Fish farming is coming soon to our Gulf waters: concerns for consumers and the environment

Veolia Environmental Services, the industrial incinerator in Port Arthur that is burning VX nerve agent waste for the U.S. Army, has asked for a federal exemption to import 22,000 tons of a suspected cancer-causing chemical compound from Mexico.

Use the form below to send a message to Stephen Johnson, Administrator of EPA. Let Administrator Johnson know that Texas should not be a dumping ground for PCB's and hazardous waste.

Dear Administrator Johnson, I am opposed to Veolia's request to import 40 million pounds of deadly Polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCB) liquid waste from Mexico to Port Arthur, Texas to burn at Veolia's toxic waste incinerator due to the many hazards such incineration presents to public health and the environment in the United States. As EPA knows, PCB's are dangerous chemicals to release into the environment and today safer, cleaner options exist to dispose of them than by burning them in a toxic waste incinerator. If EPA approves the importing of 40 million pounds of PCB's from Mexico for incineration, it will open the border floodgates for hundreds of millions of pounds of more PCB's into the United States and contaminate the nation's environment with toxic chemicals from the incinerator's smokestack. Incineration is an unsafe, dinosaur technology and needs to be ended. Importing PCB's is illegal under a law (the Toxic Substances Control Act) passed by Congress in 1976 and I am totally opposed to burning of PCB waste by Veolia as a bad idea for many reasons including: * Importing PCB's into the US poses a serious transportation hazard to several million people living in populated urban areas along a 450 mile highway route from the border through Houston to Port Arthur. * Incinerating PCB's results in unburned PCBs from Veolia's incinerator smokestack. * Incinerating PCB's creates new toxic chemicals such as dioxins and dibenzofurans, including chlorinated chemicals more toxic than PCBs. We already have too many PCB's and dioxins in the environment, food chains and our bodies. * The Veolia Port Arthur toxic waste incinerator has not installed either a PCB or Dioxin stack continuous emissions monitoring system to measure the emissions of unburned PCB's and dioxins being released from its smokestack. * Toxic waste incinerators, being machines, are known to experience a multitude of malfunctions, upsets, fires, explosions and other hazardous operations that could produce much higher rates of toxic emissions. * Our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and future generations are already at increased risk from exposure to PCB's and dioxins present in the environment. * Safer, cleaner, alternative portable technologies are developed and approved by EPA to destroy the PCB's and portable units means onsite disposal can be safely conducted where the PCB's are located. The community of Port Arthur, Texas is already under siege from decades of toxic air pollution in their air with many large, dirty polluting industries and Port Arthur does not need more toxic chemicals going in their lungs and bodies by burning 20,000 tons of PCB waste. Veolia needs to stop its burning of toxic waste in Port Arthur, a largely minority, low income EJ community that has been dumped on for decades. Moving the PCB's by truck from Mexico to Port Arthur will expose millions of people to the possibility of an accident and release of PCBs during transport. Safer, cleaner, alternative non-burn technologies already exist and are readily portable so they could be used onsite in Mexico to more safely handle the PCB disposal at each location. Please do not approve the request by Veolia to bring PCBs into the United States to burn them. Thank you, [your name] [your address]

Send to:

Stephen Johnson
Administrator
Environmental Protection Agency
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20460
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Docket Center
By email to
Docket ID No.: EPA-HQ-RCRA-2008-0123