U.S. Agencies Focusing On Urban Remediation

The 'environmental justice' movement presses for studies of links among poverty, exposure to toxins, and disease. A collaborative effort is under way to assess the legacy of environmental pollution that falls upon the poor. An Institute of Medicine (IoM) committee recently completed site visits as part of its 18-month study that will evaluate the research, educational, and health policy needs required to bring "environmental justice" to impoverished and minority communities. Environmental justice involves seeking remedies for health problems that advocates say disproportionately affect poor and minority populations living in industrial or urban areas. Funding support for the IoM study is provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Institutes of Health. The undertaking is one of several recent efforts to investigate issues related to environmental justice. In the meantime, communities have taken matters into their own hands, enlisting the help of scientists and bioremediation firms to clean up their polluted neighborhoods. BY THE NUMBERS: M.D. Anderson Cancer Center's Lovell Jones cites the need for more sensitive statistical methods in epidemiological studies of the problem. For the last two decades, community activists have been pointing out that hazardous waste sites are more likely to be surrounded by economically disadvantaged or minority communities than by middle-class, white communities. Biomedical researchers know that people in poor and minority communities tend to have a greater incidence of disease and a greater likelihood of early death than people from the middle class. But there are almost no scientific data that link environmental pollution to poverty, race, and illness. Even a 1995 report from the United States General Accounting Office (GAO), Hazardous and Nonhazardous Waste: Demographics of People Living Near Waste Facilities (GAO/RCED-95-84; June 13, 1995), points out that studies were limited and their results varied. "Few data exist to document harmful health effects of exposure to hazardous and nonhazardous waste facilities, and virtually no work has been done to document disproportionate health effects on minorities or low-income people," the report notes. "It's pretty clear that disease incidence and morbidity and premature mortality are much higher in economically disadvantaged populations," states Kenneth Olden, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). "We need studies to determine to what extent" the environment is responsible for differences between richer and poorer communities. The IoM study aims to evaluate cost-benefit and risk-benefit analyses of environmental health and justice issues as well as the role of emerging scientific research-especially development of biomarkers of susceptibility-in efforts to administer environmental justice. It also hopes to highlight opportunities for collaborative approaches to addressing the issues. The 15-member IoM committee is a group of scientists and policymakers headed by James R. Gavin, senior scientific officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md. Committee members recently visited four metropolitan sites where environmental issues are a concern: Chicago (typical for an urban area with environmental justice concerns); New Orleans (where the petrochemical industry is a dominant force); Tucson, Ariz. (an area with large Hispanic and Native American populations); and Spokane, Wash. (site of the Hanford nuclear facility). The committee met with academics and community leaders to hear their views on environmental justice issues. The committee's findings will not be published until later this year. According to Lovell Jones, a cancer researcher at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who is a member of the committee, more sensitive statistical methods must be used to study the problems reported at these site meetings. "Modern-day epidemiology is not equipped yet to really show direct cause and effect because certain clusters [of disease incidence] may not be large enough to do standard epidemiological studies." Jones notes that none of the studies that exist "take into account exposure to multiple compounds and the role of mixtures in the etiology of human disease." PUSH THE ENVELOPE: Roger McClellan of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology urges researchers to expand their traditional emphasis on single-risk factors. Toxicologists need to "get off the tunnel vision of single-risk factors and start to look at multiple risk factors," says Roger O. McClellan, president of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT) in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and a member of the IoM committee. McClellan points out that the poor have many risk factors for disease. "It's hell to be poor," he notes, pointing out that risks are driven by income, lifestyle, and occupation. He quantitates those risks with statistics from a Department of Health and Human Services study (Vital and Health Statistics: Current Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, 1993, PHS 95-1518, December 1994). He explains that individuals aged 45 to 64 with incomes of less than $10,000 have a 1.6 times higher relative risk of heart disease, a 1.4 times higher relative risk of hypertension, a 1.3 times higher relative risk of chronic bronchitis, and a 6.9 times higher relative risk of emphysema than those in the same age group with incomes of $35,000 or more. "Scientists have an obligation to society to help place all risk factors [income-related, life style-related, occupational, and environmental] in perspective and avoid the temptation to hype the risk factors they are studying," he adds. CONFIRMING A HUNCH: NIEHS's Kenneth Olden notes the need for studies to determine the extent to which environmental conditions cuase morbidity and mortality in poor populations. Lead poisoning is the only case in which a causal relationship betweeen a health problem and environmental factors has been documented, says NIEHS's Olden. "If [a child is] not a poor, inner-city dweller, it is unlikely that a kid will get lead poisoned." Research on blood lead level and its effect on intellectual development of children was pioneered by Herbert L. Needleman and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their recent studies show that early exposure of boys to environmental lead results in an increased risk of developing antisocial behavior (H.L. Needleman et al., JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association, 275:363-9, 1996). "Lead levels," they wrote in the paper, "are higher in minorities and in subjects with low incomes." Olden believes that lead is just the beginning. "I think other exposures would be the same if we bothered to go out into the communities and do the measurements. The quality of air in inner cities is generally worse than where most of us live [because of urban environmental factors like] commercial incinerators [and] diesel buses, so people are exposed more to pollutants in the environment." But Olden adds, "We need science to document or to refute, to investigate whether that hypothesis is correct or not. It's doable; we just need to make the investment to do it." Although advances in data-collection techniques can aid in pinpointing dangerous areas around contaminated sites, for example, the data that have been generated are generally site-specific, says Barry Johnson, assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) in Atlanta, and assistant Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service. "This agency has done a large number of health investigations of communities and populations that reside [around] hazardous waste sites, or reside around areas where there has been a chemical spill. We have not integrated it into a national pattern regarding environmental justice, hazardous wastes, and health." LANDMARK LANDFILL: Harold Freeman says public opposition to a North Carolina toxic waste site started the environmental-justice movement. For the last 15 years, however, a loose conglomeration of churches, community groups, and civil rights organizations has started to address the issues faced by poor and minority people living in environmentally degraded and polluted areas. Many trace the beginnings of this environmental justice movement to a 1982 proposal by local authorities in Warren County, N.C., to build a toxic waste landfill. The landfill was to be in "an overwhelmingly low-income and minority community," according to Harold Freeman, director of surgery at Harlem Hospital Center in New York and chairman of the President's Cancer Panel, a presidentially appointed advisory body that monitors the government's cancer initiatives. "Warren County became a rallying point [on] environmental inequities." As a result, GAO began a study of states in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Region IV, the Southeastern U.S. (Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation With Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities, GAO/RCED-83-168, June 1, 1983). GAO found that three of the four hazardous waste landfills in EPA Region IV were located near communities that were primarily African American, and that a quarter of the people in the communities were poor. Subsequently, the New York-based United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice produced a report that found minorities were more likely to reside in communities with commercial hazardous-waste landfills than were members of the majority population (Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites, Commission for Racial Justice, United Church of Christ, New York; 1987). Charles Lee, director of environmental justice for the commission, is also a member of the IoM committee. He describes it as "an important first step in raising national awareness about issues of environmental pollution in people of color and poor communities." The report advocated federal action to address these environmental justice concerns. By 1992, the Office of Environmental Equity was established. (It was named Office of Environmental Justice in 1994.) And in February 1994, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, entitled "Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations." The order directed each federal agency to "make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations." It also created an Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice, directed agencies to develop "agency-wide environmental justice strategy," and directed that epidemiological and clinical research be carried out on communities at risk. Executive Order 12898 not only mandated that federal agencies prevent further environmental injustices, but also led to an infusion of federal funds into environmental justice-related studies and projects. Although the $13.6 million NIEHS allocated for environmental justice projects in FY1996 is a small amount as far as institute-wide extramural grant programs go, a search of the NIEHS grants database for 1996 yielded many more than 500 grants using "environmental justice" as key words. "Health concerns covered by environmental justice are wide-ranging," says Lee. "These issues include lead poisoning, asthma and respiratory issues, radioactive wastes, pesticides and farm workers, subsistence consumption and habitat destruction, reproductive and developmental hazards, cancer, and cumulative exposures from multiple sources. This calls for a research and action agenda which emphasizes disease and pollution prevention that is supported by adequate resources and multidisciplinary approaches." SEEKING PARTNERS: Gerald Poje of NIEHS hopes foundations will help further federal research and redevelopment efforts. According to Gerald Poje, director of international programs and public health for NIEHS, "Our hope at the federal level is that the foundation world will partner with us." As noted by NIEHS director Olden at a November 1996 presentation to the American Public Health Association, foundations have experience in working on the community level, so they can better serve the needs of communities while promoting NIEHS grant programs. The institute also hopes that foundations could help those grant dollars go further. EPA's Environmental Justice Through Pollution Prevention (EJP2) program has $4.2 million available in FY1997 for nonprofit community groups, state and local governments, academic institutions, and tribal organizations. In FY1995 and FY1996 this program awarded grants-generally up to $100,000-for several projects, including community education on ways to prevent pollution. Brownfields, or abandoned industrial properties that may be polluted, constitute part of the pollution problem in poor areas. Remediating brownfields is going to take money and research on less expensive clean-up methods than those used on the EPA's Superfund sites. Large, industrial waste-contaminated Superfund sites require major, expensive remediation efforts. EPA is running a Brownfields Pilot Program, which grants up to $200,000 to communities that are involved in the redevelopment of brownfields. The money is slated to aid in efforts to assess site contamination, involve community residents in site redevelopment, help devise economic packages to redevelop the property, and resolve liability concerns. According to program analyst Kent Benjamin of EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, there are 78 such pilot projects: half national pilots awarded through Washington and half regional pilots awarded through EPA's 10 regional offices. JOIN TOGETHER: Phytotech CEO Bert Ensley stresses that "It's common sense" to involve the entire community in redevelopment of abandoned industrial properties. Like much of the Northeast, Trenton, N.J., has abandoned industrial properties in the midst of predominantly minority and economically depressed communities. One community in Trenton, aided by a nonprofit development organization called Isles Inc., wanted to clean up a lead-contaminated brownfield in its neighborhood. The group enlisted the help of Phytotech Inc., a bioremediation firm in Monmouth Junction, N.J. Phytotech specializes in using phytoremediation, an experimental but inexpensive technology to clean up brownfield sites. Phytotech planted part of the site with Brassica, a member of the mustard family. The plants pick up the lead, sequestering it in their shoots (J. W. Huang et al., Environmental Science & Technology, 31[3]:800-5, 1997; M.J. Blaylock, Environmental Science & Technology, 31[3]:860-5; 1997). After the plants are harvested, the lead is gone. Lead levels at the Trenton site are now approaching legal limits for safety. Bert Ensley, president and CEO of Phytotech, expects total cleanup after this summer. Phytotech funded the work itself for the first year, but this year's work will be funded by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection through Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Ensley points out that brownfield redevelopment involves the whole community. "The way to have the people work with you is to provide benefit to everyone. This isn't from some benign point of view; it's common sense." He says that some sites, for example, may be able to be redeveloped for commercial property that will add to the community's tax base and produce jobs, while other sites could be redeveloped into park land or as community gardens. The redeveloper makes money from the commercial sites. "They're sort of junk real estate, like a '59 Cadillac out in the field. Part of it is the willingness to make something good, useful, out of junk real estate." He adds, "The sure way is to show someone how to make money out of it. . . . Show how it benefits everyone, including the one who is taking the risk and redeveloping it. They've got to be able to make money." PICK UP THE PACE: Tulane researcher Joan Bennett says regulatory agencies' slow approval of the new remediation techniques will ultimately harm the public. Government regulations, however, can discourage the use of newer, more environmentally friendly technologies to clean up contaminated sites, according to Joan W. Bennett, a molecular mycologist at Tulane University and part of a joint environmental program with Xavier University. Bennett and her colleagues are working with the Department of Agriculture on a field trial using the mushroom Marasmiellus troyananus to clean up a benzo[a]pyrene-contaminated site. Bennett has been working on methods to encapsulate white rot fungus, Phanerochaetechrysosporium, for delivery to toxic waste sites where the fungus can degrade organic pollutants (J.W. Bennett et al., Biotechnology Techniques, 10:7-12, 1996; A.K. Loomis et al., Current Microbiology 34:127-30, 1997). Bennett points out that few remediation efforts in urban environments have involved methods such as those utilized by her group or by Phytotech. Typical means of cleaning up hazardous waste sites, she says, are using a bulldozer, scraping off the layers containing waste, and replacing them with clean layers. But, she adds, this method may lead to more environmental damage as toxic materials and dust are released into the air. Despite the promise of these new technologies, federal agencies have been slow to approve their use, notes Bennett. "By trying to protect people, we slow down methods that would be, in the long run, kinder [and] gentler." Such inexpensive technologies may help communities clean up polluted areas, but what is really needed, according to United Church of Christ's Lee, is for communities to have the "local capacity" to be able to carry out their own research and education efforts. Working with community members ultimately will create better science, he says. But McClellan sounds a word of caution: "The issue of environmental justice is a very complex issue that really interweaves elements of science with social and economic considerations. . . . Sometimes society has excess expectations as to what science can do to help solve these very complex issues." Myrna E. Watanabe is a science writer based in Yonkers, N.Y.

U.S. Agencies Focusing On Urban Remediation

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