Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 3 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
To the editor:
I would like to respond to last week’s editorial, “An Imperfect World,” in the Rappahannock News. Participating in “somebody else’s trash-to-energy program” (a garbage incinerator which recovers energy from heat produced) may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Certainly not for the residents of the communities where these incinerators are to be located: In numerous areas of Virginia, as well as nation-wide, citizen groups are up in arms about the threat from toxic contamination of incinerator emissions - in the same way that folks in the Amissville area now feel threatened.
The debate has not been resolved, but many expert toxicologists fear greatly for the effect on public health of the dioxins and other chemicals created in the combustion processes; the other part of the debate is about how much can be or must be filtered out of the smokestacks to be “safe.” These are difficult questions, but may not seem to matter much to us here in Rappahannock, safely out of range, we suppose.
What will be of great concern to us, though, will be the ash that we have been told will be brought back for landfilling. This ash residue from the incineration process may be “sterile” as last weeks piece said, but it is certainly not harmless. Sterile means free from microorganisms. It does not mean free from lead, cadmium, arsenic and a list of other heavy metals that are very toxic to humans - and that’s just what has been discovered in recent months by the Environmental Protection Agency and other investigators. Bringing this material back to Rappahannock to be landfilled opens up the potential of these materials, sooner or later, contaminating the
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