Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 They also are not required to follow the EPA's new lead reporting requirements, or any measures of the clean water act or the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. This is because the EPA does not interpret the act of firing bullets into the soil or water as "discarding" lead -- just one of a number of loopholes that allow firing ranges to operate despite unlimited lead contamination.
Still, not everyone is convinced that lead bullets represent one of the biggest causes of lead contamination on the environment. |
Devra Davis
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 By 1980, the clean water act of 1977 had been enacted and the Superfund law was in place to clean up hazardous wastes. The nation has not seen another period of such focused attention on environmental laws since then.
The radicalism of the project is hard to imagine nowadays. The president proposed an expansive program to protect and fund open spaces and reduce sprawl. He singled out the car as the worst polluter of the common resource of the air at the time, calling for major new laws that ensure that "the price of goods ... |
Alex Steffen
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 The Endangered Species Act and the clean water act both require land developers to make up for any harm they do to streams, wetlands, or habitats critical to endangered and threatened species. Simply put, a developer or other commercial occupant that compromises or destroys habitats in one location is required to protect or restore habitats of comparable scope or value somewhere else.
As with carbon credits, land developers and owners can satisfy the law through "conservation banks," which protect land containing endangered species, and "mitigation banks," which protect wetlands and streams. |
Earth RightH. Patricia Hynes
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| PROTECT THE OCEANS: Expand enforcement provisions of the clean water act to speed compliance with the "no discharge" goals of the clean water act. Outlaw the export of hazardous waste to developing nations and ban ocean dumping.
SOURCE: The League of Conservation Voters, Washington, D.C., 1989.
2. Demand Action from the Executive Branch.
Under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency has the responsibility to control U.S. production and use of ozone-depleting chemicals. |
Doris J. Rapp, M.D.
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 In one report about 30% of the industrial, municipal and federal facilities were in serious violation of the clean water act during a 15 month period.137'149a"c To make it even worse, the water quality was recently weakened again by the Bush Administration when certain legislators slipped a provision into the Homeland Security bill to allow chemicals to pollute our water in emergency situations.160 (See Chapter 7.) Once it is in the water, it cannot easily be removed. |
Gail A. Eisnitz
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 And the company's Virginia plants were under investigation by state and federal authorities for a possible 5,000 counts of clean water act violations.*
A reporter gave me the names of some Carolina Foods workers.
XXX
*In August 1997, Smithfield Foods was convicted in federal court and fined $12.6 million for what ultimately turned out to be nearly 7,000 counts of illegally discharging hog plant wastes into a major Virginia waterway and then falsifying records to cover up its activities. The $12.6 million fine is the largest clean water act penalty in history. |
Doris J. Rapp, M.D.
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| In December 2002, the clean water act was weakened again so pesticide spraying would allow known harmful chemicals to be put into our water, under certain circumstances, without permits.
Roads now destroy the natural character of many pristine public forests. Logging, drilling and mining are becoming more evident because of the total disregard of our watersheds, animal and marine wildlife habitat and recreation areas in favor of developers and big business. Federal agencies do not protect our water, and state and local agencies do not hold polluters accountable for violations. |
| It is now easier to spray over water with toxic substances to kill mosquitos without a permit as previously required by the clean water act.13,80 It appears to be possible to make exceptions to laws that were specifically designed to protect the public.)
Later on, pyrethroid products such as Scourge and Anvil 10+10® were also used to control the mosquitos in the NYC area. These pyrethroids disrupt hormones and can mimic estrogens. They are reported to be linked to breast cancer in females, decreased sperm counts in males and possibly brain tumors in children. |
Arthur C. Upton, M.D.
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| It required all federal agencies proposing activities with possible environmental consequences to complete an environmental impact statement, detailing the likely environmental effects of the action.
The clean water act, 1972 (Amended 1977 and 1987)
The clean water act seeks to regulate, in cooperation with the states, the quality of all American surface waters. The act provides for technical and financial assis-
(continued)
Box 23.1 MAJOR ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS (continued) tance to the states in developing water-treatment facilities and emissions-control technologies. |
John Robbins
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 There may be occasional accidents, as there are in any industry, but animal agriculture operates in strict accordance with the clean water act. No one is out there trying to pollute. Everyone who is supposed to obtain a discharge permit is doing so.""
What we know_
Number of poultry operations (according to the General Accounting Office) that are of sufficient size to be required to obtain a discharge permit under the Clean Water Act: About 2. |
Arthur C. Upton, M.D.
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| The clean water act, 1972 (Amended 1977 and 1987)
The clean water act seeks to regulate, in cooperation with the states, the quality of all American surface waters. The act provides for technical and financial assis-
(continued)
Box 23.1 MAJOR ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS (continued) tance to the states in developing water-treatment facilities and emissions-control technologies. Its requirements include designation of all bodies of water by states as to their uses (e.g. |
Ralph Golan, M.D.
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 One last measure you can take is to support environmental groups, state and community action groups, and legislators who will strengthen the clean water act. See the following list of organizations that can provide resource information and refer you to local organizations (see also resource information in Chapter Fourteen).
Environmental Defense Fund, 257 Park Ave. South, New York, NY 10010, (212) 505-2100.
National Resources Defense Council, 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011, (212) 727-4400.
Audubon Society, 8940 Jones Mill Rd., Chevy Chase, MD, (301) 652-9188. |
Arthur C. Upton, M.D.
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| A similar "no-risk" approach underlies the discharge goals of the Safe Drinking Water Act and the clean water act.)
Although these standards may seem similar, they are actually significantly different in concept and practice. The latter no-risk standard is potentially far more restrictive than a negligible-risk standard, such as the former. The difference between these approaches is at the crux of many contemporary controversies of environmental and health regulation. |
James F. Balch, M.D.
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 But, in reality, an estimated 20 percent of the people in the United States are drinking water so impure that it violates safety standards set forth in the clean water act. in 1996, an estimated 90 percent of the country's public water facilities were still using contaminant-removing technologies developed before 1920. |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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 The Natural Resources Defense Council, in a letter from its executive director, John Adams, reported that one-third of the United States' large wastewater dischargers were in violation of the clean water act.
The point of this information about unrestrained water pollution becomes obvious. |
Linda Mason Hunter
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 The EPA can regulate asbestos levels in drinking water under the federal clean water act, but few towns or cities can afford to replace entire water supply systems. Because acidic water is particularly corrosive, one way to reduce the asbestos in water is to reduce acidity during treatment.
BACTERIA Bacteria in water can be treated at home with chlorination or a reverse osmosis system.
Despite the publicity surrouding toxic chemicals, bacterial contamination remains the most common water quality problem in individual and small systems. |
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
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 During the 1970s, these environmentalists worked for passage of the clean water act. Now they find themselves in the awkward position of defending its consequence—huge mountains of poisonous sludge that need to be put somewhere. Sarah Clark, formerly of the Environmental Defense Fund, claims that sludge farming "is the best means of returning to the soil nutrients and organic matter that were originally removed. It is recycling a resource just as recycling newspapers or bottles is. If the right safeguards are taken, it can be environmentally protective and even beneficial. |
Elson M. Haas, M.D.
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 During the early 1970s, the EPA was quite productive. The clean water act, passed in 1972, helped regulate industrial dumping of chemicals into the environment. However, the problem was so prevalent and the potential fines were so much less than the costs of changing business practices or the profits to be made, that controlling industrial pollution was never accomplished. In 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) was passed. This set a standard for any water system serving more than 15 homes. |
John Robbins
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| What we know_
Number of poultry operations (according to the General Accounting Office) that are of sufficient size to be required to obtain a discharge permit under the Clean Water Act: About 2.00036
Number (according to the General Accounting Office) that have actually done so: 3937
Number of the 22 largest animal factories in Missouri required to have valid operating discharge permits that actually have them: 238
The volume of waste produced by factor)' farms is so enormous and so toxic that it is challenging to describe. |
Sandra Steingraber
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 The federal clean water act of 1972 brought a modicum of improvement to the Illinois River. As annual amounts of industrial waste released into the river declined, water quality improved. The longterm ecological effects, however, are less clear. Like a cloth already frayed, the river shows signs of continued damage even at lower levels of stress. Recovery has been uneven, at best. Mussels have returned to some parts of the river, and fin erosion is a less common problem in fish. |
| A younger sibling of the clean water act, the federal Safe Drinking Water Act became law in 1974 and brought all community water systems under federal and state regulation. It required the EPA to set legal limits for contaminants and placed the states in charge of enforcing these limits. Maximum contaminant levels for most organic chemicals were established only with the amendments of 1986, and maximum contaminant levels for many common insecticides and herbicides were promulgated as recently as 1991. |
Gail A. Eisnitz
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| Clean Water Act penalty in history. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth of Virginia has filed a separate suit against the company alleging 22,000 pollution violations since 1986.
Carol Reynolds, an attractive African-American woman in her mid-forties, lived with her husband and four sons in a tiny old house in the country. She worked in "casings," where manure was cleaned out of the animals' intestines so they could be used in sausage and chitlin production.
While Reynolds explained that she'd never visited the pens or the blood pit, she spoke at length about what it was like to work at the plant. |
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
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| According to O'Dwyer's PR Services, "the firm's executives have a broad range of environmental expertise and have managed numerous issues surrounding Superfund, the clean water act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, wetlands preservation and public lands."65 Edelman's client, the Alliance for America, is an industry-subsidized network of 650 anti-environmental companies and associations that are the backbone of the Wise Use movement. At the 1995 "Fly-in for Freedom," Edelman helped the Alliance target the Endangered Species Act for elimination.
No More Mr. |
| Pressure from environmentalists spurred Congress to pass the clean water act of 1972, which according to US Senator Max Baucus, "put us on the course to fish-able and swimmable rivers at a time when one river was known as a fire hazard and others hadn't seen fish in a generation. |
| The clean water act required communities to make sure that by 1977 their sewage plants could remove at least 85 percent of the pollutants passing through them, and allocated funding to pay for the additional treatment and filtering technologies needed to achieve this goal By 1976, the federal government was spending $50 billion per year to help cities achieve water purity goals.7
In the 1980s, however, politicians responded to pressure for reduced federal spending by cutting funds for water treatment, and by the 1990s the money had been virtually eliminated. |
Dr Bernard Jenson and Mark Anderson
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 Todd says
Since the [passage of the] clean water act in 1972, we've spent billions of dollars and haven't really improved water quality. We use 70,000 different chemicals routinely in commerce and then dump them into the water. Those chemicals are ungluing the natural world.
The waste-treatment industry is getting scary. To meet regulations on some chemicals, we use others that aren't regulated. We use chlorine to meet ammonia standards, and in the process make chloroform and chloramine, which don't have standards. To get rid of phosphate, we precipitate it out with aluminum. |
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