Florida Environment’s Hidden Menace: Toxic Chemical Pollution

Phosphate fertilizer factories emit toxic fumes and build mountains of mildly radioactive waste as earth-moving machines scar the earth.

Other industries sink narrow pipes like giant hypodermic needles and inject millions of gallons of poisonous liquids deep into the earth, beneath Florida’s main supply of drinking water.

Paper mills dump toxic wastes into rivers and bays, contaminating fish, spoiling wells.

This is the other Florida, away from the sunny beaches, horse tracks, Walt Disney World, resort hotels and designer golf courses that draw millions of tourists a year.

But it is a part of Florida that environmentalists say more residents should be concerned about because toxic pollution threatens the air they breathe, the water they drink, the seafood they eat.

“It is a hidden menace,” says Robert Hogner, a business professor at Florida International University, who tracks toxic pollution. “Because of the fine weather and good living conditions, people in Florida don’t pay too much attention.

“There’s an illusion of a pristine environment which surrounds people moving here. Behind the palm trees and golf courses there are smokestacks and emission pipes,” Hogner says.

Many of Florida’s worst toxic polluters have made progress in reducing the amount of chemical waste they release into the environment. But that progress is threatened by politicians who attempted to weaken environmental laws--and especially the Toxic Release Inventory, or TRI--that compels companies to tell the public the type and quantity of chemicals they’re releasing into Florida’s air, land and water.

An Associated Press computer analysis of five years of federal TRI records examined Florida’s top 25 toxic polluters and the state’s toxic hot spots.

The AP analysis found an encouraging trend: Many of Florida’s largest polluters reduced their toxic waste releases between 1989 and 1993.

But a third of Florida’s 67 counties saw their toxic waste totals grow during that five-year period--sometimes dramatically, the AP analysis showed.

Industrial Polk County in west-central Florida was the top toxic hot spot with 24.6 million pounds of toxic waste released in 1993, according to the most recent, available TRI statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Most of the toxic waste released in Polk County in 1993 came from companies that mine phosphate and turn it into fertilizer for farms and gardens. Polk County had 55.5 pounds of toxic waste per resident.

The state’s top toxic polluter, IMC-Agrico, has three phosphate plants in the Polk County town of Mulberry that generated more than 12 million pounds of toxic waste in 1993.

Phosphate-rich Hillsborough Country, also in west-central Florida, ranked second for the amount of toxic waste released within its borders. Rounding out Florida’s toxic top five are counties with chemical plants and paper mills--Bay and Escambia in the Panhandle and Duval, which encompasses Jacksonville, in northeast Florida.

The largest increases in toxic pollution over the five-year period were in the counties of Hillsborough, up 92%; Alachua, up 78%; and Duval, up 183%.

Twelve of the top 15 toxic polluters in the most recent statistics for on-site releases were phosphate fertilizer plants or pulp-paper mills.

Although toxic waste production has jumped among some companies and counties, the overall amount of toxic chemicals released in Florida dropped by 61.9 million pounds, or 36%, over the five-year period analyzed.

But Florida companies still produced enough toxic waste to rank the state 12th in the nation, based on the 1993 statistics.

“Most of the political chips in Florida go toward growth management and coastal erosion,” says Suzi Ruhl of the environmental group Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation. “But toxic pollution is an issue that is festering and insidious.”

Sarah Paris, who lives in the North Florida town of Perry, knows about festering. She never considered herself a political activist until her well water started to smell bad several years ago.

Paris says her family changes its water filters twice a month to get water clean enough to take a bath or wash clothes without discoloring them.

She blames pollution from Buckeye Florida’s nearby cellulose mill for corrupting the drinking water, though company officials dispute that. Paris joined with other neighbors of Buckeye’s plant to crusade for the company to reduce toxic discharges into the Fenholloway River.

State regulators told residents in October that people living along the Fenholloway should be given municipal water service from Perry because their well water is threatened by pollution.

Officials at Buckeye concede their cellulose mill, formerly run by Procter & Gamble, has had problems, but insist they are cleaning up the Fenholloway, the only river in Florida polluted enough to be classified as industrial.

Buckeye spokesman Dan Simmons says the company, working with regulators, is improving treatment of the plant’s waste discharges, or effluent, and gradually restoring the Fenholloway’s water quality.

While environmental groups based near paper mills and phosphate plants have been active for years, residents of areas where toxic waste releases have recently increased aren’t always aware of the problem, say regulators and environmentalists.

But public information about toxic waste pollution is often a phone call away, or as close as the local library.

The federal Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act passed in 1986 gave regulators, environmentalists and communities a powerful tool, the Toxic Release Inventory, to monitor industry releases of toxic chemicals in their midst.

Under that law, companies are motivated to reduce their toxic waste releases because they’re required to hang out their dirty laundry for the public to see.

Toxic waste releases measured by the TRI total only about 5% of overall pollution, according to most estimates. Other pollution sources, such as utilities, service industries, agricultural interests and municipal waste water, are growing steadily.

But toxic pollution has left dramatic calling cards: “bearded lady fish” with male and female characteristics in the Fenholloway River and Eleven Mile Creek near Pensacola in the late 1980s, fatal fluorine poisoning of Central Florida cows around phosphate plants a quarter century ago and Jacksonville’s former reputation as the state’s smelly sneaker.

The tiny town of Bradley Junction is at the epicenter of Florida’s huge phosphate mining industry, the state’s largest generator of toxic waste.

Frankie Smith has seen Bradley Junction, nestled amid fertilizer factories and scarred mining lands, come a long way in recent years.

“Our relationship with the phosphate industry was very negative in prior years, but has improved tremendously because of better communications,” says Smith, head of the Bradley Community Project.

Community residents have long worried about toxic fumes and some blamed failing water wells on the phosphate industry. But tests showed the well problems probably were caused by bad septic tanks, and Bradley Junction got a city water system several years ago.

“They’re not so much afraid of the health hazard,” Smith says.

Now, local residents are more worried about the destruction to the land caused by phosphate mining, damage to personal property and sagging property values, she says.

Janet Jackson, an executive with phosphate giant IMC-Agrico, says the company has worked diligently to restore the land.

Most of the phosphate companies have reduced toxic releases at their factories in the last five years and put liners under their giant mounds, or stacks, of phosphogypsum waste to further cut toxic discharges.

Like the phosphate industry, the chemical industry as a whole boasts that it has performed well under the scrutiny of the Toxic Release Inventory.

“We’re very happy to report releases,” says Nancy Stephens, executive director of the Florida Chemical Industry Council. “The law was established because of a feeling communities would like to know what chemicals are released and where chemicals are stored.”

She noted that toxic releases have dropped by more than half since 1988 from chemical plants alone.

But some environmentalists contend that some companies have made “phantom reductions” in their toxic releases by using smaller combinations of chemicals and chemicals that don’t have to be listed in the inventory.

And they worry that a move afoot to roll back state and federal environmental protections could undo progress brought by the TRI, clean water and clean air rules. Some congressional conservatives contend that environmental regulations have gone too far and are hampering business.

“What we are seeing is an effort on the part of the Republican leadership to roll back 25 years of progress,” says Carol Browner, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and former chief of Florida’s environmental agency.

“The clearest evidence is budget cuts, which would affect our ability to protect citizens’ land, air and water.”