Today's Topics:
Looking for reference information
Mining & Timber Subsidy Reform Updates
Seeking C&D Recycling Guide (Contractors)
This is a story about recycling (fwd)
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Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 11:26:39 -0800 (PST)
From: "William P. McGowan" <6500kai@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Looking for reference information
Myra--
You might also try "American Wasteland: A History of America's Garbage
IUndustry, 1880-1989" by William P. McGowan in Business and Economic
History, Vol. 24, No. 1(Fall 1995) pp 155-163.
Bill
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Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 12:51:27 -0800 (PST)
From: "David A. Kirkpatrick" <david@kirkworks.com>
Subject: Mining & Timber Subsidy Reform Updates
GrassRoots Environmental Effectiveness Network -- GREEN
Weekly Legislative and Policy Report
November 24, 1997
SPECIAL END OF SESSION REPORT
... excerpts ...
PUBLIC LANDS MINING
The FY 1998 Interior Appropriations bill continues for the fourth
consecutive year the moratorium on patenting under the 1872 Mining Law,
protecting mineral-rich public lands from being sold to private
interests at 1872 prices. With the support of the mining industry,
Sen. Larry Craig introduced S. 1102 on 7/31 to amend the 1872 General
Mining Law to assess a 5 percent royalty on new mining claims, continue
to allow miners to patent claims for between $2.50 and $5.00 per acre
and reaffirm existing cleanup standards. Competing bills supported by
conservation groups -- S. 327 introduced by Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-AR);
HR 253 introduced by Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV); and HR 778 and 779
introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) -- would levy a higher
royalty, abolish patenting, require new standards for site cleanup, and
require the federal government to block mining on unsuitable lands.
For more information, contact the Mineral Policy Center (202) 887-1872.
...
BILL TO END COMMERCIAL LOGGING ON PUBLIC LANDS
A 10/31 Sierra Club press release announced the introduction of the
National Forest Protection and Restoration Act, H.R. 2789 by Reps.
Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Jim Leach (R-IA), which would end the
timber sales program on National Forests and other public lands and
redirect the subsidies that have gone to commercial logging on public
lands into restoration and worker retraining. The Sierra Club released
an economic analysis of the Forest Service's own accounting showing the
timber sales program on National Forests operated at a net loss to
taxpayers of $791 million in 1996. Contact John Leary, Sierra Club for
more information (202) 547-1141.
...
==========================================================
Roger Featherstone -- Director
GrassRoots Environmental Effectiveness Network
A project of Defenders of Wildlife
PO Box 40046, Albuquerque, NM 87196-0046
(505) 277-8302 fax:(505) 277-5483 e-mail: rfeather@defenders.org
check out our web page at: http://www.defenders.org/grnhome.html
(All other GREEN staff remain at our Washington, DC, office)
==========================================
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Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 15:16:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Chesestick@aol.com
Subject: Seeking C&D Recycling Guide (Contractors)
Does anyone know about a comprehensive C&D recycling guide geared toward
contractors? I heard about one at conference several years ago w/ signs &
stickers for hard hats. I'd like to obtain this info for our contractors &
Navy Construction Battalions to use. Thank you,
Timonie Hood
Chesestick@aol.com
(619) 556-9799
Naval Station San Diego
Environmental Code 23
3395 Sturtevant St Ste 6
San Dieog, CA 92136-5071
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Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 16:36:09 +0100
From: Seelig.Marina@t-online.de (Marina Wagner)
Subject: This is a story about recycling (fwd)
Hi my dear,
another exaample to talk about the use of PERSONS or PEOPLE !!!!
Susan Snow schrieb:
> Recycling is not so green to its neighbors, but is it greener than the
> alternatives. Maybe, we should be clearer what is recycling.
> Obviously, cleaning up soil by thermal oxidation is not recycling --it's
> incineration. Nor is cleaning up soil via composting --it is spreading
> toxics around. People are becoming ill and dying near muncicipal solid
> waste composting plants.
>
> I suggest that the best way to protect all PERSONS is to PREVENT waste
> by reducing consumption.
> http://www.igc.org/envjustice/communique/recycle.html
>
> Susan Snow
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Recycling - Not So Green to its Neighbors
> By David Bacon
>
>
> **HUNTINGTON PARK, CA (7/28/97) - Recycling has an
> environmentally-friendly image, especially in Los Angeles, where
> commodity consumption is a secular form of worship. Any vision of a
> sustainable future here at least mandates the reuse of the basic
> materials of everyday life. That makes recycling the city's big growth
> industry.
>
> Twenty years ago, when LA drew up its master plan, the industry hardly
> existed at all. Today big industrial facilities are mushrooming,
> collecting and processing glass, metal and concrete. The most
> recently-opened plant recycles dirt, burning it to rid it of its
> petroleum residues.
>
> But low-income people living in southeast Los Angeles have a hard time
> seeing recycling's green image. Their problem? They live near the
> plants.
>
> "There's always glass in the air here," complains Mercedes Arambula.
>
> Arambula's home is catty-corner from the huge Container Recycling
> facility on Leota Street in Walnut Park. Huge mounds of broken glass
> rise to twice the height of an adult in the Container Recycling yard.
> Skip loaders constantly fill open truck trailers with it. From their
> huge scoops glass pours down in a dusty stream.
>
> "I've lived here 18 years," she says. "My kids have asthma now, and my
> littlest one, who's 1 1/2, is always sick. I won't even let them play in
> the yard anymore. The trees around my house have all died anyway."
>
> A neighbor, Ana Cano, wipes her finger across the windshield of a parked
> van in front of her house, coated with a thick layer of dust. Rubbing it
> between her fingers, it sparkles and feels grainy. "Little by little,
> we're breathing this in," she says. "I feel like my lungs are filling up
> with glass."
>
> A little further down Alameda Street, the main corridor of the city's
> industrial heartland, Alameda Street Metal Recycling crushes used cars,
> trucks and metal appliances. These hunks of used metal travel to Long
> Beach, and then on container ships to the other side of the Pacific,
> fueling a global economy of trash.
>
> The driveways and walls of the homes of Epifania Oliveria and Thelma
> Diaz are cracking as the earth shakes from the bone-jarring thump of the
> metal crusher. A thin film of oil coats their yards, and little metal
> granules push up through the skin rashes of neighborhood children. When
> the women brought their complaints to city authorities, they were
> defeated by the most local laws of all - zoning regulations.
>
> In balkanized southeast LA, divided into many small cities, they
> discovered that the plant was located in Lynwood, and zoned industrial,
> while their homes and the elementary school across the street were in
> Los Angeles, and zoned residential.
>
> "The city's message to us was that we live in the wrong place. In their
> eyes, we just shouldn't be there," Diaz says. Ana Cano got the same
> message when State Senator Gloria Molina came out to look at the impact
> of the glass dust on their homes. "We have to expect this, she told us,
> because we live in an industrial neighborhood," Cano recalls.
>
> These neighbors are working-class people. They don't want factories shut
> down or industry to disappear.
>
> That's where many of them have jobs. "We understand we all need to
> work," Diaz says. "But these places have to respect the people in the
> community which surrounds them. The bottom line is that our community is
> poor. Everyone in our neighborhood is Black or brown. Many like me are
> immigrants. And you only find these kinds of companies in poor
> neighborhoods. Can you imagine a metal recycler in Santa Monica or
> Hollywood? They just know we can't go anywhere else."
>
> Carlos Porras, Southern California Director of Communities for a Better
> Environment, points out that recycling is exempted from most regulation,
> because it's viewed as an environmentally-positive industry.
> "Public policy has allowed recycling plants to crop up without
> oversight," he says. "This is environmental
> injustice. Regulations are simply not applied to potentially harmful
> businesses which are located in low-income communities of color,
> particularly in southeast Los Angeles."
>
> But the burgeoning recycling industry is about to be challenged.
> Southeast LA neighborhoods are discovering that they are helpless in the
> face of environmental injustice if they don't get organized.
>
> One concrete recycler in Huntington Park has faced an organized campaign
> of neighborhood opposition for 4 years. Although residents of Cottage
> Street started out simply trying to control the plant's operations, the
> company's hardball defiance hardened neighborhood attitudes. They
> stopped the operation completely, and made support of its owner the
> political kiss-of-death at city hall.
>
> "The council thought Sam Chew's concrete recycling business would be the
> first of many such clean and green facilities," says Dean Hickman, who's
> fought against the concrete mountain from the beginning. "But we not
> only organized our own neighborhood in response, now we're going to the
> neighborhoods around other plants, and helping them get organized as
> well."
>
> Maybe the greenest thing produced by the burgeoning recycling industry
> will be a new movement for environmental justice. **
>
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End of GreenYes Digest V97 #291
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