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Monday, August 02, 2004

Environment - Stories today

Confined feeding. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had a very long story Sunday headlined: "Big farms, big problems? Manure from large-scale dairies creates environmental issues." Access it here. Some quotes:

Many of northwest Ohio's mega-dairies play roles in the potential threat to the water supply. An unannounced inspection of 10 dairies in March found extensive problems at nearly all of them, said Arnie Lieder, enforcement officer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5, which includes Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin. No violation notices have been issued to the problem farms.

Lieder cites a "slew of maintenance problems" with the manure storage pits as well as "failure to contain contaminated runoff and unauthorized discharges, particularly from feed storage as well as manure storage."

He said most of the dairies began operation with inadequate manure storage capacity, forcing them to avoid overflow by spreading manure on fields when the ground was frozen or snow- covered. Under these conditions, the Ohio Department of Agriculture discourages, but does not ban, manure spreading. Many other states prohibit winter manure applications.

Tire recycling. "A fifth of Indiana's tire recyclers illegally accumulate waste tires" is the headline to this story in the Muncie StarPress.

Toxic Waste. The Evansville CourierPress had an eidtorial yesterday expressing concern about what is described as IDEM's confidence that "toxic waste from Alcoa's Warrick County operation, dumped years ago at the former Squaw Creek Mine near Boonville, poses no problem today."

Stormwater. The Porter County jail in Valparaiso has received money to do a demonstration project on how to manage rain run-off in an environmentally friendly manner, according to this story published Sunday in the Munster Times.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 2, 2004 04:24 PM
Posted to Environmental Issues