pollution

Scorecard

Lrubenstein — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:14:33 -0500

Environmental Defense created www.scorecard.org in 1998 to inform people about the level of pollution in their area and to encourage them to lobby the offending industries and their elected representatives to put a stop to it.

The organization uses highly innovative technology to retrieve information from 300 scientific and governmental databases. With this information, Scorecard reviews and categorizes the information about harmful environmental hazards such as air pollutants, toxic chemicals released into the environment, potential land contamination and more. Scorecard then posts the information on its website. It shows the location of the pollution, its source, when it was discovered, what (if any) government guidelines or restrictions apply to the clean-up process and how far along that clean-up process is.

This information is available on the site in several formats. The most widely used format allows the visitor to type in a zip code and see all the different types of pollutants in their area. Other formats include a ranking of the best and worst states for certain pollutants. The site also lists over 6,000 chemicals, with a description of the dangers and sources of these pollutants.

Visitors to the web site are encouraged to fax a letter to the polluting industry, write a letter to their elected representative or volunteer for a local organization working in the community.

Completed in Spring 2000.

Distributing air quality testing equipment to community members to promote environmental justice

Lrubenstein — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:25:41 -0500

Since 1995, many communities across the United States have begun or joined “Bucket Brigades,” programs that instruct communities near industrial polluters how to build and use simple air monitoring devices, or “buckets.” In the absence of strong environmental laws, standards, or environmental enforcement bodies, buckets give communities the means to independently monitor the air quality of their neighborhoods and provide them with the evidence to affect environmental and industrial policy change.

The first Bucket Brigades in the United States were started in Contra Costa County in northern California after major accidents at the four oil refineries in the area heightened community concerns about air pollution releases from these facilities. With the assistance of a local lawyer and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), the five towns surrounding these refineries began to construct buckets and sample air quality whenever releases from the refineries could be seen or smelled. By pressuring County Supervisors to make the local health department provide funding to continue the program, the Bucket Brigades became an approved county program and were allocated $50,000 in federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funds and $10,000 for staff time and services. CBE also convinced the EPA to endorse the program and provide $90,000 to ensure the scientific credibility of the buckets and pay for the air quality tests.

The “bucket” itself is a relatively simple and inexpensive air sampling device composed of a Tedlar sampling bag housed inside a five gallon plastic bucket and a vacuum or tire pump used to suck air into the sampling bag. The “Bucket Brigade” includes volunteer members in three jobs: Sniffers, Samplers, and Community Bucket Coordinators (CBCs). “Sniffers” are responsible for alerting the bucket brigade samplers when they notice a pollution incident. “Samplers” keep the air sampling devices in their homes and take a sample when they suspect a pollution incident. After taking a sample, the sampler will record where, when, and why the sample was taken and call a CBC to retrieve the sampling bag and arrange for delivery to the analytical laboratory. When the analytical results are received from the laboratory, the results are recorded in a database and provided to the community through local media, community meetings and other methods. Community members are expected to use the data collected at their own discretion, to request further investigations on pollution from community groups, government agencies, and health facilities.

Community education is also a large part of the Bucket Brigades’ work. Beyond training all project members in how to construct buckets, take air samples, and fill out the paperwork for the analytical laboratory, the brigade also provides residents with information about the potential health effects of pollution levels. This is done through the creation and distribution of fact sheets about specific chemicals, background pollution levels, known health effects, regulatory pollution levels, trends of specific compounds over time, quality assurance information, and the results of the latest group of samples.

Low income, minority communities make up the majority of those who have begun Bucket Brigades in the United States. At first, industry representatives rejected the air quality results collected by these groups. However, persistent testing and media attention has created industrial and environmental policy change in many communities. In Contra Costa County, California, an “environmental justice policy” was adopted, reinforcing industrial pollution regulations, expanding occupational medical facilities, and including residents in decisions regarding nearby industries. In Louisiana, Bucket Brigade air samples were used to prove that the Diamond neighborhood, which was slowly being engulfed by the Shell Chemical plant, was no longer a safe place to live, eventually resulting in the company agreeing to relocate the entire neighborhood. Overall, the Bucket Brigades have found that businesses and government agencies are more likely to respond to community concerns when they know people are organized and aware about exactly what pollutants their communities are facing.

Some technical knowledge, funding, and access to a laboratory that can perform the air quality testing is necessary for Bucket Brigades to be successful. Instruction on how to build buckets, take samples, get them analyzed, and train community members is now available in a manual created and sold by CBE, however, the laboratory that tests samples must be nearby and willing to work within your budget. Some air contaminants cannot be detected in samples that are not tested within 24 hours of being collected, and sampling bags must be cleaned at a laboratory before being used in the buckets.

This paper was completed on March 26, 2003.

Leveraging the Money

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:06 -0500

Leveraging the Money

by Ulrich Mueller

Download full notebook below.

In this notebook Ulrich Mueller describes a strategy of the FoodFirst Information and Action Network to influence large mining operations that were causing various human rights abuses, by putting pressure on banks and other financial institutions that invest in those mines. The notebook provides a thorough analysis of the kinds of research and pressure tactics that can provide an important new source of leverage for communities that are trying to counter the damage that can be caused by huge corporate projects on or near their land. This tactic can be extended to cover a broad range of issues in which there is a need to pressure corporations, as it takes into account their crucial dependence on the globalized financial community to invest in their operations, and the growing sensitivity of that financial community to sociopolitical pressure.

This notebook explains how the FoodFirst Information and Action Network influenced financial institutions to promote better protections for human rights or to prevent projects that would lead to human rights violations. FIAN Germany used this tactic mainly in a campaign against violations of the right-to-food caused by large surface gold mines. The campaign cooperates closely with affected communities and local organizations. Together with these partners, FIAN investigates the human rights problems of specific mines. We then use a number of instruments to bring the findings to the attention of investors and the public: fact-finding mission reports, calls for urgent action among members, involving human rights bodies at the national and international level, media work, speaker tours, conferences and lobbying. This combination provides new leverage to influence financial institutions and mining companies. And this in turn helps affected communities to claim their rights under difficult circumstances.

We started to support mining-affected communities in 1995. The first contacts we had were with communities in Peru and Turkey. In some of these cases, German investors were involved in financing the mines. This gave us an opportunity to link human rights violations in other countries to actors in Germany. And it also proved to be an effective tool to put pressure on the mining companies. From that starting point, FIAN began using investor pressure as a primary tactic in its gold mining campaign. The tactic of directing campaigns toward financial institutions is not limited to mining.

As financial institutions are, more and more, a powerful economic force worldwide, this tactic could be used in a variety of ways in other cases of corporate abuse: Industry-wide campaigns are pressing financial institutions like banks or pension funds to withdraw support from specific industrial sectors or to pressure companies in that sector to adopt new standards or practices. Campaigns might also focus on an individual company or a specifically harmful project (like large infrastructure projects, dams, mines, etc.). In these cases, investors might be urged to withdraw their support from a specific project or to pressure the company to change their behavior. Additionally, campaigns might focus on financial market practices themselves and demand new investment rules and practices like ethical investment.

This notebook focuses on project-level campaigning, using the example of a gold-mining project in Ghana. It will start with background information on the human rights impacts of surface gold mining. The elements of the tactic will be explained and illustrated through the example. The second part will discuss what questions are important when using the tactic and how the tactic could be transferred.

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