On Tue, Nov 03, 1998 at 01:37:16PM -0800, Gill, Kathy wrote:
> At the risk of starting a holy war, the largest source of dioxin, if my
> memory serves me right, is forest fires and the burning of wood for heat
> (dioxin is a product of incomplete combustion).
>
> Not Dow Corning.
I did some checking on this today, and (a) you're right but (b) it's
unclear why you're right.
WRT (a), I need to amend my statement to read "Dow Corning is the largest
industrial/commercial source of dioxin".
WRT (b), there's some confusion about how much of that dioxin got
into the ecosystem in the first place thanks to Dow & Friends.
I say "confusion" because over the last few hours this evening,
I've only managed to read a handful of analyses/commentaries/etc.,
and after putting everything down and pushing my chair back, I'm
feeling no more enlightened than when I started. This gives me
the sneaking suspicion that *maybe* nobody out there knows and
that there's a lot of educated guesswork going on.
You might be wondering why I have this sort of stuff laying around.
Well, for starters, one of my kayak training partners is in
hazardous waste enforcement at the EPA, and when I was typesetting
her PhD dissertation (geology), I wound up getting interested in
the subject, so I have all kinds of stuff on groundwater hydrology
and stratigraphy and similar topics occupying space on my bookshelves.
I can readily absorb some of it -- one of my degrees is in physics --
but frankly, I tend to get lost in the organic/biochemistry.
And since I spent a lot of time on and in various rivers and creeks,
I've started to take quite an interest on what is *IN* those rivers
and creeks. I figure that by the time I retire from doing 'net and
Unix/Linux stuff, I'll know enough to be a real pain in the ass to
polluters, and I'll spend my time assisting folks like American Rivers
and the Sierra Club in making them miserable. Yes, I'm in training
to be an elderly crank. ;-)
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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