Food & Water Watch
A coalition of community, animal welfare and environmental organizations is filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) challenging the agency’s withdrawal of a proposed rule that would have allowed the EPA to collect basic information, like locations and animal population sizes, from factory farms.
The Center for Food Safety, Environmental Integrity Project, Food & Water Watch, The Humane Society of the United States and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing that the agency’s withdrawal of the proposed rule lacks the rational basis required by law. The information at issue is critical to the EPA’s ability to protect waterways from pollutants produced by factory farms, one of the country’s largest sources of water pollution.
“While power plants, waste treatment facilities and manufacturers have had to comply with the protective standards of the Clean Water Act, the factory farming industry has managed to evade any meaningful regulation," said Hugh Espey, executive director at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. "After over three decades, there is no rational reason for why EPA won’t enact the types of Clean Water Act approaches with factory farms that have worked well with all of our other polluting industries.”
“The animal agriculture industry has benefited from EPA’s lack of information for decades, and has successfully opposed efforts to increase transparency," explained Jonathan Lovvorn, senior vice president and chief counsel for animal protection litigation at The Humane Society. "This certainly is not good for animals, humans or the environment; it is only good for massive industrialized farms.”
Factory farms are industrial facilities that confine thousands of animals in limited land areas for meat, dairy and egg production. The operations that would have been subject to this rule are the factory farms falling within the “CAFO” point source category under the Clean Water Act, a category that consists of the nation’s largest and dirtiest operations.
“With the withdrawal, EPA continues to pursue a [concentrated animal feeding operations] CAFO pollution control policy that can only be described as willful ignorance," said George Kimbrell, senior attorney for the Center for Food Safety."As long as EPA continues to turn an unlawfully blind eye towards this industry, our waterways and communities will never be safe.”
The EPA estimates there are 20,000 CAFOs in the U.S. producing three times as much waste as humans. Although this waste contains pathogens, heavy metals, antibiotics and hormones, EPA does not require all factory farms to meet waste management and treatment requirements.
The Columbia University School of Law Environmental Law Clinic is providing legal representation in the case.
In 1972, the clear water pollution threat posed by CAFOs’ staggering waste stream led Congress to mandate that EPA must regulate CAFOs pursuant to the Clean Water Act. Despite this 40-year-old mandate, EPA continues to lack basic data about factory farms, including accurate and consistent information on their size, location and waste management practices.
Under the abandoned rule, known as CWA Section 308 Rule, the agency was to begin gathering this basic information. The proposed CWA Section 308 Rule made a strong case for the need for information collection based on inadequate existing data. Following strong industry opposition, the EPA withdrew the rule. In its rule withdrawal, the EPA radically shifted its position without justification.
The agency now claims that instead of using its authority under the Clean Water Act to gather information directly from CAFO owners and operators, it will seek to gather existing information about CAFOs from various state and federal agencies. This approach contradicts recent government reports, which confirm that state agency CAFO data is “inconsistent and inaccurate and does not provide the EPA with the reliable data it needs…” and that “no federal agency collects accurate and consistent data on the number, size, and location of CAFOs.” This legal action asserts the EPA’s change in position is arbitrary because alternative courses of action cannot provide the crucial information.
In the fall of 2012, several environmental organizations filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the EPA for all of the state-generated data gathered by the agency. After industry browbeating, the agency attempted to recall some of the records that it originally produced. Nevertheless, Food & Water Watch retained and reviewed all of the original records.
“Our review of these records confirms what EPA has already admitted in its preamble to the 308 Rule," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director at Food & Water Watch. "The data from the states is inconsistent, incomplete and ultimately, will not allow the agency to finally begin the process of properly regulating these highly polluting facilities.”
Visit EcoWatch’s FACTORY FARMING and CLEAN WATER ACT pages for more related news on this topic.
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Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.