Animal poisoning raises controversy near Irish Aluminum Smelter

“I GOT all this equipment years ago and never thought I’d be using it for this,” Justin Ryan says as he takes a tape out of his camcorder. He has been using it to record the sick and dying animals on his farm and neighbouring farms near Askeaton, Co Limerick. Mr Ryan sent a copy […]

Ecological Russian Roulette

NADVOITSY, Russia – The children of this town learn early not to smile. When they do, they show a ghastly array of blackened, splintered, rotting stumps where milk-white teeth might have been. An environmental plague has struck this northern land of lakes, no longer pristine, and thinning pine forests. The children of Nadvoitsy are its […]

Tarnished Aluminum Plant (but a Shiny Future?)

ZIAR NAD HRONOM, Slovakia — Rudolf Camaj doesn’t quite know whether to trust the stories that one day the aluminum plant here will be so clean there might be an outdoor swimming pool for the workers. “It is almost unbelievable to us that the old factory will be replaced by a new factory that won’t […]

Nadvoitsy Aluminum Plant’s Fluoride Pollution Decays Teeth & Causes Joint Disease

The first thing that anyone coming to the settlement of Nadvoitsy (Karelia) encounters … is a strong, throat-burning odor of nitrogen sulfide on the street. But the odor penetrates railroad cars about 20 minutes before Nadvoitsy, when the train passes by the Segezha Pulp and Paper Combine. Most residents of Nadvoitsy consider this “aroma” to […]

My Life as a Dump: Risking Life and Lung in the Toxic American Century

THE BUSTER BROWN shoe store on Collinsville Avenue in East St. Louis had a wonderful machine where I would stand with my feet, in their shoes, inserted beneath an oblong box, like a low, enclosed lectern, called a Fluoroscope, which shot X-rays into my toes, gonads, liver and brain and let me see clearly what […]

Local fight led to metal-smelting controls

All Christy Carton wanted to do was prevent her town’s ground water from being contaminated with cyanide. (and fluoride) She ended up doing a bit more than that. The Frederick County mother and environmental champion won a court battle that will change how dozens of U.S. companies dispose of the wastes from smelting metals. The […]

Skawina Aluminum Factory to be Closed Because of Pollution

As it has no filters at all, the enterprise, situated near Cracow, ”emits into the environment more than 1,700 t of pure fluorine, of which more than 800t finds its way into the environment in the most dangerous form, hydrogen fluoride”. This is the reason for the particularly high incidence of inflammation of the respiratory […]

The St. Regis Syndrome

Long before Canada or the United States existed, Mohawks fished, hunted, trapped and farmed those islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence that are now known as the St. Regis Akwesasne Indian Reserve. But since 1959 a plague has fallen on their land, killing their livestock, destroying their agriculture, ripping apart the very fabric of […]

Fluoride Pollution at Akwesasne Reservation

James Thompson pulls open the barbed wire gate leading to a grassy pasture and, with two mongrel dogs at his heels, steps inside to inspect his 50 head of Hereford cattle, all dying slowly from fluoride poisoning. His herd stands in minature; stunted, only waist-high. Calves are sometimes stillborn. The cows, after four years, can’t […]