TOXIC WASTE

Toxic Waste

Toxic Waste

Introduction

In the past century, the United States has been transformed from a largely agricultural society to an industrial and military superpower. During this metamorphosis, the environment has been radically altered by motor vehicles, chemical factories, hazardous waste sites, nuclear power plants, and military weapons facilities. These sources produce toxic waste that includes dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), heavy metals, nerve gas, uranium fuel rods, and plutonium bomb parts. This pollution contaminates the land, air, water, and even the human body.

Thesis Statement

There is a significant difference among people about how to resolve the trouble of toxic waste.

Literature Review

The statistics concerning toxic substances are mind-boggling. Since World War II, industry has introduced more than seventy thousand chemicals now regularly in use. They include a wide variety of dangerous chemicals, such as arsenic, chlorine, cyanide, creosote, mercury, benzene, chromium, and toluene. Thousands have nearly unpronounceable names, such as dichloromethylphenylsilane. These substances are used by industry to manufacture products such as plastics, herbicides, building materials, batteries, and a host of industrial solvents, cleaners, and lubricants. They are produced in some of the twelve thousand chemical manufacturing plants in the United States and warehoused in more than four hundred thousand major storage facilities.

People throughout the world have come to depend on the products of the chemical industry, and there is scarcely a household anywhere on the planet that does not contain at least a few items made from toxic substances. However, environmentalists say that these goods come at a price. The chemical industry is the number one producer of toxic pollution, and, again, the numbers are staggering. According to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), a list of 650 industrial chemicals tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), about twenty-five thousand facilities create nearly a billion pounds of hazardous waste annually. About half of this waste is released into the air, about 200 million pounds are pumped into the earth in underground injection wells, and 90 million pounds are dumped into rivers, lakes, and oceans. Nearly 45 million pounds are disposed of at hazardous waste dumps. The rest is burned or recycled for other industrial uses, such as cement and asphalt production.

Analysis

Like nearly every other matter involving environmental problems, public health, government oversight, and corporate responsibility, the TRI is controversial. Environmentalists point out that at least 330 million pounds of various toxins are omitted from the list. Conversely, some business interests claim ...