Springfield Republican: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, fellow lawmakers say EPA should insist on GE cleaning up Housatonic, dumping toxic waste outside Mass.
Massachusetts federal lawmakers are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to push General Electric to finish cleaning the polluted parts of the Housatonic River and cart the toxic waste out of the state.
The EPA and GE, which is now headquartered in Boston, agree that the river must be cleaned up but have clashed over where to put the toxic waste.
GE has pushed for the material, which has to be dredged from the riverbed, to be located in nearby landfills, arguing that moving it out of state would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But the EPA and state officials have said it should be shipped off-site to licensed disposal facilities, and one doesn't exist in Massachusetts.
"To allow local disposal of GE's toxic waste scraped from the riverbed would be incompatible with Massachusetts state law and a complete disregard of the affected Massachusetts communities who have been plagued with this corporate pollution for far too long," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Ed Markey, and Congressman Richard Neal wrote in a Feb. 8 letter to the EPA's administrator, Scott Pruitt.
Read the full article on the Springfield Republican website here.
By: Gintautas Dumcius
Source: Springfield Republican
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