Citizens in Berkley, MA, population 6,200 citizens in southeastern Massachusetts (source: Berkely fire chief) , say a local dump site is causing cancer.

In a story subtitled “What if where one chose to live dictated whether or not they died of cancer?,” the Taunton Gazette reports:

A group of neighbors on Burt Street claims this may be the case, because they say a toxic waste cleanup site may not have been properly purified.

The site is part of a North Main Street property, known as Cranberry Crossing, that was used from the mid-1930s to the 1960s as a tannery waste dumping ground.”

A developer plans to build on this land and residents are upset.

“People who live in this community have the tales - these are people who lived here while the dumping was going on,” said Valerie Murray, one of the Burt Street residents. “It just scares me. It scares me that soils will be disturbed in an area so close by where there was known dumping.”

Murray said she can look down at the houses on the street and think of the past and present residents and the different types of cancer that have plagued the neighborhood.

Murray said she has relatives on the street with kidney cancer and that, “further down the street there is bladder cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, melanoma and more kidney cancer.”

She said she wants answers.

In 1995 the state Department of Environmental Protection discovered a 6-acre portion of the 72-acre North Main Street Cranberry Crossing property, was used from the 1930s to the mid-1960s as a dumping ground for tannery waste, according to DEP documents.

The department found that where the waste was dumped, there were elevated levels of various toxins, and in Berkley, where there is no public water supply and residents rely on wells, this finding resulted in quick action from the DEP because contaminated soil can result in contaminated water.

From 1995 to 2000, the DEP and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted a clean-up of Bogs Landing, a 14-acre site that included the 6 contaminated acres and the 8 acres surrounding it.

According to a 2003 study released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a higher cancer mortality rate in people who live downstream of Cranberry Crossing shows the soil contaminants need to be further examined.

“We’re concerned with what we found because it seems that there appears to be a higher likelihood of dying of cancer if you live downstream of the site,” said Kyler Bennett, the director of PEER. “We don’t know for sure what is in that soil, we don’t know how clean it is, and we don’t know what will happen when they start digging wells there.”

This news report By SABRINA SHANKMAN Staff Writer in the Taunton Gazette, 01/07/2006, prompted us to look up Berkely, MA on the map. It’s a few miles north east of Shoe Factory Pond. Let’s check the county’s environmental scorecard. Air pollution in Bristol s County is as high as it gets. Bristol is one of the dirtiest counties in the USA. Designated as a “nonattainment area,” it’s a locality where air pollution levels persistently exceed National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or that contributes to ambient air quality in a nearby area that fails to meet standard. This will not be news to residents of the upper North Eastern seaboard corridor, but it’s chilling:

• Ninety to 100% of waterbodies in the county are “impaired” .
• Fifty percent of rivers, streams and creeks inthe country are polluted with pathogens.
• 34% are polluted with metals
• 25% polluted with nutrients

Against this background of high air and water pollution, what information is out there about specific loads of pollution from leather tanning?

Currently, some of the best, most honest information about tannery pollution comes from countries which have inherited the leather and tannery industries from the USA and other industrial nations. Countries like India, Pakistan, Mexico and Chile (although I have yet to see anything from the country whence most low cost leather goods come — China).

U.S. studies have reported elevated risk of lung cancer in leather workers. But another risk is through run off and sludge from the massive amounts of water used for the leather tanning process.

“Conventional leather processing,” says one recent study reviewing methods today in India, generates “huge amounts of pollutants.”

“Tannery wastewater,” says Environmental Science Centre EULA-Chile, “contains large quantities of organic and inorganic compounds, including toxic substances such as sulfides and chromium salts.”

“The presence of chromium in the effluent is a major concern for the tanning industry,” says another study of tannery wastewater in India. This a study, from Central Leather Research Institute, Adyar, Chennai (formerly, Madras), India, makes a novel proposal for extraction of the chromium from tannery wastewater by use of seeweed, and reuse of the seaweed as a source of chromium for the tannery process.

Scientists also in Lucknow, India recommend use of “algal biomass” as “an economical method for removal of chromium from tannery effluent.”

What seems weird is how occupational safety experts in the USA seem to have kept the focus on incidence of cancer in leather tannery workers whereas in these other places more attention has gone into the problem of effluent. For example in Leon, Mexico in 1995 scientists reported:

The effects on the environment and health of the operation of a chromate compounds factory and tanneries in the Leon valley in central Mexico are discussed. Sampling and analysis of chromium were performed in water, soil, and human urine. Groundwater has been polluted in an area of about 5 km2 by the leaching of a solid factory waste, which results in concentrations up to 50 mg/l of hexavalent chromium. The plume shape and extension appear to be controlled by the prevailing well extraction regime. Total chromium was detected in the soil around the factory as a result of both aerial transport and deposition of dust produced in the chromate process and irrigation with tannery-contaminated water.

They conclude that “Analysis of the impact of chromium in air and water on populations with various degrees of exposure revealed that highly harmful health effects were not observed.”

Since then, scientists in South Africa have conducted experiments on tannery waste and found that aging of slag containing chromium III can make it more toxic: “very gradual oxidation of trivalent to hexavalent chromium does occur when the slag is exposed to atmospheric oxygen, rendering a quantifiable but small portion of chromium in this much more mobile and toxic form.” So too in Australia scientists reported in 2003:

Worldwide chromium contamination of soils has arisen predominantly from the common practice of land-based disposal of tannery wastes under the assumption that the dominant species in the tannery waste would be the thermodynamically stable Cr(III) species. However, significant levels of toxic Cr(VI) recently detected in surface water and groundwater in India, China, Australia, and elsewhere raise critical questions relating to current disposal criteria for Cr-containing wastes. It now appears that despite the thermodynamic stability of Cr(III), the presence of certain naturally occurring minerals, especially Mn oxides, can enhance oxidation of Cr(III) to Cr(VI) in the soil environment. This factor is of public concern because at high pH, Cr(VI) is bioavailable, and it is this form that is highly mobile and therefore poses the greatest risk of groundwater contamination.

IARC (World Health Organization International Agency for Research onCancer) apparently does not consider tanneries a serious problem. Their assessments are based on cancers in tannery workers.

However, around the world people are concerned about impact of tannery pollution (expecially chromium) on surrounding populations. A site called Hell for Leather addresses the fact that in Pakistan, where “over one million people, including small-scale enterprises, depend on this sector for their livelihood, ” the expansion of the leather sector “has resulted in considerable pressures on the environment and pollution that affects the local people.”

The Blacksmith Institute has a page on tannery pollution in Africa, Albania, India and the Philippines.

Perhaps Berkely, MA, U.S.A. should be added as an example of “legacy” pollution.