The Chemical World This Week

Chemical & Engineering

NEWS NOVEMBER 13, 1967

Antipollution fight focuses on Chicago's efforts Chicago's WBBM-TV ended its half-hour documentary depicting progress in cleaning up the pollution of Lake Michigan on a doleful note: one small skirmish won, but precious little else accomplished. This battle against pol­lution is currently putting Chicago at the center of what could well be the most aggressive antipollution fight yet. The outcome could be precedent-set­ting for many future antipollution drives elsewhere.

One of the most audacious moves yet made in the squabble landed in the lap of the Illinois attorney general. The Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago asked for permission to act for the state of Illinois by filing a suit in the U.S. Supreme Court against the state of Indiana and indi­vidual polluters. The district charges that Indiana has failed to exercise its police powers to prevent harmful pol­lution that affects Illinois waters of Lake Michigan and the various water­ways of the district.

The suit will not be filed. But the move serves to point up one of the problems affecting Chicago area pollu­tion. Although much of the industry in the area discharging into Lake Michigan is located within sanitary dis­trict jurisdiction, much of it is also lo­cated over the state border in Indiana along the Indiana Harbor Canal. Thus, while there has been and is a good deal of interstate cooperation, the battle is also marked by a fair amount of interstate political maneu­vering.

The greater problem of the entire lake involves Michigan and Wisconsin as well. In fact, the sanitary district has suggested that suits similar to the proposed action against Indiana should be instituted against Michigan and Wisconsin where the circumstances are similar.

This particular sanitary district ac­tion, however, is only one of numerous actions that are keeping an intense pressure on the situation in the Chi­cago area. Some of the more signifi­cant:

• F o r weeks the Chicago Tribune has been drilling Lake Michigan pol­lution into the public consciousness

with almost daily "Save Our Lake" articles. It has also distributed thou­sands of free bumper stickers bearing the same slogan. WBBM-TV, in its documentaries, bears down on the theme "Too thick to navigate, too thin to cultivate."

• The Illinois General Assembly, in special session (for various reasons) last month, passed an antipollution bill similar to one that had been vetoed earlier in the year by Gov. Otto Kerner. The latest bill, which has this time

been signed into law, distinguishes be­tween dumping and discharging. Ef­fective immediately, it prohibits dump­ing of materials into Lake Michigan without consent of the Illinois Depart­ment of Public Works and Buildings and the Illinois Sanitary Water Board. It provides penalties of up to one year in jail and fines from $1000 to $10,000 for each day of a violation. For dis­charging, vessels and industries have until Dec. 1, 1968, to prevent pollut­ants from entering the lake, the dead-

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line set in 1965 at an Indiana-Illinois-federal pollution conference.

• Attorneys general of Illinois, In­diana, Michigan, and Wisconsin met in Chicago early this month to consider ways of combining legal powers to take joint action against lake pollution as a single force. The goal is to avoid suits between states by bringing suit against individual polluters. The meeting thus forestalled any suit by Illinois against Indiana.

Meanwhile, still pending is a suit brought late last month by the Chicago sanitary district against 11 companies operating on the Indiana Harbor Ca­nal. An initial court hearing dismissed one of the charges—that against Texas Co.—from the 12 originally cited. The remaining 11 are Inland Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Ameri­can Steel Foundry, Cities Service Oil, Socony-Mobil, Lake Cities Corp., Clark Oil and Refinery, U.S. Gypsum, Sinclair Refinery, American Oil, and Union Carbide.

The suit is unusual in that an Illinois agency is suing Indiana industries through an Illinois court. The sanitary district brought the suit under its au­thority to prevent pollution of any wa­ters from which a water supply may be obtained within the district. It alleges that effluents discharged by the companies find their way to the Illinois part of the lake and constitute a health threat. It cites steadily rising water purification costs due to increas­ing pollution of Illinois waters in the lake caused by the polluted effluents. A similar suit has been brought by the sanitary district against U.S. Steel, which operates plants on the Calumet Harbor in Illinois.

According to the sanitary district, the hope is to get timetables for pollu­tion abatement created under court or­der. Thus, if the timetables are not met, the companies stand to be cited for contempt of court.

The one small victory in the overall battle came with the agreement last month of the Army Corps of Engineers to dump dredgings, for the remainder of the year, from Indiana Harbor into landfill sites rather than in the lake. A huge oil slick earlier discovered float­ing on the lake and traced to the dredging operation created a public outcry in Chicago that reached all the way to Congress.

The situation became unsettled, however. The Indiana stream pollu­tion control board late last month or­dered a halt to the dumping of dredg­ings into the landfills, which had been offered by Inland Steel and Youngs­town Sheet and Tube. It said polluted water from the dredgings might seep out into Lake Michigan. The army engineers said it wouldn't resume dumping into the lake but would seek

new dumping sites. After study, the Indiana board, its fears of seepage al­layed, gave the go-ahead to resume dumping in the original landfills.

So far, the battle over Lake Michi­gan is mostly one of words and legal and political maneuverings. Authori­ties say that southern Lake Michigan is in the same shape that Lake Erie was 15 years ago. Whether the bur­den of pollution can be turned back in time to prevent it from decay won't be clear for some time. But the effort is certainly being made, and WBBM-TV could yet find its doleful outlook a bit premature.

Passage of air pollution bill will help Congressional image

Passage of an air pollution control bill will be ranked as one of the few out­standing achievements of the strife-torn 90th Congress. The version of S. 780 just approved by the House dif­fers only slightly from that approved earlier by the Senate, so ironing out the differences before adjournment should present no problem. In fact, the Sen­ate might even accept the House ver­sion and send the bill on to the Presi­dent without bothering to call a House-Senate conference.

One difference between the House and Senate versions of the bill is spending authority. The House would authorize $428 million for a three-year program to fight air pollution; the Sen­ate would authorize $700 million for the same period. In view of the cur­rent Congressional furor over economy, the cheaper House version seems likely to prevail.

Another difference is the way that registration of gasoline additives would be handled. In the House ver­sion the Secretary of Health, Educa­tion, and Welfare could ask additives makers to furnish whatever information he thinks is needed. In the Senate version HEW is limited to such infor­mation as the name of the additive and recommended concentrations for use. The Manufacturing Chemists Associa­tion backs the Senate version because it believes that the House version would, in effect, give H E W licensing power over additives.

The fundamentals of the bill stirred no debate on the House floor. In gen­eral, the bill follows the pattern of the present water pollution control law. States and interstate regions would set standards for air quality subject to final approval by HEW. In addition, HEW could stop pollution sources by injunction in cases of extreme emer­gency, HEW would register all fuel additives, conduct research on fuels, and make a two-year study of the im-

Rep. John Dingell A different way

pact of setting emission standards for individual industries regardless of plant location.

In contrast to the bland acceptance of the basics of the bill, a fierce floor fight broke out over an amendment to permit California to set its own stand­ards on emissions from automobile ex­hausts without regard to existing fed­eral specifications. When the bill was debated in the Senate, the California delegation succeeded in tacking on an amendment that would permit Cali­fornia to set more rigorous controls on automobile exhaust emissions than those set by HEW because of Cali­fornia's peculiar smog problems.

When the House Commerce Com­mittee reported the bill, however, this amendment was thrown out. In its place was an amendment proposed by Rep. John Dingell (D.-Mich.) which attacked California's smog problem in a different way. Under this amend­ment, California could set stiffer con­trols on auto exhausts provided it could prove to H E W that local conditions warranted the tighter controls.

On the floor the California delega­tion, showing a united front, attacked the Dingell amendment. They charged that it was a sellout to the big auto makers located in his district. Moreover, they charged that the Din­gell amendment would undo all the pioneering work California had done in exhaust control and would force the state to accept lower standards at the whim of H E W merely for the sake of national uniformity.

Vainly Rep. Dingell and his sup­porters tried to explain that this amendment would not cramp Cali­fornia's style, that H E W would not deny California's right capriciously, and that the amendment was not a sellout to the automobile interests. At one point the debate became so turgid that Rep. Dingell remarked, "There is a great deal of smog right

20 C&EN NOV. 13, 1967