When it comes to exposure to hazardous waste, Chicago is a tale of two cities divided by color and income. On the South Side, neighborhoods like Roseland, Englewood, and Riverdale are over 95 percent black. Across the Windy City, fewer than one in five households live below the poverty line, but eight of nine communities on [...]
"“This is personal,” says 25-year-old organizer Ashley Hernandez. “This is my home, this is my family, this is my health.” Hernandez’s parents, immigrants who fled El Salvador’s civil war, had worked diligently to save for their own home in Wilmington by working as a truck dispatcher and a housekeeper. But their home was just 500 [...]
The Superfund program has long lacked the funding required to remediate the hundreds of languishing sites that continue to endanger communities across the country. Scott Pruitt’s answer to this dilemma? Promoting redevelopment. At face value, incentivizing the cleanup of contaminated land through redevelopment seems to be a win-win solution that protects human health and revitalizes [...]
"Federica Armstrong discovered when she moved to Palo Alto, Calif., that Silicon Valley is not what it seems. The world’s capital of tech innovation prefers to keep its superlatives, good and bad, under wraps. Along its Prius-choked roads, it looks like Anywhere, U.S.A.: single-family-home suburbs south of San Francisco, bordered by chain stores, auto dealerships and [...]
“West Virginia is one of the most beautiful places in the world. And people are tired of being collateral damage and they’re tired of living in a toxic waste dump,” Paula Jean Swearengin, a West Virginia native, told ThinkProgress. “We’re just wondering if we do get on the NPL [National Priority List], will any of [...]
"Robert Taylor isn't sure why he's alive. "My mother succumbed to bone cancer. My brother had lung cancer," he ticks them off on his fingers. "My sister, I think it was cervical cancer. My nephew lung cancer." A favorite cousin. That cousin's son. Both neighbors on one side, one neighbor on the other. "And here [...]
"Donald Trump on Friday nominated a Dow Chemicals lawyer to head-up an Environmental Protection Agency unit that oversees hazardous waste disposal and chemical spills from toxic“Superfund” sites. Dow Chemicals facilities are involved in dozens of Superfund projects. Dow had accrued $219 million in accrued obligations for remediating Superfund sites, according to the company’s fourth [...]
Scientists at Norway’s University of Bergen found that lung function decline in women regularly using cleaning products was equivalent over the period to those with a 20 cigarettes a day smoking habit. "When you think of inhaling small particles from cleaning agents that are meant for cleaning the floor and not your lungs, maybe it [...]
"Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley recently noticed a startling fact about kids in the lead-poisoned city of Flint, Michigan: They have become increasingly bad at reading since the water crisis began in 2014. A state government report showed that, from the year 2014 to the year 2017, third-grade reading proficiency in the city dropped [...]
The small white and maroon trucks that deliver the waste often come at night, she says. They contain what regulatory agencies innocently refer to as produced water, or brine, a slurry generated during fracking operations that can contain more than 1,100 chemicals and which is carcinogenic, flammable, and radioactive. Garman says she and her son [...]
