Unearthed today: The value of environmental caution

Caution is in the news a lot right now isn’t it? The government says that, when it comes to the virus, we need to follow the “precautionary principle”. Sounds sensible and dull – but actually if you think about it in social and environmental terms, it’s pretty radical. There’s some evidence that’s not how ministers do think about it mind. We’ve got two really important stories out today which touch on this issue; one directly and one less obviously – but the connection is there.

Single use disposable plastics are one of the biggest growth areas for the world’s beleaguered oil sector – driving up emissions in the process. But would that industry exist at anything like it’s current scale if we didn’t have places to dump or burn the waste it creates at low-cost? Places where the communities impacted were either economically or politically powerless to object.

We’ve reported already on the mass export of British ‘recycling’ to less developed economies, often resulting in large-scale illegal dumping and pollution for local communities and the surrounding environment. We’ve also reported on how the UK’s recycling industry itself depends on the use of marginalised workers working on zero hour contracts in poor working conditions.

But not all our waste is recycled, more and more is burnt. To do this the UK is building more and more incinerators.  Inori Roy wanted to find out where these plants are by analysing incinerator data and mapping their locations. Her investigation revealed that, in the UK, waste incinerators are three times more likely to be built in the UK’s most deprived neighbourhoods than in the least.

Potential new incinerators – which have been proposed, are in planning or being built – also reflect this trend, according to the mapping data. They are three times more likely to be built in the poorest areas than in the richest areas and nearly half are on track to be built in the UK’s top 25% most deprived neighbourhoods. We also found that people of colour are overrepresented in the neighbourhoods where existing incinerators are sited.  They are disproportionately more likely to be built in Northern urban areas.

They bring to these areas new sights, smells and noises – none of them good. They are often built in areas with existing air pollution problems, a problem they do not help to solve. They make the areas they are built in worse places to live. They are solving a problem we should not have and creating more problems for communities who need the reverse. But they get built anyway.

Regular readers will recall that when fracking was proposed for large parts of leafy southern England it came with large-payouts to home-owners, new community investment and regular environmental monitoring. It still didn’t happen. That’s not what’s happening here.

“In poorer neighbourhoods, [industrial sites] are built there, amassed there,” Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, a clean air campaigner whose daughter died of asthma in 2013, told Unearthed. “If it comes to pass that Black and Asian people are not paid as much, then they’re not going to get the best houses in the best areas.”

Kissi-Debrah added that living in industrial areas worsens environmental health conditions for people of colour, and their needs are often in competition with other government priorities.

“I don’t know whether pollution and peoples’ health can compete with the economy and jobs.” It sounds familiar, but here, the precautionary principle seems less of an issue. In addition to the story please take the time to watch Inori and Georgie’s excellent video here.  We also reported this one with the Guardian.

The precautionary principle is also fundamental to our future food and environmental regulation outside of the EU – and again to the protection of those impacted by cutting regulatory corners.

The trade deal between the US and UK – being negotiated in secret as I type – is about far more than the import of chicken carcasses washed in chemicals. It’s about the entire precautionary system of food, animal and environmental regulation which the UK has inherited from the EU; a system designed to protect all communities and consumers more-or-less equally from harm but a system which the US very much does not share.

The US, put most simply, prefers ‘science based’ approach which refuses to ban products unless there is overwhelming evidence of harm. It allows the US – bluntly – to produce stuff more cheaply with “different” environmental and food safety standards, putting the communities who buy these products or who live where they are produced at risk in a way nobody is in the EU.

And in largely un-reported comments picked up by Alice Ross and Lucy Jordan in their new analysis Trump’s trade ambassador has suggested there will be no trade deal without a major shift in the UK’s approach to standards that will affect products from animal antibiotics to pesticides.

“The European Union has raised this practice of using [food] standards really as protectionism to a high art,” Lighthizer told the Senate committee. “We have to insist on science-based standards, for our farmers… and to the extent people deny us access, we shouldn’t give them a trade agreement.”

One of the little-reported products which could be on the list to be imported is carbadox, an antibiotic used in pig-farming that has been banned in the EU since 1998.

An estimated 50% of pigs in the US are treated with carbadox – which can help drive down the cost of meat production by allowing pigs to be kept in closer quaters – but it has been found to leave potentially carcinogenic residues in the animals’ livers, which are used in processed pork products such as sausages and lunch meats.

It highlights wider issues with the incredibly widespread use of anti-biotics in US meat production.  “When you go to slaughter those animals, those drug-resistant bacteria inevitably contaminate some of the meat. And those get packaged up and shipped into our grocery stores. So we are routinely bringing drug-resistant bacteria into our house,” said Lance Price, director of George Washington University’s Antibiotic Resistance Action Center.

Similarly, the quantity and variety of pesticides used in American farming outstrips those currently used in the UK. The EU’s precautionary principle has prohibited or minimised the use of many chemicals where links to human or environmental health hazards are strongly suggested, sometimes before conclusive research has been carried out. In the event of a US-UK deal products containing residues of these chemicals could now be allowed in.

PAN’s analysis showed that British shoppers could be exposed to grapes produced with 1,000 times the UK-permitted level of the insecticide propargite, and apples treated with 400 times the UK-permitted level of malathion. Both chemicals have been linked to cancer and other serious health impacts.

Many UK supermarkets have suggested they would limit the American produce they stock – ruling out chlorine washed chicken for example, and for those who buy organic, the problem can be avoided entirely. But these products would still work their way into school canteens and processed foods. At the same time UK farmers may struggle to compete increasing pressure to reduce their own standards in parts of the country where mass agriculture is a major industry. The mass production and consumption of intensively farmed and artificially low-cost meat – in turn – is a major driver of climate emissions.

The precautionary principle – if applied fully – could be pretty radical. It can ensure environmental harm is avoided and all communities are equally protected. Without it environmental destruction is probably much easier.