Our Pollution

• Americans use approximately 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year. Research shows that target pests will eventually develop resistance to these pesticides anyway.
• Seventy-three different kinds of pesticides have been found in groundwater, which is potential drinking water.
• More than 100 active pesticide ingredients are suspected of causing cancer, birth defects, and gene mutation.
• A growing list of pesticides have the potential to disrupt the immune and endocrine systems and of having long term impacts on the offspring of exposed humans and animals.
• The cost of one nuclear weapons test alone could finance the installation of eighty thousand hand pumps, giving third world villages access to clean water.
• Estimated costs of cleaning up the 24,000 contaminated federal nuclear facilities range from $100 billion to $400 billion. (The Environmental Protection Agency)
• Each year U.S. factories spew 3 million tons of toxic chemicals into the air, land, and water. That compounds the over one-half billion tons of solid hazardous wastes - we're not talking about your garbage here - that get dumped across the nation for our generation to one day clean up. (The Gale Environmental Scorecard)
• In 1987, the U.S. released 1.2 million tons of toxic chemicals into our atmosphere, 670,000 tons into our soil, and 250,000 tons into our water. (International Wildlife magazine)
• PCB's haven't been used in the U.S. for more than two decades. But dangerous levels of PCB's remain in the natural environment and pose a threat to human health. --ENN for 5/27/98
• "Everyone has some amount of dioxin in his or her body, and the average level is already high enough to endanger health." --Lois Gibbs
• Nitrogen is essential to crops but too much will leak into groundwater and rivers causing nutrient pollution in rivers and oceans and severe human health problems from nitrate pollution.
• In the US, 41% of all insecticides are used on corn. Eighty per cent of these are used to treat a pest that could be controlled simply by rotating the corn for one year with any other crop.