An Allegory about NIMBYism

Remove contaminated soil.
Restore the aquifer to drinking water quality.
Replace air strippers that vent to the atmosphere with carbon filters.
Redevelop properties to bring in new tenants and raise property values.

What do these objectives have in common?
Throughout the history of a particular Silicon Valley Superfund site, these goals have been supported by the community, responsible parties, and regulators.  And at face value, they each appear to be protective of human health and the environment and benefit the neighboring community.

Only more recently has the concept of sustainable remediation been used to look at cleanup programs from a holistic viewpoint, and examine the collateral damage that some remedial decisions can cause, even those that appear to be protective.

In the 2008 Optimization Evaluation reports prepared by Northgate, Geosyntec, Weiss, and Schlumberger, we found that annual carbon (CO2) emissions related to the operation of five treatment systems at the Silicon Valley Superfund site ranged from 42 to 281 metric tons. For comparison, the EPA estimates that the annual CO2 emissions from a typical passenger vehicle are approximately 5 metric tons.

In a 2010 economic analysis of 25 San Francisco Bay Area Superfund sites, Northgate staff, Maile Smith and Scott McLaughlin found that although concentrations of groundwater pollutants had been greatly reduced, contaminant removal rates were insufficient to reach cleanup goals.  Furthermore, we found that the benefits of groundwater cleanup were reduced by the cross-media (e.g., water to air) pollution impacts of the remediation programs. The study indicated that the collective pollution reduction achieved by the cleanup programs at these sites is less than the pollution generated by the production of goods and services required to operate and maintain the cleanup programs themselves.

And this week the Center for Investigative Reporting published an article on the journey of the groundwater pollutants from that particular Silicon Valley Superfund site, illustrating the pathway that pollution takes after it is pumped from the ground and filtered through those carbon vessels.

“There’s really no such thing as throwing something away,” said Environmental Protection Agency spokesman Rusty Harris-Bishop. “You’re always throwing it somewhere.”

It's an interesting tale, and certainly highlights the potential collateral damage that can occur when we collectively decide, "not in my backyard."

Read the complete article here:  http://cironline.org/reports/cleanup-silicon-valley-superfund-site-takes-environmental-toll-6149

Is Environmental Contamination Responsible for Violent Crime?

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, January/February 2013 Issue

Across the US, violent crime peaked in the early 1990s and then began a steady and significant decline. Not unique to a particular city, this declining trend is seen nationwide, including in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Newark.  This article explores the reasons behind this trend, and in the process, researched a myriad of criminology theories: crime goes down when the economy is booming and goes up when it's in a slump; crime drops in big cities are mostly a reflection of the crack epidemic of the '80s finally burning itself out; demographics (as numbers of young men increases, so does crime); prison expansion; guns and gun control; family dynamics; race; parole and probation policies; raw number of police officers; and legalized abortion.

The author found a growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, and juvenile delinquency. A large body of evidence suggests that the use -- and discontinuation -- of tetraethyl lead in gasoline may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past 50 years. And this relationship seems to hold true for cities of different sizes, both within the US and internationally.

Read the article here.

And several of the cited studies:
How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy
Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime
Understanding international crime trends: The legacy of preschool lead exposure
The urban rise and fall of air lead (Pb) and the latent surge and retreat of societal violence
Association of Prenatal and Childhood Blood Lead Concentrations with Criminal Arrests in Early Adulthood