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Rhode's organization, along with a coalition of environmentalists, took out a full page ad in the New York Times on June 5th blasting the EPA for not doing its job. The environmentalists say blaming the victims, consumers and farmers, is wrong. Dioxin is spewed out of garbage incinerators and paper mills. Many plastics, such as PVC, are loaded with it. The EPA knows this. Yet all over the world, from the US to France to Japan, governments encourage the construction of more garbage incinerators. And nowhere in the world do governments take any significant action to curtail the manufacturing processes that further burden the planet with toxic dioxin. This is the case even though known alternatives, such a oxygen rather than chlorine bleaching of paper, exist. Governments don't take action because they listen to the big corporations. It's too expensive to change, the big companies whine.
But what of the small farmers whose livelihood may be further jeopardized by the corporate polluters? Maybe now is the time for farmers and environmentalists to join hands. In France environmentalists are calling for a ban on garbage incineration because farmed and wild fish have dioxin in them. Instead the government is planning to expand garbage incineration.
What if farmers and environmentalists organized together to fight dioxin pollution? Could they shut down our incinerators and come up with better solution to garbage handling? What if Dean Kleckner, the President of the American Farm Buruea, stood outside the nations capitol with a huge banner flapping in the wind, the other end of which was held by someone in a suit from Greenpeace, that said "Save America's Family Farms, Ban Garbage Incineration."? end
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