We also need to talk about protection of the environment. Politicians sometimes talk about this but they don't act because they fear that action would be expensive, either for the government or for the private interests they serve.
But the lack of environmental protection is far more expensive than action because it allows industries, farms and some governments to off-load expenses onto the public. Government and industrial economists call these costs 'externalities' and they ignore them, but they are very real. According to the American Lung Association diseases caused by auto exhaust cost the US $40 billion a year.[1] Pollution is also a threat to our food supplies -- it has already destroyed most of the Great Lakes fishery and may be a factor in the collapse of the deep sea fishery.
But the answer to most pollution problems is one that will warm the heart of the most rabid free market capitalist. User pays. No more, no less.
In one sense that is already the case because we all cause pollution and we all bear the cost but, because the cost is borne by all, no individual has a personal motive to reduce it. If the cost of industrial pollution is borne directly by the people who produce it, they will have a reason to reduce it.
The user-pays principle has the added advantage that if the user pays the cost of the cleanup, the cleanup is liable to be more efficient. If the government pays for the cleanup, it makes sense for whoever does the work to make it as expensive as possible.
The first pollution scare that I recall was in the early 1960s when ecologists reported that effluent from municipal sewage systems was polluting Lake Ontario. The provincial government of the day responded by spending millions of dollars on sewage processing plants, but when the fuss died down there were a couple of problems with those plants.
The most obvious was that they offered only primary and sometimes secondary treatment, and the effluent they produced was still pollution. Another was that pollution was and still is measured as a percentage of effluent, so the easy way to meet 'standards' with an inadequate treatment plant is to install a big fresh-water pump and mix the effluent with clean water before you discharge it. The total amount of pollution discharged is the same as before but, if you test it, any single unit of effluent is 'cleaner.'
As they say in some circles, 'the solution to pollution is dilution.'
But the more serious problem with the sewage plants of the 1960s and 1970s was that the pressure to build new sewage plants was supported at least in part by the people who had built the old ones, and they were more interested in selling more of the same than in developing new ideas. I was a newspaper reporter in Belleville Ontario at the start of the fuss and several times the county Medical Officer of Health told me that the ideal way to handle the city's sewage would be to pipe it to a remote forest area and spray it on the trees.
That would have disposed of the sewage safely and produced an economic benefit -- bigger trees -- at the same time. Now, some modern small-scale sewage-treatment systems use 'artificial wetlands' to process effluent more completely than any mechanical system.
But the important point about the MoH's suggestion is that it would have produced a long-term economic benefit, rather than a short-term cost. The companies that build and equip sewage plants supported campaigns to build new plants but once the plants were built they had no further interest in them and, in some cases, the plants have been allowed to deteriorate. If a sewage treatment operation can sell its product for a profit the management will maintain and expand the plant in order to maintain and increase the profit.
And, one way or another, it should be possible to make a product from sewage that can be sold for a profit. Back in the 1940s and 1950s some American cities processed sewage to produce commercial fertilizer and if they did not make a profit at least they reduced their costs. As mentioned earlier, a test plant in Carthage Missouri converts waste from a turkey-packing plant into fuel oil and industrial chemicals.
We need to encourage and, where necessary, subsidize sewage disposal systems that process sewage to produce oil, plastics, or other useful products. When oil refineries or plastics manufacturers bid against each other to buy our sewage, we will know that we have found an acceptable process.
For the short term, we might look for low-tech solutions. I've often wondered about the potential for sewage treatment by zebra mussels, which are said to clean water so completely that fish starve.
Imagine a large tank filled with wire screens that support millions of zebra mussels, which would clean the water that passes by them.
The water might then have to be sand-filtered, to eliminate the chance of mussel-spawn getting loose but, because the water would be clean, this need not be an expensive process.
The frames that support the mussels would be dated and, before the mussels are ready to spawn, they would be lifted out. We could pass each frame through a set of rollers to crush and remove the mussels, then seed it with mussel spawn before it's returned to the main tank. The crushed mussels, a combination of meat and shells, could be used for chicken feed or fertilizer or as feedstock for a chemical process.
That might work or it might not, but it's a suggestion. The important principle is the one I stated earlier -- we need to look at pollution on a 'user pays' basis. If a town or a city or a private industry pollutes a lake or a river, that town or city of industry is responsible for a complete clean-up. Because a strict application of this principle would probably bankrupt most of the towns, cities and industries in the country we could not apply it everywhere immediately, but it should be applied immediately to all new developments and it could be phased in over time to existing problems.
DDT and PCB
The second big ecology scare I remember was the kufuffle about DDT, sparked by Rachel Carsen's book "Silent Spring." Carsen was worried that DDT seems to affect birds' reproductive success and since then we have discovered other problems but, while most agree that we used to use far too much DDT, some scientists think the global ban was a mistake.
One of them is the late Dixie Lee Ray, a biologist whose career included terms as director of the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, governor of the State of Washington, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission and Assistant Secretary of State in the US Bureau of Oceans.
Ray notes that in 1948, before they began spraying mosquitoes with DDT, about 2.8 million people in Sri Lanka suffered from malaria. In 1963 there were only 17 known cases of malaria in the country but in 1968, a couple of years after the spraying stopped, there were a million cases and in 1969 there were about 2.5 million.[2]
Before 1946 the world averaged about 200 million cases of malaria and two million deaths a year. The disease had almost disappeared by 1960 but DDT was banned in many areas in 1972 and by 1978 there were an estimated 800 million cases and 8.2 million deaths a year.[3]
DDT was banned because it was said to kill birds but, Ray says, annual counts of birds by the Audubon Society show an increase during the years DDT was used. Ecologist say the problem is that when birds are exposed to DDT they lay eggs with shells too thin but, Ray says, the problem of thin egg shells had been noted for decades and is generally attributed to diet problems, nervous tension and other causes. Quail that were fed massive doses of DDT hatched nearly as high a percentage of their eggs as quail that were not fed DDT, and pheasants that ate DDT hatched a higher percentage of their eggs than pheasants that did not eat it.[4]
Statistics also show that deaths from liver cancer in the United States decreased by 30% from 1944-72 -- the years of heaviest DDT use.[5]
Concern about DDT overlapped the ecological panic over PolyChlorinated Biphenol, commonly called "PCB". It's a synthetic oil that has one dominant characteristic. It is stable, and will not react at normal temperatures.
It's a good coolant for big transformers and other electrical equipment because it does not break down under electrical sparks. Because it was cheap it was also used for other purposes, including road oil to control dust on dirt roads.
Activists tell us that because PCB is very stable animals that eat it can't break it down and as one animal eats another the PCB is concentrated. An amoeba that eats PCB gets very little of it but the insect that eats amoebas that eat PCB gets all the PCB that millions of amoebas have eaten. The fish that eats insects gets all the PCB that thousands of insects have eaten and a bird that eats fish gets all the PCB that hundreds of fish have eaten. Because the PCB is never broken down, it keeps moving up the food chain.
At the top of the chain some birds get very high concentrations of PCB which interfere with the formation of egg shells. This reduces their breeding success.
That's the conventional wisdom. On the other hand biologist Ray says there are eight or ten strains of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria that will break PCB down, and tests show they can reduce the concentration of PCB in water or soil by 60 to 65 percent every 20 days.[6]
There is also a secondary problem that when PCB is burned at low temperatures it produces chemicals called dioxins, which are believed to be potential causes of cancer.
Conventional wisdom tells us that PCB is itself carcinogenic, but that seems to be a myth. Men who made electrical transformers often worked with their hands and arms up to the elbows in PCB, and they had no more cancer than the average of the population.[7]
Still, it made sense to stop using PCB for road oil and other uses that distributed it directly into the environment. PCB used in transformers and other electrical equipment did no immediate harm but, because transformers can leak, it made sense to find some other fluid to cool them.
Because of the myth that PCB is dangerous we have regulations that make it expensive to dispose of and, because legal disposal is expensive, some shady contractors just dump it. We know this happens because, from time to time, we find barrels of PCB in city dumps and even by the roadside. If some is dumped in barrels, it's a safe bet that some people save the barrel and just dump the oil.
PCB works better than other materials that are now approved for coolants in transformers and if it were legal to use it, the oil in a junked transformer would be too valuable to dump. Instead the junk dealer would carefully drain it and sell it to a manufacturer who would re-refine it and use it again.
PCB is valuable because it does not break down and, because it does not break down, it could be kept in use almost forever. Instead, the regulation that bans the use of PCB ensures that much of it will be dumped.
If we are not going to allow the use of PCB we have to find a way to get rid of it. That should be no problem because if you mix it with regular fuel PCB will burn in a diesel engine and provide about as much power as diesel fuel. Because the PCB will burn completely only when the engine is working hard it should be used only in an engine that works against a constant load -- such as an electrical generator or a pump -- to avoid the formation of dioxins. That's no problem because we have thousands of diesel powered generators and pumps in Canada.
But there is a still better way to get rid of PCB. Cement kilns around the world are fueled by powdered coal or oil. Tests at a cement plant in Mississauga proved that if PCB is mixed with the fuel oil burned in the kiln it is destroyed completely. Even the chlorine, which is released in any other form of disposal, is bound into the cement and it reduces the need to add chlorine from other sources. PCB is burned in cement kilns in France and other European countries.[8]
But not in Canada. Because of the myth that PCB is dangerous, toxic and liable to cause cancer, activists demanded that it be stored until we can find some "safe" way to dispose of it. Government officials approved but attitudes changed when a semi-legal PCB storage building at St. Basile-le-Grande Quebec burned in 1988.[9]
It turned out that the building was built to store 4,500 liters of PCB, was licensed to store 90,000 liters and actually contained 160,000 liters. Even at the 4,500 liter level it would not have been legal because the building was not surrounded by a fence and had no sprinkler system -- both of which are required by law.
The fire began a circus of protests and mock concern that eventually forced governments to agree on a solution. Rather than burn PCB as fuel in any of the dozens of cement plants across Canada, where it would reduce the consumption of normal fossil fuels, governments decided to burn it in incinerators where they would use fuel to support the flame and where no use would be made of the energy produced. Naturally the process would be very expensive, and naturally the so-called ecologists who came up with the idea would collect the profits.
Because there are few incinerators most PCB's have to be trucked long distances to reach them and, because humans are not perfect, some is spilled in transit. We saw one example of what that could mean in April of 1985, when a transformer being hauled from Ontario to Alberta developed a leak and dripped PCB on the Trans Canada highway between Thunder Bay and Kenora, Ont.[10]
The total amount leaked was a much less than one percent of the PCB sprayed every year on that same road a few years earlier, but the provincial government closed the highway and detoured traffic hundreds of miles on a winding two-lane road through Fort Francis. Aside from the danger of detouring heavy traffic over a secondary road the detour alone did more ecological damage than the spill, because cars and trucks on the detour burned tens of thousands of gallons more gas than they would have on the direct route.
Meanwhile doctors explained the danger with the illustration that if you walked through the whole area of the spill and smoked one cigarette, you would be in more danger from the cigarette than from the spill. This was in the days when cigarettes were not considered dangerous.
Rather than try to wash the spilled PCB off the highway the province decided to re-pave the highway and lock the PCB into the pavement. If the mythology were true the PCB would last longer than the pavement and it would be released some day, but this 'solution' appeared to satisfy the activists.
The reason the transformers were being trucked west is also interesting. They were going to a PCB incinerator near Swan Hills, Alberta, that the Alberta government spent $300 million over a period of nine years to build and run. In 1996 a private company took over the province's 40% interest in the plant and, since then, Alberta Environment has charged it with violations of green laws and deer in the area show high levels of dioxins and furans in their livers. Most of the 7,000 Cree who live in the area hunt for their food but the government has advised them that pregnant women and children should not eat wild game.[11]
Our governments have been trying to get rid of PCB's for years and a lot of them are gone now, but there's still a lot left. A TV program the night before I wrote this mentioned a plan to send 13 old American ships to India to be broken up. The program said that between them the ships contain about 700 gallons of PCB.
The news story implied that this was an ecological disaster because the Indians would not dispose of the PCB properly -- they might dump it into the sea or something -- but in fact it was good news. In Canada an unscrupulous contractor might dump PCB into the sea but an Indian contractor will probably use it.
If India still allows it in transformers the PCB in those ships will be used in transformers. If not, the ships are going to a shipyard and, if nothing else, 700 gallons of PCB is 700 gallons of fuel for a diesel engine. It might be used in cranes and tractors around the shipyard but big marine diesels are more tolerant of irregular fuel, and they would be a good place to burn PCB because they commonly work at a sustained rate.
Any use the Indians make of that PCB will be preferable to wanton burning, just to destroy a valuable resource.
In Canada, we need to lift the ban on the use of PCB and shut down any PCB incinerators still operating. I do not suggest that we allow the manufacture of new PCB but if existing PCB can be re-used, it should not be dumped. If it can not be re-used for any other purpose it should be burned as fuel in a cement kiln or in a diesel engine with a constant load.
FACTORY FARMS
In the modern world, industrial or factory farming operations are a major source of sewage and they have become more of a problem as they are banned or controlled in one area and move to another.[12]
It was a farm that polluted the municipal water supply of the Ontario town of Walkerton with E coli bacteria that killed seven people and sickened about 2,000 in May of the year 2000. The managers of the water plant were culpable because they skipped or faked some tests, but they did not put the bacteria into the water table.[13]
We need farms, even factory farms, but we need clean water too. Where a creek or river flows through or past a large stock farm the water should be tested regularly and where there is no creek, test wells must be drilled around the farm and the water tested. The government should also maintain test wells in any area where many people use ground water, and should test the water from those wells regularly.
If the water is polluted the farm must be shut down until the problem is solved. From the farmers' point of view this is a draconian measure but, for the rest of us, it's just common sense. It's also common sense that the regulations be enforced more rigorously against large commercial operations than against small family farms.
If we want cheap meat we have to allow factory farms but if we want a livable country we have to control them. I don't know if there is any way to control the smell of an industrial-scale pig farm but I do know that neighbours, even farming neighbours, should not have to live with it. A couple of hundred meters of forest around the farm might control the smell but, if not, the farm should move to an area where there are no people to smell it.
If nothing else, the owners of a large-scale pig farm could buy the surrounding farmland and use it to grow corn or some other big-field crop, with workers who could live miles away.
But the main problem with a factory farm is the manure, and there is no question that it is the farmer's absolute responsibility. If chemists can make it into a safe and odorless fertilizer or into fuel oil or plastic that would be the farmers' good luck but, one way or another, they should have to dispose of it safely.
SINGLE-USE GOODS
One easily-controlled cause of pollution is single-use goods -- the throw-away ball pens, razors, cigarette lighters and other goods that we buy, use and throw away.
In modern retailing the more wasteful products are generally the most profitable and, in a world in which chains of stores dominate the market, these are the products that are promoted. They are convenient for users and profitable for manufacturers but a cost to the public and the people who make, buy and use them should pay that cost.
The use of one disposable ball pen, razor, cigarette lighter or whatever is a small matter but the use of hundreds of millions of them by tens of millions of people is a problem.
Some goods are by nature single use because nobody wants re-usable toothpaste or toilet paper. They have disposal costs which are borne by the people who pay for the sewers and processing plants but, because we all use the products, we can all share those costs.
Food must be packaged but unnecessary packaging is an extra cost to society. In Germany and some other European countries the manufacturer is responsible for the final disposal of anything he produces and some very efficient recycling programs are operated by packagers of food and other household goods.
In Canada we could start a program of maker and user responsibility with a packaging tax, levied on every layer of packaging. If I buy toothpaste I expect it to come in a tube but if the tube is in a box or a blister-pack, that's a second layer of packaging to be disposed of. Someone has to pay for that, and it should be the person who chose to buy toothpaste in that package.
In today's world the extra package gives the toothpaste a commercial advantage because the package makes the tube look bigger and because it has bright and attractive advertising printed on it. A tax on excess packaging would give a price advantage to products that are not over-packaged.
One of the most obvious applications of a packaging tax is on soft drinks. I find it disgusting that while the State of Michigan mandates that soft drink cans be returnable, the city of Toronto ships literally millions of them to Michigan for burial.
The tax on a can or bottle could take the form of a deposit. If the package is returned to the store the deposit is refunded -- and it's up to the store to dispose of the used package.
TORONTO'S GARBAGE
Toronto's garbage-disposal problem dates back to a time when rabble rousing activists pressured a technophobic Ontario provincial government to ban the burning of garbage. This doomed square miles of potentially useful land to destruction and the city of Toronto to an endless battle with the surrounding towns and townships in a search for a place to bury waste.
It also inspired one of the great political boondoggles of provincial history because the land around Toronto is not only some of the best farmland in Canada, it is also some of the most expensive real estate of any type. We can't afford to use it to bury garbage but, thanks to the law, garbage has to be buried somewhere.
That set the scene for a royal commission to find a new site for landfill. Aside from months of highly-paid sinecure for the commissioners, the search was good for speculators because land values dropped precipitously in any area the commission considered using.
As I write this we are using the temporary solution of trucking Toronto's garbage to a landfill in Michigan. This solves Toronto's problem and creates profits for the owner of the landfill site and for the truckers who haul the garbage, but it is an ecological obscenity.
In a rational world it would be illegal to bury garbage in land that could be used to raise food or to ship garbage more than a specified distance -- perhaps 100 miles or so. Recycling programs could be subsidized but if the program is valid the receiver of the garbage should be willing to pay for it, or at least to help cover the costs of collection. If a recycler charges to accept the garbage, it should not be considered valid recycling.
At one time I considered telling the American Drug Enforcement Administration that some of Toronto's garbage trucks were smuggling drugs into the USA, but that would be illegal. On the other hand I would be surprised if none of the garbage trucks were smuggling anything, one way or the other.
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