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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1993 WFP Collective, Inc.
HOW HUMANS TREAT
THEIR SURROUNDINGS,
EACH OTHER, THEMSELVES
It seems that when it comes to environmental journalism, our local dailies don't stray too far from the "isn't everything just peachy" company line in the PR materials of major corporations.
Case in point: A recent story in the Seattle Times concerning citizens banding together in King County's South Park area to fight construction plans by Waste Management Inc., the world's largest waste-disposal company. In a blatant example of regurgitating "corporate-speak," a story by reporter Constantine Angelos notes, "Waste Management Inc., a major recycler ..."
(Angelos, by the way, is the same Times reporter who has offered up articles that consistently downplay the level of opposition to and concerns about the Seattle Commons project.)
Unfortunately, the Times doesn't bother to give you the full story of Waste Management, a multinational enterprise which could just as easily and truthfully be labeled "a major polluter." Ample evidence to support this assessment can be found in a 1991 Greenpeace report titled, Waste Management Inc.: An Encyclopedia of Environmental Crimes & Other Misdeeds.
The report, produced by Greenpeace U.S.A.'s Toxics Campaign, offers nearly 300 pages testifying to Waste Management's "history of environmental and antitrust law violations." These include the company's culpability in at least 96 Superfund contamination sites (12 percent of the entire Superfund list), a record $45 million in environmental settlements and penalties in the 1980s, and deliberate attempts to weaken and subvert environmental regulations.
As for the garbage company's record on recycling: In 1989, WMI recycled waste from less than 20 percent of the homes from which they hauled refuse. "In 1990, WMI incinerated five times the amount of garbage it recycled," the Greenpeace report said.
The report also documents WMI's penchant for squeezing out local non-profit and citizen-run recycling programs. In Arkansas, WMI's heavy lobbying helped trim out parts of then-Gov. Bill Clinton's recycling legislation. And here in Seattle, city officials charged WMI's local subsidiary with dodging $400,000 in local taxes.
"The company's recycling services do little to reduce the volume or toxicity of household garbage," the report concludes. "WMI's recycling division is run as a break-even operation that chiefly serves to deflect community opposition to the expansion of WMI dumps."
That last comment is highly ironic, considering the fact that the Seattle Times story in question is about opposition to a WMI recycling facility. Apparently, Waste Management's glitzy PR campaigns aren't fooling everyone anymore - though the Seattle Times remains an apparently willing greenwashing victim.
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