Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 22, 1992 TAG: 9203230152
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT McCONNELL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Lawrence Summers, the World Bank's chief economist, has suggested that "dirty industries" properly belong in less-developed countries. In his view, "the economic logic" behind dumping toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is "impeccable": Because the social cost of pollution is measured by lost wages due to pollution-induced sickness and mortality, world-pollution cost can be reduced by transferring such effects from high-wage to low-wage countries.
If so, the time has clearly come to revise the concept of "economic logic" to include common-sense environmental principles, the foremost of which is: Air and water pollution do not recognize jurisdictional boundaries.
For confirmation, Summers might do worse than contact the citizens of Selma, a Virginia hamlet across the Jackson River from Clifton Forge. Selma is the site of the infamous Kim-Stan waste dump, which in May 1990 was seized and closed by the state following numerous complaints of pollution violations. During 1989 and 1990, the landfill was the dump site for up to 500,000 tons of waste from out of state, most of it from New York.
After accruing revenues of nearly $7 million, the landfill's owners filed for bankruptcy, leaving the state to pay cleanup costs of up to $5 million. The state, pleading poverty, refuses to take aggressive action to stem the pollution, allowing the leachate to seep into the Jackson River just above its confluence with the James.
The issue of exporting waste is also being played out on the international stage. Dutch environmental officials, for example, are gravely concerned with the impact on the Netherlands environment of pollution in the Rhine, pollution produced upriver in Germany and elsewhere.
Similarly, environmental scientists from Sweden, Finland and other Baltic states decry the ruination of the Baltic Sea's environment due in part to water and air pollution from Poland. According to presentations last year at the International Conference on Environmental Pollution, water in most Polish rivers is so tainted as to be unfit for industrial use, much less municipal water supplies. Comparably poor water-quality in Czechoslovakia, the former East Germany and the Soviet Union has likewise contributed to the degradation of the Baltic Sea environment.
At the international level, it is necessary to go no farther than the border between Mexico and the United States to demonstrate the adverse impact of "exported" pollution.
Over the past decade, stringent environmental-protection laws have been enacted in California to improve air quality over Southern California, the nation's most polluted urban area. Among the impacts of such legislation has been the migration of many industries from Southern California to Mexico. Called maquiladoras, such firms generally set up shop just over the border.
Although some Californians might be willing to trade the loss of well-paying jobs for a supposedly cleaner environment, the fact is that most of the pollution probably finds its way back into California by the back door.
Consider:
More than 500 foreign-owned firms are in Tijuana, a short trolley-ride from downtown San Diego, many of which have "emigrated" from the United States. Most discharge polluted water into the Tijuana River, which empties northward into a wildlife refuge in the United States. Up to 12 million gallons per day of raw sewage, further contaminated with untreated industrial wastes, flows into California from Tijuana. These industrial toxins threaten to ruin a $200 million binational sewage-treatment plant set to open in 1995.
According to a recent survey, 78 percent of furniture plants which relocated from Southern California to Mexico did so because of California's strict anti-pollution laws. In Tijuana, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, water samples from a relocated furniture manufacturer's outfall pipe emptying into a small stream were analyzed. The concentration of perchloroethylene, a known carcinogen, was found to be 18 to 24 times higher than U.S. drinking-water standards.
American firms operating in Mexico are required to ship hazardous wastes back to the United States for processing. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 6.3 percent of such firms complied in 1991. Furthermore, such firms are required by U.S. law to pre-treat industrial waste before dumping it into Mexican municipal sewage-treatment plants. Lead concentration in the Tijuana River in 1990 was measured at 768 parts per billion, 100 times the maximum-permitted U.S. standard, suggesting that the law is regularly flouted.
Relocation of industries to Mexico has resulted in a massive increase in truck traffic between offices in the United States and plants in Mexico. Mexican-registered trucks are not required to meet California's strict emission standards and are of course exempt from state inspection.
Thus, exportation of pollution from developed nations to less-developed countries or from rich to poor states, far from being an example of "economic logic," poses a severe threat to regional environmental health. It is far better to regulate emissions and waste within one's own borders than to encourage their exportation to poorer jurisdictions where enforcement of environmental laws is less likely.
Otherwise-responsible officials who defend exporting pollution should instead carefully review the evidence for its growing, and global, impact on the planet's health. They should listen to the residents of Selma, Va.
Robert McConnell is associate professor of geology at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg.
by CNB