global stewardship

Soundguy · Dec 24, 2005

Anyone else alarmed at the recent events in china... At last count, we have had 2 coal mine explosions a massive benzene leak, and now a cadmium leak in the last 30 day period.

I appreciate the chinese 'breakneck' spped int he global economy / industry race.. but any one else alarmed at the seeming lack of safeguards present...

Benzene and cadmium contamination are serious matters... I looke dup the effects of cadmium.. it was horrific.. I heare benzene makes it look like viatamins in comparison..

An ap articel i read said the cadmium was released from a foundry? anyone know if this foundry supplied tractor part raw materials?

soundguy

n4807g · Dec 24, 2005

Don't know about the foundry. China is undoubtedly growing without the environmental safeguards we now take for granted in the USA. However it wasn't many years ago that we had the same problems:

Love Canal
Cuyahoga River (fires)
Lake Erie was virtually dead
Boston Harbor still has tons of heavy metals in the muck on the bottom of the harbor.

Hopefully the Chinese will begin to put the same safeguards in place we now take for granted.

Buckeye_Jim · Dec 24, 2005

Having worked about 20 weeks in various parts of China installing hydrological monitoring systems, the most visable situation is the air pollution. Cement plants belch the dust. Small scale kilms make red bricks everywhere, they are all burning coal. Every wok in every home burns a coal bricket.

Pollution controls seem to non existent. In cities, people walk around with dust masks. People will smoke in confined places such as elevators.

Jim

Bates · Dec 24, 2005

We are fueling their breakneck expansion. We manufacture almost NOTHING in the U.S. anymore. It's not as if we have a choice in our spending, though. I challenge anybody to go shopping and find any common household items that aren't made in China that can be bought on a working man's salary.

The Chinese are good, hard working people and it's really starting to pay off for them (at our expense). You can't compete with people willing to do high quality work for a few bucks per day. Their tractors are probably the WORST quality thing that they produce. Thier electronic products are the best in the world.

n4807g · Dec 24, 2005

No doubt air pollution is a problem. They use what they have for energy. They have a lot of coal. Hopefully sooner than later they will address their growing environmental issues.

n4807g · Dec 24, 2005

Oh I dunno...I have one of those "worst" things they make. I disagree; the quality and workmanship is very good.

milkman · Dec 24, 2005

( Anyone else alarmed at the recent events in china...
I appreciate the chinese 'breakneck' spped int he global economy / industry race.. but any one else alarmed at the seeming lack of safeguards present... )

Seems our big corporations are not too concerned since they are moving there at 'breakneck' speed in the form of the largest auto assembly plant on the planet courtesy of GM.

Soundguy · Dec 29, 2005

I realize we had those nice environmental problems ourselves.. the union carbide deal was a horrible one.

Any sign that the chinese gov't is moving to 'work' on this.. or is theeconomic growth still a little too important for them? ( I realize they are just trying to make a living and get ahead like everyone else... this isn't meanst as a 'slam' to the chinese ).

Soundguy

LarryD · Dec 29, 2005

I've been to many countries in my travels and environmental concerns, as well as employee safety, seem to take a back seat to production.

Had to remove a 20 ton chiller in Moscow, I told the local laborers to collect the glycol in drums for disposal, their supervisor told them to let it go in the storm drain.

There is a pipe manufacturing plant in Cairo that has an asbestos cloud leaving it that would contaminate half a state by our standards. I can't even begin to describe the air in the city from vehicle emissions.

Then there was India...

I guess my point is we only hear about these incidents when the media tells us (at least information is leaving China now) and that's usually only the catostrophic/extreme cases. There's a daily problem that surely adds up to a much greater concern.

California · Dec 29, 2005

( Any sign that the chinese gov't is moving to 'work' on this. )

Here's a recent Business Week article. I tried to draft a quick summary but decided that's impossible without breaching the Ban On Politics here. (which I agree is necessary to keep us focused on common interests).

The 'Reader Comments' below the BW article are also worth reading.

Link to Business Week article.

To20Chris · Dec 29, 2005

They are where we were years ago. We spilled lots of cadmium - just about any old metal plating operation is a toxic waste site. And it is nasty stuff, like quite a few metals (mercury, lead, etc). Of course, we injected quite a bit of mercury into our children.

If they spent more on addressing these issues, we could not afford their products. Maybe if they loaned less of their money to us, they would have more to spend on environmental protection.

tjkadar · Dec 30, 2005

We still have plenty of issues in America that are not being addressed from past and present practices. Companies are set up in such a way that if there is a big release or small releases over a long period of time, the company will file for bankruptcy and walk away. This has happened with a lot of the dying and finishing textile plants in the South.

At one site, I've seen groundwater the color of Mello Yello because of chromium contamination. The good news is nobody in the area is using groundwater for drinking water. The bad news is the groundwater is leaching into the surface water and wetlands adjacent to the site.

One company abandoned their open pit mining operation. They had about a 50% completion on the remediation when they decided it was too expensive to finish the job. Now you have about a 5-acre pit around 180 feet deep that is half filled with water that is essentially sulfuric acid. The water’s pH is about 2 and it is slowly seeping into the surface waters surrounding the site. We wont even mention the issues with their cyanide heap leach recovery systems.

But there is some good news. Exxon-Mobil and Philips-Conoco are spending millions cleaning up arsenic and lead contamination at old superphosphate fertilizer plant sites. These plants started operations around 1870 with the last ones closing their doors before WWII. The Mobil portion of Exxon-Mobil started life as the Virginia Carolina Chemical Company and has morphed over the past 130 years into Exxon-Mobil. Philips-Conoco started out as the American Agricultural Chemical Company before assuming its present day corporate entity.

Still, there are a lot of problems that are not being addressed. Money is the biggest single issue we are facing. We lack the funds to clean sites up. We don’t have the money to hire or keep the best and the brightest. And over the past several years, our budget has been cut and cut again. Politics always takes precedence over science.

With the continued expansion of subdivisions into what used to be rural farmland, we are discovering new problems. At times, the soils in these new housing projects have pesticide levels above residential soil screening levels. The farmers are not liable for this because they have applied the pesticides according to the manufactures instructions. The homeowners aren’t even aware a problem exists. The developer doesn’t care. He already has his money.

So that leaves the government holding the bag. Right now, there are no regulations or laws to address the issue. We don’t even have a mechanism in place to adequately address or prevent these problems from happening. The best we can do at the moment is let the EPA perform an emergency removal, which is expensive, time consuming, and very disruptive. But since Katrina, you’ll have a hard time getting the EPA to spend their limited budgets anywhere but in the hurricane area.

Hmmm… this isn’t a reply as much as it is a rant. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif Y'all have to forgive me. /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif This is something that bothers me a lot. We have enough work here in America to keep us busy for a long time, but we lack the resources to adequately address the situation. It is frustrating to say the least.