It's behind the paywall, but the Morning News and Randy Lee Loftis commit real journalism today in the form of an article on the dangers of Particulate Matter pollution, even at so-called "moderate" levels. It's based on two recent studies, inlcuding one we profiled here last week, but then does the right thing by localizing what the results of those studies mean for DFW air quality. The answer isn't pretty. It turns out there were an average of 41 days a year from 2007 to 2011when PM readings at one of two monitoring stations in Dallas were in the range that's associated with increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. By comparison, DFW experienced 38 days last summer when the new 75 parts per billion ozone standard was exceeded. Considering that there are about three times as many ozone monitors as PM monitors in DFW, you can see where some folks might think we have a problem: for more than a month every year, we breathe air that can make us sick or kill us. Unfortunately for future victims, it appears it will take some kind of threat from the federal government, or the courts, or both to make PM pollution as much of a target for control as ozone pollution, even thought the scientific evidence continues to mount that particulates cause much more widespread public health damage. That's because state and local governments risk losing federal highway dollars if they don't try and reduce ozone pollution, or smog. There is no such threat driving public policy regarding any other air pollutant. There are almost 40 posts on PM pollution listed in our category directory for this blog. Many of these summarize recent studies showing how pervasive PM pollution is and how insidious its health effects are. It damages you by being both a piece of dirty soot that can make it hard to breathe, and as a carrier of any number of toxic chemicals that attach themselves when the piece of soot is created. PM can have lead or mercury on it. It can have benzene or formaldehyde. It's a microscopic suitcase for toxins. PM can cross the lung/blood vessel barrier and travel throughout your body, affecting your brain, your reproductive health or your immune system. It's the most underestimated, and under-regulated pollution. Federal standards for PM pollution are stuck way behind the times and need to be updated, but the Obama Administration decided not to go forward with trying to write a new standard in its first term - probably because of projections about how far-reaching the solutions to PM pollution will have to be - taking in everything from cars to power plants to diesel trucks, to cement plants. You've seen the howling from industry over new ozone standards and power plant mercury rules. Imagine the reaction to a tougher PM standard. Yet that is the direction the science is sending us. We've often been critical of the dearth of local environmental reporting in DFW, but this piece today is an excellent example of he kind of work a major metropolitan daily needs to be churning out on a regular basis. Kudos to the News and Loftis.   Read More

It's from last week, but this NY Times piece on how the Chinese government was forced to:  a) acknowledge an air pollution problem it didn't want to admit to, and b) then actively monitor that problem despite it not wanting to, is a great example of grassroots citizen action using nothing more than information as a weapon. The government isn't telling you the truth about what's in the air? Then go measure it yourself and publicize the results via the Internet. In this case, just the simple act of publicly reporting the facts shamed the government into action. The mere release of correct information was all it took to bring down this totalitarian house of cards. Often, the most formidable opponents and systems end up being movie-set thin, able to be knocked over with the a good hard and well-directed push from citizens. What a great reminder of how powerful a little information can be on the 25th anniversary of the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory, which is credited with shaming American companies to reduce their own pollution by just honestly reporting what they were putting into the air and water.  A Chinese activist notes that "...at the end of the day, the people spoke so loudly that they made their voice heard.” Amen, and pass the information.   Read More

The chart to the right is a screen grab taken directly from the EPA's own TRI website (Toxics Release Inventory) ranking the largest Dioxin polluters in Texas in 2009. The emission numbers don't look all that big but that's deceiving because Dioxin is the Black Mamba of industrial poisons. It's so toxic, it's measured in grams and not pounds or tons. It's a carcinogen, wreaks havoc with hormones and immune systems in adults, children and fetuses, and has a variety of other nasty human health impacts. There is no "safe" threshold level of exposure to Dioxin. It's what made Agent Orange so toxic. It's why Love Canal, New York and Times Beach, Missouri are federal Superfund sites. Dioxin is associated with hazardous waste incinerators, large chemical plants and paper mills because it's formed when chlorine is heated or burned. Now, knowing all that, maybe you'd think the cement plants in Midlothian would be the largest local source of the stuff. But no. Look at #9 on EPA's list. It's Exide's lead smelter in Frisco. Look at the company it's keeping.  Chemical plants, power plants, pulp mills and refineries. There's only one other North Texas plant in the top 22 (out of 74 total Dioxin polluters in Texas) and that's an aluminum smelter in Commerce. In 2009, the Frisco smelter released more Dioxin than any cement plant in Texas. More than the Valero Refinery in Corpus Christi, or the ExxonMobil Refinery in Beaumont. More than the Martin Lake coal-fired power plant. In 2009, Exide was Collin County's only source of industrial Dioxin. There were no facilities in Denton, Dallas or Tarrant Counties emitting Dioxin. And this high ranking was based on Exide's claim that most of the Dioxin that the smelter created onsite went "poof" after being treated, and left only 2 of 13 grams behind. If the company is fudging only a little bit, it means the smelter could in fact be in the top five for that year. What's remarkable is that all of the other polluters at the top of that list are much, much bigger operations than Exide's doublewide-looking smelter in Frisco. When it comes to the most toxic substance ever tested by EPA, Exide is the little smelter that belched. It produces Dioxin numbers all out of proportion with it size. Since reporting for Dioxin began in 2000, Exide's Frisco smelter has estimated producing over 94 grams, and releasing over 18. That latter amount alone is enough to give every resident of Frisco cancer several times over. But unlike heavier stuff coming out of the stacks at Exide, Dioxin can travel far, far downwind. Way past the smelter's puny "non-attainment" zone.  Way past the Frisco city limits. So next time you see some news about those citizens trying to relocate that old smelter, maybe you won't consider their efforts so provincial, and instead write them a check for helping you reduce your average daily intake of poison.   Read More

Polluters love the dark. They use it to hide what they do. Ask anyone who lives adjacent to an industrial facility when the pollution is its worst. "At night, and on weekends and holidays." When the inspectors won't be coming out until long after the evidence of the violation is dispersed into the air or water. Polluters also love the darkness of secrecy. "Trade secrets" usually mean toxic ones. Keeping people in the dark. Conversely, polluters hate the spotlight. They don't want their pollution made public. Information is indeed power. Sometimes, just the act of knowing is enough to shame a polluter into change. That's what made the creation of the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory so simple and radical 25 years ago. Inspired by the incredible scale of the 1984 Bhopal India Union Carbide accident that left at least 4,000 people dead and another half-million injured, a worldwide "right-to-know" movement sprung up demanding that people be informed about what hazards industry was imposing on them involuntarily. Before 1987, it was impossible to know how much toxic pollution a cement plant, or lead smelter, or refinery, or steel mill, or power plant actually produced. After 1987, it was possible to get a fuzzy self-reported picture that nevertheless was powerful enough to fuel a wave of national activism and voluntary emissions reductions. It's hard to imagine now because everyone, including the media, takes this information for granted. But back then, the annual reports were treated as major announcements - with Texas always ranking one or two for total toxic releases. Local papers would do their own top ten regional polluters lists. Activists used the inventories to point to large sources of specific pollutants. There was a certain "Scarlet Letter" aspect to winding up on these lists. "Coming Clean" is a new book about that landmark transfer of knowledge. As its website notes, it's "the first book to investigate the process of information disclosure as a policy strategy for environmental protection. This process, which requires that firms disclose information about their environmental performance, is part of an approach to environmental protection that eschews the conventional command-and-control regulatory apparatus, which sometimes leads government and industry to focus on meeting only minimal standards."  Brad Plummer at the Washington Post uses the book's release to link with EPA's debut of a brand new Greenhouse Gas national emission inventory that Agency officials hope will have the same impact on the kinds of pollution making global warming worse. We did out part by posting the North Texas results last week. The major problem we see with this strategy is that some of these polluters are absolutely shameless.  Read More

EPA has released the 2010 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) numbers and the news isn't good. What are called "toxic releases" to the air land and water increased by 16% over 2009 levels. Particularly disturbing is a 10% rise in dioxin pollution. Dioxin is the powerful chemical behind Agent Orange woes. It's a human carcinogen and potent Endrocrine disruptor. It's so toxic that it's not measured in pounds or ounces, but in grams. It's undergoing a long overdue complete health effects review inside EPA right now that the chemical industry is desperate to delay or kill. Maybe you think this isn't your problem. Think again. Cement kilns are large emitters of dioxin and chances are you're downwind of six of those. Smelters turn out to be a large source as well, but you sure don't hear about that in connection with the Exide lead smelter in Frisco do you? Even though it churns out dioxin in cement plant-like amounts. According to the EPA, 2010's increase in Dioxin is attributed to mining industries - like smelters - and incinerators and cement plants burning hazardous waste.   Read More

Stung by criticism that it wasn't doing enough about cracking down on chronic polluters, and facing a tough re-election fight, the Bush Administration in 2004 established a secret "watch list" to help it identify the worst bad actors. If, after nine months of knowing about a critical environmental violation at a faclity, there still hadn't been any enforcement action, the facility took its place on the list. As of September of this year, that list had grown to 1,600 facilities. Thanks to NPR and the Center for Public Integrity, you can look at and investigate a map of the US identifying those 1600 plants, including over 100 in the DFW area when you use the Zoom tool the NPR website provides. Many names are familiar - TXI, Holcim, Ash Grove and the Ameristeel steel plant in Midltohian all make the list, as does the Exide lead smelter in Frisco, as does Magnablend, the Waxahachie plant that just blew up, as does places you might suspect like the GM plant in Arlington or the Bell plant in Ft. Worth, However, there are lots and lots of places that maybe you haven't suspected, like the Americhem plant in Mansfield, or Valley Solvents and Chemicals in North Ft. Worth. The sites on the list are rated 1 to 5 on a EPA "Risk Factor Scale," with 5 being the maximum risk. All of those sites we just listed are all rated at Risk Factor 5 - that is the combination and/or volume of chemicals released make them among the most dangerous sites on that "watch list." But wait, there's more. Within this larger watch list, there's a second, more selective list of REALLY bad actors that numbers 464. Almost 10% of those sites are in Texas, but only two are in DFW: GE Engine Services on FAA Blvd. in Ft. Worth and our good friends at Ash Grove Cement. You remember Ash Grove - the owners of the last obsolete wet kilns in Texas that refuse to modernize their cement plant just south of DFW. As we remarked on Monday when DFW officially replaced Houston as the "Smog Capital of Texas," DFW hasn't historically been associated with dirty air and dirty industries the way the Gulf Coast has been. Unfortunately, that's changing.   Read More

It's hard to believe, but as late as 1988, an American citizen could not find out what kinds of chemicals an industrial plant in their neighborhood were using or storing on-site, nor the kinds or volumes of pollution being emitted by the facility. There was no way to access that information, no law compelling companies to disclose what hazards they might be imposing on a community. In short, there was no "Right-to-Know." That changed with the passage of a bill introduced and passed 25 years ago by Senator Frank Lautenberg, who was inspired by the Bhopal/Dow Chemical disaster in India in 1984 and is still around to celebrate the anniversary. The annual release of TRI information has become so routine that it hardly gets any notice anymore, but in the late 1980's to mid 1990's these annual totals were shocking evidence that air toxics were everywhere, and that the local chemical plant down the road was a source of poison for the people surrounding it. Information is power, and having this information and making it public was enough to shame many corporations into reducing their toxic pollution. What they were doing was drug out into the harsh light of day, and, like many things that were once done in dark corners, the mere exposure was enough to change the public relations calculations, and the practice. TRI is how we know that the Exide lead smelter in Frisco has dumped at least 80,000 pounds of lead into the air since 1988. It's how we know about the emissions of the cement plants in Midlothian, or the GM factory in Arlington, or any other major point sources of pollution. Moreover, after TRI came TRI Explorer and the RTK net folks who take the EPA's data base of reports submitted and allow you to search by zip code, city, facility name and other variables. These days, you're now literally only a click or two away from knowing which toxics the manufacturing plant down the street from your new house is releasing into the environment.  That's progress and it was made possible by a Senator who cared and citizens on the ground who helped generate support for it.   Read More