Love Thy Neighbor: The Bible Belt Is Becoming a 'Dumping Ground'
In northwest Georgia, Donnie Smith spends slow mornings at his auto shop, watching Netflix and counting the trucks passing by his window. You can hear the 18-wheelers from a mile away, barreling down the picturesque Appalachian countryside as early as 4 am. Hundreds of them carry toxic coal ash and a sterile stench daily to the landfill next door, which leaves residents nervous about drinking the tap water from their otherwise pristine lake. “There is another one,” Smith points out every minute or so. “Once they got the foot in the door, you couldn’t get them out.”
You’ll find the same book, just a different verse, in downstate South Carolina, where Uncle Sam and private industry have left the Savannah River with radioactive cesium levels that are among the world’s highest, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. Already saddled with at least $35 million in cleanup costs from now-bankrupt companies, the region’s burden comes with radioactive alligators and disturbingly high cancer rates that shot up by as much as 25 percent in some counties between the 1980s and the 2000s. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m not worried,” says Audrey Lofton, a former Savannah River Site janitor. “What can a little nobody like me do but talk about it?”
Stories like these are piling up as surely as the growing landfills in their backyards. Individual trash dumps in the South have drawn national attention in the past. But an in-depth investigation by OZY reveals a previously unreported, persistent trend of Northern waste being systematically shoveled onto Southern shoulders. Seven of the 10 states that export the biggest chunk of their municipal solid waste — commonplace trash — are from the North, according to thousands of pages of trash data and public records from all 50 states, analyzed by OZY.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/love-thy-neighbor-the-bible-belt-is-becoming-a-dumping-ground/ar-AADZWIy?ocid=spartanntp#image=AADZWIy_1|3
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Drives libruls crazy
