Members of Congress from the Great Lakes region will soon announce efforts to reauthorize the Great Lakes Legacy Act, a law and program with a laudable goal: cleaning up toxic muds and other sediments located largely in harbors around the Basin.
On its merits, the Act should be reauthorized -- but it won't be enough to clean up Lake sediments. Mel Visser, author of Cold, Clear and Deadly, explains why in a letter to Congress:
Dear Senator/Representative ________,
Without reform of global chemicals policy, the extension of
the Great Lakes Legacy Act will waste hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Removing mud alone will not decrease water levels of “Legacy
Pollution” in the Great Lakes. In fact, it
will do almost nothing to benefit the Great Lakes without action to shut off global inputs of persistent organic compounds banned
in the U.S. and Canada but still used in enormous amounts abroad.
According to the 2008 Lakewide Management Plan (LaMP), Lake
Superior currently contains 2.3X the acceptable level of PCBs, 14.9X of
toxaphene and 18.7X of Dieldrin.
International scientists realize that these legacy
pollutants are still heavily used in developing countries, transport through
the air, and contaminate the Great Lakes, to Chesapeake Bay, to San Francisco Bay, to the mountain lakes of our national parks and on to the Arctic Ocean.
Medical studies continue to find that “Legacy Pollutants” in
the blood of correlates with many cancers, diabetes, and from recent studies,
obesity.
Please use precious taxpayer money to rid the Great Lakes and all North American waters and fish of
legacy pollutants by directing it toward the global elimination of all legacy
pollutants that are currently banned only in the developed world.
Thank You,
Melvin J. Visser
I
have been working on finding the source of legacy pollutants since my 1995
retirement as Vice President for Environment, Health and Safety at The Upjohn
Company. The story of my search, Cold,
Clear, and Deadly: Unraveling a toxic legacy (Michigan
State University Press) was published last year. I currently work to raise the
awareness of the pollution of North American air and waters from PCB and
"banned" pesticide uses in developing countries. See coldclearanddeadly.com.
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