We must not risk another pollution failure

By Chronicle Editor

The state Department of Environmental Quality would be seriously remiss if it were to grant Holcim Inc. a permit to burn tires as fuel without conducting a full environmental impact study.

Holcim wants to burn more than a million discarded tires a year in the production of cement as a cost-saving measure. The DEQ has granted a tentative permit after completing an environmental assessment - a much more abbreviated process than the environmental impact study.

After the completion of a public comment period at the end of the month, the DEQ will make a decision on whether to grant Holcim the permit now or require the more thorough study.

Opponents of Holcim's plan have raised sufficient questions about the effects the tire-burning process will have on agriculture, water quality and human health to warrant the more thorough process.

They have pointed out that heavy metals will be discharged into the air and will be carried on prevailing winds to settle on agricultural land and bodies of water. The big questions are how much, where it will fall and what effects those pollutants will have when they do fall.

The answers so far have been less than satisfying.

Opponents have raised legitimate concerns about the weather data used to predict the path pollutants will follow downwind from the plant. The upper level data used came from the U.S. Weather Service station in Great Falls, the nearest point where that data is taken regularly.

But data taken more than a hundred miles distant to predict the path of an air pollution plume is not going to produce a reliable result. Those observations need to be taken at a point closer to the source.

And opponents have argued convincingly that southwest Montana's increasingly important tourism industry would suffer from the mere perception that a significant nearby pollution source is tainting the air, water and flesh of wildlife that live and feed in the area with heavy metals.

The effects on tourism may be a hard-to-measure impact, but they are impacts nonetheless that would be inflicted on a great many people who stand to gain nothing from the cement plant's fortunes.

Montana's regulation of resource industries is marred by significant failures in the mining industry that have caused serious health problems and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs. Burning millions of tires with insufficient information about the effects risks yet another of those failures.

Reader Comments