Toxic Chemical Right-To-Know and Good Neighbor Campaigns
The organization has increasingly focused on environmental health issues, including landfills, hazardous waste dumps, groundwater and wellfield protection, incinerators, pesticides, and especially, industrial pollution.
In 1980, Ohio Citizen Action, working with allies in neighborhoods, firefighters, and labor unions, began a contentious two-year campaign that passed a strong Cincinnati toxic chemical right-to-know ordinance over the opposition of Procter & Gamble and the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. The Cincinnati ordinance became the model for laws the organization was able to pass in Akron, Cleveland, Columbus, Kent, Lancaster, Norwood, Oregon, and Toledo.
Then, in December 1984, a catastrophic accident took place at the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. Tens of thousands of people were killed, blinded or maimed for life by their exposure to methyl isocyanate gas. People in the United States began asking - Could this happen here? Do we have methyl isocyanate at plants in the United States? What about all the other chemical accidents that could take place? What could we do to prevent them? Members of Congress had heard about the right to know laws that had been passed in Ohio, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, and thought that those laws could be extended to the rest of the country. The Congressional committee drafting the federal right-to-know proposal used Ohio’s local ordinances and experiences as a model to draft their proposal, including a requirement that local firefighters receive lists of the chemicals being stored at facilities in their communities. In the fall of 1985, Ohio Citizen Action and other groups across the country delivered more than a million petition signatures urging Congress to pass a strong bill. The measure passed by a one vote margin, and included an important new component, the requirement that industries report the chemicals being used and stored at their facilities, and their emissions into the air, land, and water. That was the birth, in 1986, of the Toxics Release Inventory.
Since then, Ohio Citizen Action has used the Toxic Release Inventory as the basis for “good neighbor campaigns” with polluting companies. These campaigns combine community organizing, regional canvassing, direct negotiations with the company, and other techniques to cause major polluters to prevent pollution, according to Sandy Buchanan, “far beyond what federal or state regulations would require.”
So far, such campaigns have involved AK Steel, Middletown; Brush Wellman, Elmore; Columbus Steel Drum, Gahanna; DuPont, Washington, WV; Envirosafe Landfill, Oregon; Eramet, Marietta; FirstEnergy, Northern Ohio; General Environmental Management, Cleveland; Georgia-Pacific, Columbus; Lanxess Plastics, Addyston; Mittal Steel, Cleveland; Perma-Fix, Dayton; PMC Specialties, Cincinnati; River Valley Schools, Marion; Rohm and Haas, Reading; Shelly Asphalt, Westerville; Stark County landfills; Sunoco Refinery, Oregon; Universal Purifying Technologies, Columbus; U.S. Coking Group, Oregon; Valleycrest Landfill, Dayton; and Waste Technologies Industries hazardous waste incinerator, East Liverpool.
Ohio Citizen Action has published a Good Neighbor Campaign Handbook (Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, 2006), describing how such campaigns are organized.
Read more about this topic: Ohio Citizen Action
Famous quotes containing the words toxic, chemical, neighbor and/or campaigns:
“America today is capable of terrific intolerance about smoking, or toxic waste that threatens trout. But only a deeply confused society is more concerned about protecting lungs than minds, trout than black women.”
—Garry Wills (b. 1934)
“If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
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—Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901–1979)