Commentary –

Civilized Pollution

By William A. Collins

I can live,

Most anywhere;

But I can’t,

Escape the air.

Connecticut is perhaps the most civilized state. We feature green lawns, big cars, the latest computers, smoke-free stacks, dump-free towns, and disease-free kids.

Well, mostly disease-free. There’s not much scurvy or rickets anymore, let alone polio or diphtheria. Kids these days, however, are loaded with asthma. It’s our state epidemic. And the irony is that asthma is closely related to being so civilized, as are other unnerving childhood afflictions. They are made more common and more severe by exposure to certain nasty chemicals.

Some come from cars. We like our cars big, and we’re game to drive them a long way in order to enjoy big green lawns. This means burning ever more gas and spewing ever more exhaust, countering the hard-earned gains from our emissions testing program. Obviously settling for smaller yards and smaller cars would cut those emissions a lot, but we’re not yet ready for that. But whenever we finally do get ready, all those animals whose habitat we tear up for new homes will surely be as grateful as our kids.

Also dangerous are those sumptuous lawns themselves. We feed them fertilizers and protect them with pesticides, all of which run off into our watercourses, and then to Long Island Sound. Some of that poison, though, manages to enter our children along the way, not to mention otherwise innocent plants and animals.

Computers also take their toll. In Connecticut we relish owning the latest computers. But what do we do with the old ones? There’s a limit to how many they need in Uzbekistan. So, after some scavenging for parts, most get burned or buried, thus expelling their brew of lead and mercury into the air or groundwater. The bulk of that brew goes airborne, because Connecticut burns its garbage. We’ve run out of places to bury it. On the whole that’s good, because our scrubbers are top-notch. We capture most of the bad stuff, which, had it been landfilled, would have poisoned our groundwater for centuries. But you can never capture everything, especially lead, mercury, and PCBs. Plus our nation’s laboratories invent new toxins far faster than we can corral the old ones at our incinerators.

The solutions to this atmospheric epidemic are not so hard to conjure up. Europe uses a lot of them now. It’s just that they nibble away a bit at our prized lifestyle, and compromise the cherished marketing techniques of some important corporations.

To begin with, as mentioned before, we should drive smaller cars and live in small houses closer to work. (That’s tough enough.) Second are those lawns. Indeed our family has a pact with ours: “You grow, we mow.” Beyond that, it’s on its own. Next are computers. Connecticut needs to control their disposal, just like cars. Equipment exists to capture all their noxious parts, so the state should subsidize the installation of some of it.

Then there’s retail packaging. It’s mostly plastic, and totally out of hand. Hewlett-Packard, for example, may get a gold star for having a woman president, but it gets a lump of coal for its shamelessly egregious packaging. If the state can’t ban it, it should at least boycott the company.

Such solutions obviously trample on our upwardly mobile toes. But that’s better than letting industrial toxins continue to poison our kids’ lungs and livers. Expanding the returnable bottle law, expanding plastic recycling, and limiting packaging would be reasonable places to start. Our governor probably isn’t interested in any of that, so you might drop the hint to any lawmakers you bump into.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)