Utah Doctors Join the Occupy Movement

Taking inspiration from the Occupy movement, in late December a group of doctors and environmental groups in Salt Lake City, Utah, announced a lawsuit against the third-largest mining corporation in the world, Rio Tinto, for violating the Clean Air Act in Utah. This is likely the first time ever that physicians have sued industry for harming public health.

Air pollution causes between 1,000 and 2,000 premature deaths every year in Utah.

(1) Moreover, medical research in the last ten years has firmly established that air pollution causes the same broad array of diseases well known to result from first- and secondhand cigarette smoke – strokes, heart attacks, high blood pressure, virtually every kind of lung disease, neurologic diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, loss of intelligence, chromosomal damage, higher rates of diabetes, obesity, adverse birth outcomes, and various cancers such as lung cancer, breast cancer and leukemia. (2-12)

Most of Utah's cities are in violation of many of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) national air quality standards, and for several days during a typical winter, Utah is plagued by the worst air pollution in the country. The American Lung Association routinely gives Utah's largest cities an “F” for our air quality. Last February, Forbes Magazine, hardly a cheerleader for excessive environmental protection, rated Salt Lake City as the ninth most toxic city in the country, and the biggest contributor to that ranking was the mining and smelting operations at the Bingham Canyon mine, run by London-based mining conglomerate Rio Tinto/Kennecott (RTK). (13)

This is the world's largest open-pit mine and has created the largest mining-related water pollution problem in the world. The mine is located on the western doorstep of Salt Lake City, home to 1.8 million people. There is no comparable juxtaposition of an enormous mining operation this close to such a large urban center. RTK's mine and smelter operations account for 30 percent of the particulate matter emitted into the atmosphere over Salt Lake County (14), making it by far the largest source of industrial pollution in the urban areas of Utah.

The smelting operations and fugitive dust from the 1,100-foot-high waste rock piles and tailings ponds are a constant source of highly toxic heavy metal contamination – lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium – to the air, water and soil of Utah's largest city. The mining industry watchdog Earthworks states that before the most recently approved expansion, RTK was releasing 695 million pounds of toxic material into the Salt Lake City environment every year. (15) Because heavy metals do not degrade, are not combustible and cannot be destroyed, that heavy metal toxicity steadily increases year after year, as it has for the over 100 years of the mine's operation. Despite this extreme burden on public health, predictably, the Utah Division of Air Quality recently issued a permit for RTK to expand their operations by 32 percent, which will make their pollution emissions even worse.

RTK is making record profits – $15 billion last year. In August, Chairman of the Board Jan du Plessis bragged, “Rio Tinto has produced another set of record-breaking results.” Du Plessis apparently specializes in delivering pollution: he is also chairman of the board of British American Tobacco. Tom Albanese, Rio Tinto's CEO, who made almost $8.5 million in compensation last year, recently lamented, “[Rio Tinto must do] a better job at managing the curse of resource nationalism … and the activism of stakeholder engagement.” (16) Let me translate that for you: local people throughout the world are tired of being exploited for profit, they're starting to stand up for themselves and Rio Tinto doesn't like it. Utah citizens tired of RTK's pollution would be considered part of that “curse” to Rio Tinto executives.

This issue is simple: RTK can well afford to clean up, but they won't, and no one is making them. Their contribution to our pollution is hurting all the residents of Salt Lake City and adding to the premature death total mentioned above. For environmental and public health advocates, RTK pursuing and receiving an approval to expand was the last straw.

If the core tenet of the Occupy movement is that corporations and the 1 percent manipulate every level of government to serve their profit-driven agendas and simultaneously disregard – if not openly undermine – the interests of the 99 percent, then there is no better example than RTK's operation of Utah's Bingham Canyon mine.

The Utah Physicians for Healthy Environment estimate that the mortality, health and environmental costs to the community from RTK pollution is between $2 billion and $4 billion, more than the value of the wages and taxes that they pay. Nonetheless, a massive public relations budget allows RTK to heavily advertise themselves as “job providers” and take virtually no responsibility for the various environmental and health consequences of their operations.

Frederick Douglass, the19th-century civil rights leader, said, “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.” Let it be known that the people in Utah will no longer “quietly submit” to more pollution, more deaths, shortened life spans and poorer health to fatten the wallets in the London boardroom of Rio Tinto. We are going to “take back” the air we breathe.

References
1. Calculation by the Utah Physicians for Healthy Environment using the formula published by the American Heart Association.
Brook R, Rajagopalan S, Pope CA, Brook J, Bhatnagar A, et al. AHA Scientific Statement: Particulate Matter Air Pollution and Cardiovascular Disease; An Update to the Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2010;121:2331-2378.

2. Peters, A. Air Quality and Cardiovascular Health: Smoke and Pollution Matter. Circulation. 2009: 120:924-927

3. Eugenia E. Calle and Michael J. Thun C. Arden Pope, III, Richard T. Burnett, Daniel Krewski, Michael Jerrett, Yuanli Shi. Circulation. 2009;120:941-948. Cardiovascular Mortality and Exposure to Airbourne Fine Particulate Matter and Cigarette Smoke.

4. Bocskay K, Tang D, Orjuela M, et al. Chromosomal Aberrations in Cord Blood Are Associated with Prenatal Exposure to Carcinogenic Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons. Cancer Epidem Biomarkers and Prev. Vol. 14, 506-511, Feb 2005

5. Perera F, Tang D, Tu Y, Biomarkers in Maternal and Newborn Blood Indicate Heightened Fetal Susceptibility to Procarcinogenic DNA Damage. Environ Health Persp Vol 112 Number 10 July 2004

6. Gauderman WJ, Gilliland GF, Vora H, et al. Association between Air Pollution and Lung Function Growth in Southern California Children: results from a second cohort. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2002;166:76-84.

7. Gauderman WJ, Gilliland GF, Vora H, et al. The effect of air pollution on lung development from 10 to 18 years of age. NEJM 2004;351:1057-67.

8. van den Hooven EH, de Kluizenaar Y, Pierik FH, Hofman A, van Ratingen SW, Zandveld PY, Mackenbach JP, Steegers EA, Miedema HM, Jaddoe VW. Air Pollution, Blood Pressure, and the Risk of Hypertensive Complications During Pregnancy: The Generation R Study. Hypertension. 2011 Jan 10. [Epub ahead of print]

9. Raaschou-Nielsen O, Andersen Z, Hvidberg M, Jensen SS, Ketzel M, Sørensen M, Loft S, Overvad K, Tjønneland A. Lung Cancer Incidence and Long-Term Exposure to Air Pollution from Traffic. Environ Health Perspect. 2011 Jan 12. [Epub ahead of print]

10. Pearson J, Bachireddy C, Shyamprasad S, Goldfine A, Brownstein J. Association Between Fine Particulate Matter and Diabetes Prevalence in the U.S.Diabetes Care October 2010 33:2196-2201; published ahead of print July 13, 2010, doi:10.2337/dc10-0698

11. Crouse DL, Goldberg MS, Ross NA, Chen H, Labrèche F 2010. Postmenopausal Breast Cancer Is Associated with Exposure to Traffic-Related Air Pollution in Montreal, Canada: A Case–Control Study. Environ Health Perspect 118:1578-1583. doi:10.1289/ehp.1002221

12. Pearson RL, Wachtel H, Ebi KL. Distance-weighted traffic density in proximity to a home is a risk factor for leukemia and other childhood cancers. J Air Waste Manag Assoc 50(2):175-180.

13. https://www.forbes.com/2011/02/28/most-toxic-cities-personal-finance.html

14. Calculations by the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment based on inventory
data at the Utah Division of Air Quality.

15. https://www.earthworksaction.org/issues/detail/toxics_release_inventory_what_is_it

16. https://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23934614-rio-tinto-boss-attacks-governments-for-interfering-in-mining.do