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By Jerry Adler
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The first environmental decision of the Clinton-Gore administration didn't involve endangered species, the greenhouse effect or the other high-concept issues facing the world in the 21st century. Instead, the vice president-elect injected himself into a local dispute over licensing an incinerator in a depressed industrial town of eastern Ohio-an issue so obscure that the protest movement had to settle for Martin Sheen as its official celebrity. Last week it wasn't so obscure anymore as full-page ads blossomed in The New York Times and The Washington Post calling on President-elect Clinton to allow the plant to open on schedule. The ads were an early warning of the problems Clinton will face in "putting people first," when people worried about their next meal square off with those who worry about their next breath.
The Waste Technologies Industries plant in East Liverpool, Ohio, is no ordinary incinerator. It is a $160 million complex intended to burn 60,000 tons a year of toxic waste from industries all over the country-or possibly, given that the operator is a subsidiary of a Swiss engineering firm, the world. It has advanced pollution-abatement equipment and smokestack monitors that can send data on emissions minute by minute to Environmental Protection Agency officials. It has created more than 100 jobs in a rust-belt town so depressed that its population has fallen by 50 percent in a decade, to 13,000. That explains why many in the community were outraged when Gore said that he would seek to deny WTI an operating permit until Congress investigates the plant's safety. "Without WTI, we're dusters, we're gone," says Dick Kelly, 50, a former steelworker who lost his job 12 years ago and now sells insurance.
But the plant also sits on the Ohio River flood plain, atop two aquifers and only 300 feet from the nearest homes. These conditions were legal when the plant first applied for a permit more than a decade ago, but would disqualify it under a more recent law that requires at least 2,000 feet of separation from houses. And that explains why other citizens were lining up last week to spend a night in jail as a badge of honor in the fight against WTI. "I'm prepared to do whatever it takes to stop WTI," said Edith Barnhart, who was awaiting trial for criminal trespass after being arrested with 74 others in a protest outside the plant last month. She is 68.
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The campaign to stop the incinerator has been orchestrated by Greenpeace and by Hugh Kaufman, an EPA whistle-blower. Kaufman says he has found irregularities in the plant's permits dating back to 1981, when a state agency took the land by eminent domain for use as a "port"-three months after the agency had agreed to lease the property to Waste Technologies for a toxic-waste disposal site. EPA higher-ups concede technical errors in the permit process, but consider them moot now. Kaufman thinks it will be all to the good if the WTI case puts the fear of God, or public-interest lawyers, into businessmen inclined to play fast and loose with permits. But he sees a more urgent issue. "The children in the area ... will be paying the price for their whole lives so that a few good men can get paid burger-flipper salaries to poison their neighborhoods," Kaufman says. "East Liverpool is being treated by big-money men as a Third World country."
WTI officials, on the contrary, try to leave the impression that its smokestack emissions will be as invigorating as a breeze from an orange grove. Officials assert that emissions will be far below state limits-.038 tons per year of lead, for instance, versus a state limit of 2.35 tons. A coal-burning power plant in nearby Shippingport, Pa., "puts out more emissions in one hour than we put out of certain substances in a year," says WTI spokeswoman Julia Bircher. "If other industries in this valley had to meet our emissions, they would close down tomorrow." Greenpeace, working from figures in the plant's permits, charges that WTI's figures are lies, and the likelier numbers are much higher-as much as 4.7 tons of lead. And incinerators put out compounds that aren't regulated at all, and for which no standards exist-but which may also be harmful. Ultimately, Greenpeace takes the position that there are no safe levels of emissions, that incineration is an inherently dangerous technology that ought never be used. But this is also how ardent environmentalists feel about landfills, leaving unspoken the implication that the industries that generate these wastes-chemical, pottery, paint and pharmaceutical companies-ought to be doing something else entirely.
Meanwhile, grandparents in BAN THE BURN T shirts await their jail time and WTI supporters have rallied, 700 strong, in the East Liverpool Motor Lodge. The company, racing the clock against a new administration, continues testing and adjusting its burners, preparing for a seven-day test burn, which could take place early in January. And an administration committed to saving both the environment and the jobs of places like East Liverpool, Ohio, faces the first, but by no means the last, test of how to reconcile those goals.
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