EPA: Mandate Coal Ash Disposal Rules & No More Dumping on Poor Neighborhoods!
- by: Susan V
- recipient: US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Conservation and Recovery
EPA has been too soft on utility companies far too long. In 2000 EPA tried to federally regulate coal ash as hazardous waste, but the industry went ballistic and EPA backed off and focused on recycling instead of demanding safe disposal.
Now Coal Ash - containing lead, arsenic, mercury, and other toxins - is being dumped in landfills that lack proper lining - and in disproportionately poor, minority neighborhoods where it’s adversely affecting the health of residents. Mother Jones says the dumping of this toxic by-product of coal production has “quietly become one of America's worst environmental justice problems."
In Uniontown AL, for example, one of these landfills is located directly across from homes where children play. The contaminated coal ash that pollutes the surrounding air came from the tons of toxic slurry released after the disastrous dam rupture at Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee in 2008.
Earthjustice senior attorney Lisa Evans told MJ that "We've always known how to dispose of coal ash." EPA says the waste should be contained within enclosed and lined landfills to prevent it leaching into the soil or blowing through the air. However, the rules are voluntary - states don’t have to follow them, and as the Uniontown example shows, they often don’t.
Poor minorities should not have to bear the cost of weathy companies' refusal to pay for proper toxic waste disposal.
Sign this petition to demand that EPA make rules on coal ash disposal mandatory in all states.
To the EPA Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery:
Mother Jones’ investigation into the dumping of coal ash into improperly contained landfills in predominantly poor minority neighborhoods led them to characterize this widespread practice as “environmental racism.”
MJ says it found “about 200 locations where spills are known to have contaminated the surrounding water and air.” And according to MJ, EPA is well aware “that low-income, minority communities are disproportionately affected—1.5 million people of color live within the catchment zone of a coal ash storage facility.”
Even worse, reports MJ, “Most coal ash landfills and ponds do not conduct monitoring, so the majority of water contamination goes undetected."
Also according to MJ, EPA‘s Barry Breen told members of Congress in 2009 that "Due to the mobility of these metals and the large size of a typical disposal unit, metals, especially arsenic, may leach at levels of potential concern,” and further EPA data reveals that people living near disposal sites have a “1 in 50 chance of developing cancer from drinking arsenic-contaminated water.”
This is what happens when EPA allows utility companies to pretend that coal ash isn’t hazardous waste and leaves it up to them to self-regulate. Poor minorities end up paying for what companies save in disposal costs - with poor health, and, considering the lead and mercury exposures, a potential for decreased learning capacity among exposed children, making it more likely that they will never escape the poverty they were born into.
Not surprisingly Duke Energy has already considered dumping the waste from its 2014 spill into the Dan River near a poor, minority neighborhood in Eden, North Carolina.
Even though EPA has laid out rules for regulation, monitoring and disposal of coal ash waste, its website says, under question #22 about “implementing this final rule, “ that “EPA is strongly encouraging States to adopt at least the federal minimum criteria into their regulations.” As MJ noted, EPA has not made adoption of its final rule mandatory.
Poor adults and children should not have to bear the costs of what wealthy companies should be paying for and EPA should have made mandatory long ago - proper disposal of hazardous coal ash waste.
I, the undersigned, insist EPA make its coal ash disposal rules mandatory immediately.
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