eWaste Apathy

This is a broken computer monitor that has been sitting in the water 50 FEET away from Dog River Park in Mobile Alabama for YEARS. I have alerted the City of Mobile leaders, the State of Alabama, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, and the US EPA to the fact that there is a hazardous television floating in the water in Dog River. That was in 2012. No one bothered to contact me or reply. Four years later and there are STILL a number CRT televisions floating in the watershed.

I thought documenting the dense pollution in Dog River (been doing it for 5 years) would provide local leaders an incentive to develop a program to address the pollution problem in the trashy Dog River watershed. My recommendation was and still is to get a litter boat working the watershed full time removing the trash. I mean, the City can afford to pay 2-3 dozen workers to mow grass, surely the City of Mobile cares enough about the public waterways their drainage system pollutes to dedicate at least one worker to keep it clean.

Hooray! Supposedly the City of Mobile now has a litter boat. So how is the City of Mobile's litter boat doing? I don't know because I have never seen a litter removal boat in action and the storm water trash is not being removed from the trashy shorelines in Dog River. This is a problem.

You see, not all trash is benign. Glass cathode ray tubes in old computer monitors and televisions, also called CRTs, contain several POUNDS of toxic lead. (1)

LEAD content in a CRT monitor can be as high as 20%, which means that one 34” television can contain up to 2.2 POUNDS of lead. Allowing this hazardous material to seep into soil and water systems can be extremely harmful to human health.(2)

If the monitor or screen gets broken then lead dust or cadmium dust can get out and that stuff is very, very toxic. (3)

Lead is only one of several toxins in old Televisions.

Sadly, there is still no one to call to get HAZARDOUS trash removed from Mobile waterways. I know because I've tried for years to get the trash removed from Dog River. The City of Mobile will not even keep their park shorelines free of trash. ADEM is useless to get the trash pollution removed from Dog River. The US EPA is just as useless. Gonna be a lot more cancer in the future as long as hazardous trash in public waterways is ignored after 5 years of complaints to the authorities.

So, enjoy your swim in Dog River and Mobile Bay because no one in Mobile or the State of Alabama or the Federal Government gives a shit what is floating in the watershed. Nor do the residents who live in the area.

(1) http://m.timesunion.com/business/article/After-Jan-1-Toxic-tubes-from-old-TVs-5986626.php

(2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25776743/

(3) http://www.post-gazette.com/local/2008/06/01/By-the-way-that-big-old-TV-is-really-toxic/stories/200806010187

Bayou Chateauguay

You can change the name of a polluted creek but you cannot change its image without changing its image.

A bicycle group wants to change the name of polluted Three Mile Creek to Bayou Chateauguay which no one will ever be able to pronounce. The bicycle group also wants a 10-12 mile bicycle trail built along the creek.

I say, do not waste a dime of money on the polluted Three Mile Creek until the City of Mobile respects and values their waterway asset enough to remove the trash from its trashy shorelines.

Here is what the shoreline typically looks like along the last few miles of Three Mile Trash Creek. This photo merge was taken yesterday.