A Saga of Industrial Pollution

摘要

Toms River offers a fascinating, carefully written description of chemical industry malpractices during the past five decades and the subsequent actions of citizens, authorities, companies, employees, and lawyers. It helps us understand why chemical industry tends to produce health hazards, why that is happening in new areas (such as China) even today, and how these problems could be reduced. In 1952, the Swiss company Ciba (later Ciba-Geigy and now Novartis) built a chemical factory for producing dyes and, later, other chemicals in sleepy Toms River, New Jersey. The town's enthusiastic welcome gradually turned into complaints and eventually outrage. Through illegal dumping of Union Carbide waste, Toms River came to host another hazardous site. The careless disposal of solid and liquid hazardous wastes at the two sites polluted the nearby river, soil, groundwater, and ocean and caused suspicion of a childhood cancer cluster. Both sites were included in the Superfund program, which identifies and attempts to clean up contaminated sites in the United States.