Don Mckay, Co-Chair of the IAQAB

We'd like to now talk about what progress in reducing atmospheric deposition of persistent toxic substances under the Annex 15 umbrella is being made. I'd like to call upon Harold Garabedian from Vermont, who is an Air Board member, to give this presentation.

Accompanying Visual: Slide Show

Harold Garabedian, IAQAB

There are two parts to the IAQAB Priority: One, Dr. Cohen's work with HYSPLIT in terms of what are the significant sources and pathways. The second element was the review of progress by the governments in reducing these releases of persistent toxic substances. (refer to slide 3)

Under Annex 15, the specific focus of this effort was looking at Clause 5 of the Annex, the control of the substances. (refer to slide 2) What was unique, in this case,is that, in addition to the Parties, Annex 15, paragraph 5 calls upon the states and provinces to actively cooperate in the control effort. In order to do our assessment, the board had to develop a methodology that incorporated not only the querying of the federal governments but also the state and provincial governments. (refer to slide 7)

So, over the course of two years, we did attempt to contact states and provinces by means of an electronic survey targeted at individuals involved in air quality management.

The response from those levels of government was largely inadequate. Not only did we receive very few responses but those we did receive lacked detailed information, which suggested to us that the knowledge of obligations under Annex 15 has not been disseminated within these agencies and the information we sought was not being assembled in any systematic way by that level of government. Annex 15 may be being considered by the parties at the federal level but it was not apparent that its requirements were being communicated to states and provinces.

Given that response, we felt we had to focus at the federal level; this is what we were able to find and what I'll be reporting on here.

This information seemed to be very fragmented and it was quite an effort in terms of identifying those people who had the knowledge and the data. In order to facilitate this, a piece of infrastructure was created -- what we call the Emissions Inventory Working Group -- consisting of individuals within various units of Environment Canada, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, USEPA, and from a few state agencies who were knowledgeable of the location and condition of these data. (refer to slide 8)

Over the course of about ten conference calls and two face-to-face meetings this working group assembled the information in the first case to assist Mark Cohen in doing his work with dioxin. They're now working on data sets to support our ongoing work on cadmium and, ultimately mercury. What we found is that Annex 15, from an implementation point of view, has been subsumed, to some extent, by the Binational Toxics Strategy signed between the US and Canada in April of 1997.

Under the Binational Toxics Strategy, pollutants are classified as Level I or Level II (refer to slide 4 and slide 5 for lists). The Level I list is very similar to the Great Lakes Water Quality Board Critical Pollutants list of 1985. What we found was information in terms of all Level I substances appears to be in one or more programs or policies aimed towards virtual elimination and that most Level II substances are in some sort of voluntary reduction programs.

However, what seemed to be missing is the systematic quantification of reductions. Regarding specific programs, one can find information that, for example, would quantify the reductions associated with the implementation of further regulations governing emissions from hazardous waste incineration. For example, a rule limiting emissions from medical waste incinerators was developed in the US in the mid 1990's and is now being phased in. In Canada, under the ARET program, again there is quantification of benefits from specific actions. Debra Meyer of USEPA and Chris Pilon, David Niemi and others in Canada have been able to assemble such information and it is posted on the IAQAB website.

This information will identify programs, such as the MACT (Maximum Available Control Technology) initiative in the US and the Strategic Options Plan development in Canada and provide estimates of current emissions and some notion of reductions associated with these. However, the cataloguing of this information for the Level I and Level II contaminants is a major undertaking. The one report on the website on U.S. activities is in excess of 700 pages and continues to grow as more information is unearthed. There are some summaries on the back table for those who might be interested and we'd encourage you to visit this website to get the data.

However, again I think the focus of my presentation is not the details of these programs but that these programs in and of themselves, while they will produce reductions, do not allow the comprehensive review that Annex 15 anticipates nor support modeling work such as that developed by Dr. Cohen.

What we have looked at are national inventories available to support that type of analysis, because it is only through this analysis that the benefits of the control programs can be determined; and the delivery of improvements can be confirmed. We've tried to characterize the national inventory data into three bins. This first bin is called "good". (refer to slide 10) Good is not meant to be great. Good is only meant to be - it passes. This is a data set worthy of one's confidence in modeling and other applications. In terms of that bin, what we find is that there's adequate information to continue this type of work for these pollutants. The dioxin inventory, which has been reported on, and mercury and cadmium are thought to be adequate.

One of the actual challenges of this effort was just building some infrastructure. It surprised me that 12 years after a binational agreement (Annex 15) we still don't have in place a mechanism that allows the routine development and exchange of this information in consistent formats. For these three pollutants, we have made or will make this happen. However, for those contaminants in the second category, we think the data are really only indicative (refer to slide 11); that is they can give us a general sense of sources and source categories for these contaminants, but there are significant gaps and holes in the information that would preclude modeling or other sophisticated analysis.

Then, we run into a grouping of inadequate inventories and for these 20 pollutants it's not even productive to think about trying to estimate where we are in the continuum of emissions trends. (refer to slides 12, 13, and 14) We can't work with any of those; we can only work with the first three at this point.

What is happening in terms of the area of emissions is in the U.S., the major effort seems to be being put into what is called the National Toxics Inventory. (refer to slide 15) As opposed to trying to develop separate inventories for each pollutant, this is the national management scheme, if you will, for tracking emissions of a host of pollutants within the U.S. I have a slide for a comparable effort, the National Pollutant Release Inventory in Canada. (refer to slide 16)

These obviously are good and important initial efforts but they do suffer from a number of shortcomings; sources are really not well documented at this point; there's really little or no information in terms of process activity to support the estimates; the type of analysis needed to support modeling is information that is both temporally and spatially resolved and very detailed within the operation. That largely is unavailable in these inventories. The current information may support some planning decisions but certainly does not support analysis. Sources are frequently being aggregated at county level. Also, we don't actually have a sense of what's missing; even a qualitative statement of the incompleteness of these data sets would be helpful but that hasn't been assembled.

Further, much of this information is currently coming from states. There aren't regulatory requirements for states to submit the information and therefore some states are submitting and some states are not, adding to the inadequacy at this point

Our research on dioxin has found that there are several versions of a US inventory for 1993 that people are working to try and create solutions to some of the problems. There is a '96 inventory in the works, although it is not available at this time, and hopefully it will provide us with some better information.

In Canada, as mentioned, the major inventory is called the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) and, as opposed to something specifically responsive to Annex 15, it's national in scope; that's good in terms of supporting the type of analysis that needs to be done; however, this inventory also has some deficiencies. It only looks at larger type facilities; while it lists 176 substances, only five of them are within the Binational Toxic Strategy. There are major sources not accounted for; an example of that being mercury emissions from Ontario Hydro, and there are few statements on the quality of the data. Again, these are things that I think people are working on but are unaddressed in the current inventory information.

Regarding mercury, which is really the next pollutant that the board plans to work with, as we mentioned, that information is available and it is starting to be developed. (refer to slide 9) This is information that Debra Meyer and others have been working into a GIS format and it's showing that we can resolve the data at the county level and display it. (refer to slides 18 and 19)

One of the challenges actually to the Emission Inventory Working Group was just to resolve computer format issues across the boundary. We have data in Data Explorer in the U.S. and ArcInfo in Canada and just trying to combine those two software packages was a challenge. At this point, they've got the U.S. mercury data together and the Canadian data are being integrated with it in both time and space. The result will be a binational display as you saw earlier for dioxin emissions. I believe it will all be posted all on our website as it's developed.

To guide some of these efforts in emissions inventory, we thought what we could do is identify some characteristics that we believe are important to the inventories. (refer to slide 17) These could be summarized as follows. We really think in order to complete this work these routine emissions reports need to be timely; they need to be quality controlled; they need to be publicly reviewed and publicly available and accurate. I think the issue of public availability is of particular interest in Canada. Data that are in the NPRI are available, but not all significant sources are listed and only a few of the BNS pollutants are included. With regards to other information, there appears to be a confidentiality issue -- the public release of the data is an issue and needs to be resolved.

There are multiple applications of an inventory that I think we must recognize. Tracking progress would make use of one type of dataset and it might be relatively simple. To support modeling efforts is a much more difficult challenge, requiring much more detailed information, and then for control requirements that's another set of information. We see, in terms of control requirements, that type of information is generally available; inventories for modeling and tracking progress are less available. The data really do need to be comprehensive; if we can't account for all the sources then we really can't make statements as to their contributions and particularly what are the next regulations that are needed or next source control measures that are appropriate. The data need to be spatially and temporally resolved. The estimates really should be based on actual measurements as opposed to emissions factors. Use of factors can lead to a lot of uncertainty.

To sum this up, then, this element of our work really shouldn't have been this hard. It shouldn't have been two or three years in the making. If there are going to be binational agreements and strategies, we should be able to go to a publically accessible database and track the results very easily. It was not the case here. This was over two years worth of effort by several individuals working to compile at least the statement of where we are. (refer to slide 20)

At the same time, the parties are moving forward with control programs. If you go to the website and look at the catalogue of programs out there I think you'll be impressed in terms of the extent of the activity. However, the inventories don't exist to support sophisticated analysis. We've been able to do dioxin; we will work on cadmium and mercury. That's it. In terms of trying to go beyond that, to deal with the other substances, first there needs to be substantial investment in terms of assembling this information. Really that's going to be the role for the parties and jurisdictional governments. It's not something that our board could undertake. Without quality inventories, we don't know if the environment is benefitting or to what degree it is. If we can't look at change over time we don't know what direction we're going. We really can't make a comprehensive statement about progress nor do the type of analysis that's needed in terms of making decisions about the next steps.

(Applause)

Don Mckay

Thank you very much, Harold, for a good overview and again the effort was quite substantial in trying to get that information and to analyze it. We have time for some discussion. Does anyone have any questions? or comments? Please use the microphone if you don't mind.

Q. Daniel Green, STOP, Montreal

Looking at Annex 15 that I just happen to have in front of me, considering what the Parties were supposed to do by October 1, 1998 -- they were supposed to identify toxic substances to be monitored -- this has been done. They were supposed to develop a number of monitoring and surveillance stations -- I don't think that has been done. Location of those stations -- that has not been done -- kind of an ad hoc approach between Environment Canada and EPA -- I think so. The equipment at such stations -- that has not been done either. The quality control and quality assurance procedures between the two countries -- that has not been done, and the schedule for construction and commencement of operations of these stations -- well, of course, I guess that has not been done because the other things have not been done. A lot of things have not been done to find out how these chemicals travel in the basin. Speaking to the people at EPA, I asked "well, is there work being done to integrate the stations in Canada and in U.S.? I don't think that work has really started as far as a basin-wide bank of information where you can plug in and get all the results of all the sampling stations and all their measurements. We're in twelve years of these commitments here and who is dropping the ball here? Why aren't we seeing more progress? Science is telling us that this is the most important pathway of movement of these chemicals and yet, we're not seeing this much progress as per Annex 15.

A. Harold Garabedian

The charge to the Board by the Commission under Annex 15 was paragraph 5, which was the progress of the parties in the control of these substances. Angela, if you'd like to comment about monitoring . . .

My name is Angela Bandemeyr. Daniel and I were talking earlier. I'm the U.S. Program Manager for the Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network which is mentioned by name in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Actually what Daniel and I were discussing earlier was how IADN is integrated into other deposition networks but actually IADN has been established since 1990 and we do have the sites set up on each lake as mandated in that Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. What hasn't happened as quickly as we wanted it to happen was making the data available to everybody, but we now have a website - the address is in our literature in the back. The data is to be available online so it did take us some time to get to that point.

As far as QA, Quality Assurance, we're still working on it. We've been trying to do it over the years, so the network does exist and probably we haven't been doing all that we should have been doing, but it does exist. What Daniel and I were talking about was integrating what we do with other networks or other activities, for example, in the St. Lawrence Seaway. It would make a lot of sense to have networks that are transregional; that would go beyond the basin looking upwind to sources in the United States and Canada and downwind, and in fact the EPA is trying to address that by attempting to develop a national toxics monitoring network that may address some of these PTSs, and Canada has some networks and it's difficult to keep integrating these but we are working on it. In addition, in the Arctic program, there's integration between us and the Canadians. So many of these things are in their infancy and hopefully in the next ten years, we will see more progress.

Don McKay

If I just may comment on the Canadian side because I'm responsible for the IADN in Canada and the people that work there, what I would say is that, as Angela has indicated, we certainly have been very cooperative in working towards this. Scientists as well as non-scientists, we always find things don't move as fast as we'd like because we never have enough resources and the issues always end up being a lot more complex that what was initially thought. Certainly, from the Canadian perspective, I don't hesitate to say that in the Great Lakes program at Environment Canada, the IADN network is one of the major jewels in the crown -- we've been able to use that information to look at what is being deposited around the Great Lakes and subsequently to try to look at when will we achieve virtual elimination using that data from certain persistent toxic substances in the Great Lakes. So, yes, we'd like to move faster; yes, we'd like to be able to do more; but I still think that we have come a long way in the 12 years.

Certainly, integrating with other networks; one of the things we are certainly trying to do at Environment Canada is look at the total atmosphere. The one atmosphere approach, as we like to call it, recognizes that what you have is one soup out there with lots of things going on and we try to understand it and monitor and understand all the things that are happening and we certainly are working on expanding a national toxic network in Canada. We have it in three major areas; one is in the Arctic; one is around the Great Lakes; and also some out on the West Coast. Again, the intent is to try to make it a more national program These persistent toxics are difficult to measure; they're expensive to analyze once you have a sample and certainly though I think I have no hesitation in saying that we have made progress. I think things will certainly make better progress as we achieve a better understanding of the challenges. We have the modeling capabilities that Mark has shown.

Q. - Hi, I'm Emily Green. I'm the Director of the Sierra Club Great Lakes Program. I just wanted to address a disconnect that we see sometimes between some of the control measures that the agencies put in place and the actual goals of the Water Quality Agreement. Specifically, we believe that the agency has some authorities that it's not effectively using to control some of these pollutants. An example would be a MACT standard that came out recently for petroleum refineries. While I understand that there are gaps in the emissions inventories, there's certainly data that show that industrial category as a potential source of mercury. Well, the MACT standard did not, at all, address that and we believe that, despite the gaps, if there's data that show that sources are emitting persistent toxic pollutants, than the MACT standards and other control options that the agencies have under like the Clean Air Act ought to address those pollutants. I was wondering if you looked at any of that and if not, if you intend to?

A. Harold Garabedian

First of all, I'd agree with you and I think that's a result of the absence of adequate information. I think control programs moving forward without good documentation of emissions and emissions inventories are going to cause us to not do as good a job as we could. I think what we found is a "good faith" effort in terms of moving forward with controls but absent this documentation and integration with policy, we're not sure it's as good or as complete as it should be. It seems like we are willing to spend a lot of money to measure; we're willing to spend money to control; but it seems to me that the resources in order to document the job done and report on it are really lacking in this effort.

Q. - My name is Rebecca Caters of Green Bay Wisconsin with Clean Water Action Council. A year ago, I worked with Great Lakes United to try to track what the different states were doing about the Binational Toxics Strategy and I interviewed a number of DNR staff trying to prepare a report and I also had difficulty finding information. I was appalled by the unawareness of our state's staff of the Binational Toxics Strategy. I remember trying to find information on octochlorosytrene and people in the air management program of this state did not really know much about that chemical or were not aware of any state effort to address it. I see a lot of talk here at this meeting about, not just this session but this whole weekend, talking about the Binational Toxics Strategy but it doesn't seem to be trickling down to the local jurisdictions and there doesn't seem to be much attention being paid to the regional push. I guess I'm not here to criticize your effort but perhaps to sympathize with trying to get these states to participate and actually take this information seriously. What can be done to get the jurisdictions a little more plugged in and respectful of the process?

A. Harold Garabedian

I wish I knew the answer to that second part but . . .your experience is wholly consistent with us in terms of our effort, particularly with the states. They were just totally unaware of things like Annex 15; outside the immediate jurisdictions adjacent to the lake, the whole notion of the Water Quality Agreement was a foreign concept to those states, and I think that as we start to look at the long-range implications of pollutants, obviously we need to get this information out. I think since the Binational Toxics Strategy has came along, there's a movement in the right direction to better integrate, at least in the U.S., on a national level, some of this information. The (again, speaking to the U.S.) National Toxics Inventory will again move in a better direction. However, without a specific focus on Annex 15 in those efforts, I just don't think we're going to get the information that we need.

Q. Rebecca C. - Is the annex going to be weakened?

A. Harold G. - I don't know.

Q. R.C. - Is that on the table?

A. H.G. - I don't know. Bruce?

Q. Bruce Walker

Presumably, when you start mercury, or if you have started mercury, at least on the inventory side you'll have a much better set of databases to deal with. I don't spend that much time on mercury but I keep running into mercury task groups that are either Canada-wide or North America-wide or regional so presumably it is fair to say we finally have a decent point source, at least, mercury inventory in the two countries?

A. Harold Garabedian

Right. Mercury is unique in that we do have a good inventory. Rather, we put it in the "good" category. What's unique about mercury is there was a specific section of the U.S. Clean Air Act that called EPA to report to Congress on mercury. There was a very, very large concerted effort to get a good inventory on mercury in order to make that report. That's what distinguishes it from the others. We don't have that same forcing function or requirement for other contaminants and therefore its part of the reason why, I think, they fall into this indicative or inadequate class because that concentrated effort in compiling the information was not made. If we're looking for some optimism, it's the '96 inventory that may give us the second point. The '93 US NTIS inventory, while it has some problems, is at least a point on the chart, inadequate as it may be. With the '96 inventory, we may be able to make more precise statements about change.

Q. - This is Angela Bandemeyr again. I was wondering whether you had looked into what it might cost to try and develop emission inventories like this?

A. H.G. - No, we have not made an estimate.

Q. A.B. - and did you look at the Great Lakes Air Toxics Inventory? and I'm curious what you think about that particular inventory and how well it was done?

A. H.G. - The RAPIDS inventory? (Yes) Yes, it's been used. I think as toxics inventory goes, it's one of the more-advanced efforts.

Q. A.B. - Do you think it's getting in the right direction? still needs to get better? Or. . .

A. H.G. - I think inventories are always under development. I think you are always looking to make them better; improve them; and so there is no "best." You're always looking to make them better. I think RAPIDS is a very good inventory. I think it's a very good effort. I think it will continue to increase over time. One of the major changes that was made to RAPIDS recently is to include mobile sources. It was all just stationary sources before; not mobile. Depending on which pollutant you're looking at, that obviously is very important. So I think there are efforts to continue to improve it.

Q. Mark Cohen

Angela, I think that the information that the states put together for the Great Lakes Regional Toxics Inventory was the same information that we gave the EPA in . . . and so, for the Great Lakes states and provinces, the national toxics information and the Great Lakes inventory should be very similar. ('96?") '96 - yes.

A. A.B. - Yes, but that's eight states in the U.S. - you have the rest of the states in the U.S. that have other inventories.

H.G. - Right, and they're probably not as advanced as the RAPIDS effort.

Q. A.B. - I guess what I'm getting at being from the Great Lakes, I was just wondering if that would be the type of approach you would recommend to the governments? to the parties? or would you recommend something different?

A. H.G. - I'm not sure I would recommend a specific approach. I actually know, as a matter of course, the EPA is looking at RAPIDS as a way to recommend to other states - that here is a model for how to do it.

Q. Unidentified - I had a question following up something that Carol Browner mentioned last night -- how EPA had finished a study of emissions of coal-fired plants and then Congress delayed action on that and said "we'll do it again." I agree with the basic philosophy that having a catalog of the source emissions will allow us to track the progress in how much those are decreasing but another way you can track the decrease is just, with some of the pollutants, is just measure them in the fish and tell people "quit releasing them." If your kid comes home drunk, you don't say "where did you get the liquor and how much are you drinking?" You say, "if I smell it on your breath again, I'll take the car away for another year." How do you see us, as a group, trying to negotiate -- how do we negotiate trying to collect an inventory and yet not let the inventory be used to derail actual progress? make it a stumbling block or a forever process that never comes to anything because people deliberately put road-blocks in our way. Thanks.

A. Harold Garabedian

There are many inventories. There are inventories for planning; there are inventories for modeling; there are inventories for policy decision-making and I think, what you are alluding to is, there can be information in which the action to take is obvious; however if the question is, are we achieving the goal of the Water Quality Act as Annex 15 directs in terms of reducing atmospheric deposition? you need the data to do the analysis. It's not to say that you shouldn't take action in advance of having that data in my mind; there may be compelling reasons to do that.

Don Mckay

I want to also add to that comment -- one of the things you can do is you monitor at the receptor to find out and, as you said, are the levels in fish increasing or decreasing? If decreasing, say something is improving -- great. But we may not know. What we need to know the inventories at the source for, is certainly to find out where it is going and what is going on to be able to model it and also to see how well the controls are working. You measure at the receptor and you say things are improving but you don't know is it improving because of the controls you've put in or what is the reason why and by knowing that inventory and see a decline in the emissions you can maybe somehow able to relate part of the story to the controls that are causing the improvements at the receptor.

Q. - That wouldn't be to say to exclude modeling? Modeling is very important to this whole effort.

A. - That's right.

One last question, then and we'll move on.

Bruce Walker

It's actually a comment following the last question. In Canada, under the development of Canada-wide standards particularly for mercury, some of the industry stakeholders in that process are proposing just that, that rather than have a percent reduction requirement for major sources like coal-fired power plants and base-metal smelters, that it entirely be based on fish consumption advisories; but how do you relate a fish consumption advisory at any particular part of Canada whether it's in the Great Lakes basin or elsewhere, to a smelter in Manitoba or coal-fired power plant in Ontario? Considering that there are control and abatement technologies well-known and understood now, that seems to be basically a lose/lose situation unfortunately. So I would urge the government of Canada not to take that approach.

Don Mckay

As one of my advisors has indicated, one of the things that between the Water Board and the Air Board is sponsoring is what is called the Moot Court in Windsor at the end of October. It was mentioned in the main session as well. It is intended to look at what regulatory tools are in place in both the U.S. or Canada to address a circumstance where an air emissions source is impinging on a receptor water body causing increased contaminant levels in fish for example -- what regulatory rules or laws are available in both countries to address such sources? This Moot Court, which is going to be held in Windsor in October, is to look at that issue. There will be two scenarios - a U.S. side and a Canadian side - and lawyers for the industry and lawyers for the environment arguing the case. The intent is to look at how well regulatory rules in either country or both countries could address such a circumstance. So it's going to be an interesting event at the end of October. Again, I just want to thank Harold very much for his presentation.

Before we have the panel, I'd like to put up three slides just to give you . . . what are some of the things that we would like, as an Air Board, for you to take away today from this particular workshop. I think the major thing that we wanted to get across and to demonstrate is that there is a methodology out there; that proof of concept has been demonstrated - the capability to link specific sources or source regions with depositions of persistent toxics on specific Great Lakes. I feel quite confident that what you've seen today has met that proof of concept; the work that Mark has presented. Again, Mark has used one methodology; one modeling technique; and that there are others out there; but no one has, until today, has really proved that the concept that everybody has been talking about, can be done. I think it's been well demonstrated that it is there and it can be useful methodology. So, that's the primary message I think we want to have you take away with you from this workshop today. What are some of the specifics there, and I have a long list in the report and in the report to the Commissioners, in there-- there is a lot of them, -- but I just wanted to highlight some of them.

The first one is that we can, with difficulty, and I think Debra and others will attest to that, develop a seamless boundary map of the emissions inventories in the cases we've shown, namely for dioxin and atrazine. So, one of the concepts that the Board has really been pushing in all of the air issues is this concept of a seamless border. The atmosphere doesn't recognize the 49th parallel or any border. So, in order to address these air issues and to try to come to some resolution, we have to forget about the border and try to make sure that we're compatible in our data; in our information; in what we do. So, I think it's been a demonstration that we can, with some effort, even though we use methodologies that are maybe a little different, we can get that seamless boundary and we can create a North American, at least U.S./Canada at the moment, set of information.

The second one is, again, emphasizing the methodology; that this idea of a source receptor transfer coefficient can be developed for persistent toxic substances. Some are going to be easier than others. We took the easy ones and you can see the difficulty just taking the easy ones and producing those source receptors. But, just think for a minute what it's going to be like for mercury or other ones where there's a transformation going on as it leaves the source and before it gets to the receptor. That's going to be a really scientific challenge but one I think that certainly Mark and others are working on and we will be able to come to resolution on.

We have, again, proven that we can do the source/receptor relationship as Mark mentioned before; that has been used for 20 years for sulphur in the acid rain problem. We can now use it for the persistent toxic substances as well. Using that, we can then estimate what the deposition to a particular lake can be and we've been able to demonstrate that we can validate or verify that the modeling is in the range through measurements. As Mark showed, for both atrazine and for dioxin, comparing to what is actually measured and what the model shows, we are certainly in the ballpark and we certainly can give useful and valid information for policy development. So, those are the specific ones, I think. There are many others in the works, but those are the ones that I would like to see people carry away with them when they walk out later today. What are the implications from this work that we can say. I think you've heard it over and over and over again but the emissions inventory is at the fundamental basis for the work we're doing. When you talk to people about emissions inventories or you go and try to get resources to work on emissions inventories, the money givers' eyes glaze over and there's a big yawn and they say, 'Oh, what's that. That's not glitzy. How can I really sell that to a minister or how can I sell that to a governor or whatever.' Because there is nothing glitzy there. I mean it's going out; taking these measurements etc. But that is the fundamental thing that needs to be done in order to make this work worthwhile; in order to understand how well controls are; in order to being able to model; what's going on and forecast. I can't overemphasize that every time I give a talk. I think there are people starting to realize that but it's important. I don't envy the people and I admire the people that work in that field because it's a difficult job and you're not liked by anybody because you never give it on time; it's never the way the modelers want it, etc. etc. but it is fundamental and I just can't overemphasize how important it is that we work on getting the best emissions inventories that we can.

As well as the modeling, we need systematic measurements. The models cannot be improved or understanding put into the model outputs without having systematic measurements of ambient air, precipitation, and water concentrations. We need those to improve -- to understand what is going on -- in order to improve the models. We need that information to validate the modeling and we need that information to understand trends. So, we can't just model it; we can't just measure it at the source; we also need to have the background measurements and long-term measurements in order to understand the problems and to see how well we are moving towards a solution to those problems. Again, back to emissions and the importance of, and again, the difficulty of merging the information. So, we need to be able to have regular, bi-national, coordinated updates on emissions inventories so we can then address how well we are doing.

******

I think the major recommendation to the Commission arising out of our report is the coordinated use of the methodology that we've demonstrated here today. We would also encourage them to re-examine current control programs, given the information that we can provide and we may also identify additional actions required to address goals in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the Binational Toxics Strategy. Some of those additional actions are aimed at timely reporting, and better emissions inventories - these are the things that we feel that we want to convey to the Commissioners to push and to advocate to the Parties to make sure that we get the information that would allow us to move the agenda forward. Next, we do have a panel that I hope will comment on some of these and also comment on your questions from the floor.

As the panel members are coming, I'm going to ask them to individually introduce themselves and their affiliation. What we have is three members from the Great Lakes Water Quality Board and three members from the Air Quality Board and . . .why don't we start at this end, Steve, and could you introduce yourself and your affiliation.

I'm Steve Clarkson with Health Canada in Ottawa (Water Quality Board ). Rick Artz with the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland and the Air Board. Wayne Draper with the Air Board and with the Transboundary Air Issues Branch of Environment Canada, Ottawa. Vic Shantora, the Canadian Co-chair of the Water Quality Board also with Environment Canada. Peter Wise of the Water Quality Board and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Gary Foley, Co-chair of the Air Quality Board with the research side of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Don Mckay

I'm going to take the prerogative, as the facilitator, to ask the first question and hope not the last question.

Q - The question I'd like to put to the panel is, we've seen a mechanism to look at the air pathway of persistent toxic substances; we know that that is only one pathway. There's also the water pathway through sediments and runoff etc. What do they think is the most important pathway for these persistent toxic substances?

Vic Shantora

I'm going to defer to the scientists in the crowd because I'm a policy-wonk so to speak but from what I understand, by and large over the last twenty odd years with air and water pollution control programs, the effluent point sources have been ratcheted down. That's not to say that we can't do anymore; we can and we will. But, as I understand it the air pathway to the Great Lakes and the contaminated sediments in the Great Lakes seem to be the two major areas right now where persistent, bioaccumulative toxic substances are problematic so what Don and the other people here this afternoon spoke to resonated very well with me in terms of the need to have a closer look at the control programs; the need to walk the talk in terms of zero discharge and virtual elimination. The need to upgrade the inventories. Just a comment on the inventories, I would say that that's a bit of an iterative process and I think we are making some progress. Clearly I think the work presented earlier this afternoon indicated that there is a lot of room for improvement so I think, just to summarize, the air and the sediments, to the Water Quality Board, are the ones we think deserve their fair share of attention.

Peter Wise

I'll go next. Also, from the Water Quality Board point of view -- I think Vic's hit it. We know it's coming from the air and where we can all make a case for more mass-balance studies, and I think that the work that's gone on in Lake Michigan needs to continue. I think we need to continue mass balance work which looks at tributary loadings, point sources, what's coming in from groundwater, what's in the sediment, the air; but we can't wait to take action in terms of regulatory approaches for that to be done. It's too expensive; it takes too long, we know that. We know it's coming from the air. I think Mark's work points that out. We either have the existing authority and we're not using it or we need to get new authority and it's one way or another. If you look at the Super-Fund Program of years ago, initially when the United States had the hazard ranking system, you couldn't factor in bioaccumulation in fish. It wasn't a basis for designation of a site as a Superfund site. That's changed. We changed that regulation to now make bioaccumulation one of the criteria.

It's interesting over the last few days to hear the conversations about total maximum daily loads as if it were a new concept. TMDLs have been in the US Clean Water Act since 1972. We just haven't used them in the context of persistent toxic substance multi-pathway control. The fact of the matter is, we either can use them to deal with the air sources or we need to change the Clean Water Act so we can and that's, I think, what next weeks' WQB/IAQAB (the Moot Court) is all about -- is to find out whether legally we can do that. Mark's point is very interesting. I don't want to guess what's going to happen at the Moot Court because I know that the National Wildlife Federation's working very hard on their side and the corporate attorneys are working very hard on their side but one of the big issues is going to be -- Yes, legally maybe we can make this construct but we can't pin it back to that one source because we don't know which way the wind is blowing so the modeling is going to be a real key factor in that. So, there is a lot of work to be done but we just can't wait for all of it to be in to move toward further control.

Gary Foley

When we look at the air pathway, there are three components to it. One of them we've been able to address with Mark's work and that's how much are coming from the sources that are inside and outside the basin. Mark pointed out that there were two areas that he really couldn't address. One is, there are times when the lakes, themselves, are sources of emissions; we're hoping that the Lake Michigan Mass Balance study will give us a basis for quantifying that. They are making measurements of that. This is really the first study, or the first major study that I'm aware of that's made these types of measurements. So we have to understand that. The other aspect is the urban plumes that pass over the lake. A study was funded about five years ago to a group of universities; a couple of million dollars went to them to look at the Chicago urban plume and the field and analytical work is now done. All the results are being written up and they are being published and soon we'll have it all in hand.

They were able to look at two substances, PCBs and mercury, I believe, and they found for PCBs that about half of the deposition to Lake Michigan was coming from the urban plume; from the Chicago around to Gary urban plume. That's a substantial amount coming from that source. So that's another part of the air pathway that you need to take into account. So, I think when you put the three parts together we need to work on the air pathway. We need to work on the urban plumes if they're a major source; we need to work on the near sources; we need to work on the long-range sources; and we need to look at how much of the material that's already in the lakes is coming out of the sediments and being re-emitted, whether from sediments that are disturbed and sediments that are not disturbed. So, there are a lot of challenges here to deal with.

Rick Artz

Just building from where Gary left off -- using the tool that Mark has developed, there are some things that are a whole lot easier to do than others. In many cases, the air pathway is the most important. Demonstrating it is another thing. Current-use chemicals are going to be easier to look at then banned chemicals; banned pesticides in particular. The stuff is spread out all over the place. It's very difficult to go after that with this particular tool, especially without much data on past application rates and practices. It doesn't mean that air isn't the most important pathway for these substances; but it means that it's going to be difficult to use the tool we have to address them; so, either we need another way of going about it or we look at the things that the tools we have in hand can address.

The other point is that the air pathway vs. the other media is highly dependent in the Great Lakes system on which lake you're looking at. Mark's demonstrated that, particularly for dioxin, for Lake Superior, it's not difficult to show that the air pathway is most important and to go after those sources. For other basins, it's a lot more difficult so for things where we're fairly certain the air pathway is important I think it's important to look at the list of chemicals that we have and to go after the things that are most easily addressed first; because the list is very long.

Don Mckay

Angela? Yes, please. To those who want to ask a question and start a discussion, please use the microphone.

Q. Angela Bandermyr

My question gets at what you were just talking about -- the banned chemicals. The emission inventories that you said were in good condition are primarily for the current-use chemicals and I'd like to know -- and also the Air Quality Board suggested that there needs to be more air, water measurements of these chemicals -- what do you feel about measuring these things in soil in addition to all these other media? and also what do you think about advocating global emission inventories for some of these banned chemicals that are no longer in use in the U.S. but are in other countries? This is somewhat underway but is there a need to further endorse these? and how do they fit it to what we would do in the Great Lakes in terms of modeling?

A. Rick Artz

Chemicals have different lifetimes in the atmosphere. For things that are very long lived I'm not sure we're ever going to get a good handle on them through any tool unless we have adequate inventories globally. It's been a real pain to get good inventories for North America. I'm not sure how we go about getting them from places without the infrastructure and a commitment to this sort of thing in other parts of the world. If we are serious about getting after the banned chemicals, we will need such global inventories. I think it's possible to do it but it will take a serious commitment and frankly, I don't think that we've got that commitment in place from anybody at this point.

Anyone else like to comment?

A. Vic Shantora

I don't know the science of this so I won't talk about that at all but to my sense, one side of the question is, how do you improve the inventories? The other side of the question is "where do you get the biggest bang for the buck?" - "is it trying to get inventories, which are going to be challenging because you've got to go back and do some sort of forensic analysis, or do you put more emphasis, then, on getting your international agreements and getting the inventories of what is already out there where you know that the product is still being sold and therefore, presumably, one should be able to get a handle on how much is actually being sold and where it is being used?" That's not to diminish the need to improve those inventories for the historic things that maybe don't exist any longer in Canada and the United States but I'm at a loss to know how one even does that.

Mark Cohen

What Angela is getting at was if you take measurements of, in fact, pesticides in the soil around the country, you can apply the same kind of model that we're using for atrazine, assuming that's being applied that day; you could get some estimates. Even though banned, you could get some estimates of how it was coming up. We haven't really done that for any of these -- heptachlor, and all these banned pesticides that are on the list -- we don't know, they're still coming up out of the soil; still being transported to the Great Lakes and still coming in through the air pathway; but we don't really know -- is it just from our country? the reservoir of stuff from our country? is it stuff that's still being used locally? is it stuff that's coming in from the sediments? I'm not sure if we know.

Don McKay

If I may, from a scientific point of view, one of the things that people are doing, one of the labs in the US and that Bidleman (AES-DOE) is looking at that. One of the things is looking at chlorinated isomers because in the chloride structure they are mirror images of each other. If you do an analysis, if there are new sources being produced they'll have equal spikes, left and right hand, positive and negative. What has been found with some of these chemicals is that whether they are in the soil or in the water there's microbes that seem to prefer one or other to eat. Thus if you measure - and he's done measurements by going down into the southern United States and taking soil samples and measuring the air over there or in the Arctic, taking water samples and measuring the air over the water, you can detect whether they're from old sources or new sources. If they're new sources, the positive and negative spikes will be the same. If they're old sources, one will be smaller than the other. Then by doing back-trajectories you can get an idea of the sources - where it's coming from and whether it's being volatilized out of the soils due to tillage practices or whatever. So, that is one mechanism - a tracer mechanism - in trying to determine that so again to answer your question, Angela, it is important to measure under the soils.

Q. Angela Bandermyr - So, will you recommend that?

A. Don Mckay - I think we will.

Q. Daniel Green, STOP, Montreal

When Canada had to make a decision about mercury emissions and fish contamination, what Canada did was through the Fisheries Act, declare that you must not discharge so much amount per tonne and then they did a regulation for air. 15 chlor-alkali plants in Canada were ultimately shut down; there is still one operating because of the air reg. Yes, you can put activated carbon filters in your stack, but there is no way to be able to capture that mercury through all those vents in a hot-cell room and that's what killed the mercury chlor-alkali cell in Canada - the air reg. ICI, in Cornwall, shut down after MOE did an air sample because they were non-compliant. There was no way in hell that ICI can comply with Canada's air reg and they shut down in '94-'95.

We didn't have these sophisticated models. All we knew was that a toxic chemical was emitted through air by a point source and we acted upon it. It boggles my mind why we can't do the same approach with coal-fired plants now without having to refer to very complicated point-source modeling. Now, I understand the demonstration has to be done and scientists will continue doing their science and it's exciting; it's exciting science; it's pathways of how chemicals move. But, what do we want at the end of the day? Do we want reduction of loading of these chemicals to our environment?

I think we know enough, for instance, from mercury for Canada and for United States and I think Carol Browner mentioned this, to regulate these point source coal-fired power plants.

We also know enough about PAHs to regulate Canada's aluminum industry and yet we're not doing it because Canada's aluminum industry has a lot of clout. Now, in the front page of the Ottawa Citizen the president of Alcan wrote to our Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, saying that if CEPA language stays the way it is and if PAHs get regulated under CEPA, the aluminum industry will walk away from Canada. That's bull @#%@. Our hydro prices are so dirt cheap where are they going to go? Still, benzo[a]pyrene was the highest-rated chemical in the first national priorities list that was cooked up - the National Priority List under CEPA - by the multistakeholder committee. Benzo[a]pyrene scored the highest. I know; I was on the committee. And yet, after this learned committee (not that I was particularly learned) but anyway, they were people smarter than me on this committee said, "Yes, we have to control benzo[a]pyrene, a known human carcinogen and 80, 75% of this from the aluminum sector in Canada and yet Environment Canada was just unable to regulate it through CEPA. So, I don't know; and yet we know that this chemical is emitted. We know it falls down. We know it contaminated areas in Canada -- Kitimat in BC and in Quebec, and yet, no regulation has happened. So, having said all that, I'm not seeing what I want to see and I'm looking at the Air Quality Board.

Just giving another example, the Quebec and the federal government know that a plant will be emitting hexachlorobenzene, the Magnola Plant in Asbestos Quebec will be emitting these chemicals, adding maybe a third to Canada's POPs inventory and yet, again the government seems paralyzed because you're dealing with these big corporations. What are you guys doing? Why can't we get, on one hand, action on a known source -- coal-fired plants -- and why can't we get action on the aluminum sector? and why can't we get action on one plant that will increase Canada's POPs budget by one third? Why can't we get action? This is not rocket science here. This is not modeling. This is just acting to prevent and to stop known point sources from polluting the environment. Why can't we get some leadership?

Vic Shantora

One comment, Daniel, and that is that I'm not sure that your facts are right regarding the adding the one third to Canada's inventory of POPs. But, setting that aside, I guess what I would look for, because I'm wearing my Water Quality Board hat here is how do you put that in a recommendation that then we take to the International Joint Commission? What are you telling us? Are you telling us that we don't need the inventories? we don't need the modeling? we just need to get on with it. Is that what you are saying?

Daniel Green

No, I'm saying that in certain situations we can do parallel efforts but these things take so long to get through the legislative processes of two countries that before you have regulations you will have, probably, some data and modeling. It should be a double pathway. I don't think we have to wait for the model to act now. (OK) You can say that, but by doing so, I believe that you are going against your own precautionary principles. I think you know enough about how these things work in the environment. Let's not get boggled down by the "we'll do this and then we'll do that approach" if we have enough information. Will the precautionary principle be used to get definite action on chemicals we know are being emitted by certain sectors of industry that should stop as soon as possible.

Vic Shantora

If I can just paraphrase that, and I'm going to try doing that without putting my Department-of-the-Environment hat on here, but it seems and believe me I agree with you when I keep my departmental official's hat on is that things are painfully slow. One of the new features of the new Canadian Environmental Protection Act is that when something is declared toxic under that act, the government will have two years to put a regulatory proposal together and another 18 months to actually have that implemented so I think that politicians probably have captured your concern in that act.

Daniel Green

Are you telling me that if mercury a CEPA toxic - no debate about that. (Um hum) . . .that Canada will act on regulations to limit mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants in two years.

Vic Shantora

No. I'm not telling you that. I'm telling you that, because I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the ins-and-outs of what gets grand-fathered and what does not but for a new CEPA toxic, then we'd have the time-clock provisions of 2 years and 18 months. It's not a bad thought. Again, I want to bring this back into the Water Quality Board and the Air Board and what recommendations we make to the IJC. It seems to me, what implicitly what I heard, and you said explicitly 'why does it take so #@%# long and we don't need all these studies' but it seems to me that we maybe do need legislative or other policy tools that say, "OK, you've declared it toxic. Now let's put it on a fast track to do something about it."

Wayne Draper

If I could just add a little bit to that starting with what Vic said last -- the commitment that we're trying to address and evaluate in the exercise that we've been engaged in is mainly paragraph 5 of Annex 15 which, in itself, is a very strong commitment by the Parties to reduce and/or eliminate toxic substances so I don't think this exercise, in any way, is intended to suggest that parties shouldn't moving ahead on controlling things. But that wasn't the focus of the exercise. It was, could we extract from information available what the progress of the parties has been? And, when you ask yourself that question, the answer is not that easy to define, so I think it's more in that context that our exercise was in, and it was not, in any way, intended to diminish or slow down the need for action by the parties.

Is this on the same vein?

Mark Cohen

Yes, I was wondering if I could just quickly talk about dioxin for a second. Daniel, looking at dioxin is very instructive I think. It looks like we've been beating a dead horse and we've been just going to the n^th degree to do this but looking back on the history of dioxin and our understanding of that is very instructive. Ten or 15 years ago, when we first learned that we were getting dioxin out of waste incinerators, what we did was, people that did risk assessments - they looked at the air inhalation pathway. They asked if you lived one kilometre or so away from the incinerator, what was your risk? and all that was looked at was the air-inhalation pathway from one incinerator.

It wasn't for maybe five or six or maybe even 10 years later that we started looking at this bioaccumulation and up-take in the food chain that it was recognized that only a small fraction of the risk came from the air inhalation. Most of it came from the dioxin that got into the farm five miles away and that you drank the milk or ate the meat from the farm. Now, for a long time, and I think we're still in that paradigm, when we regulate incinerators in the United States today, we're still looking at that kind of risk assessment paradigm from one incinerator -- is the risk from that one incinerator too great? The kind of work that I've been doing and that other people have been doing shows that the cumulative impact of 46,000 sources, which you only could get at through this modeling approach - the cumulative impact is very large and what you find is, if you look at any one incinerator, it's OK. If people don't drop dead from any one incinerator, even though we know these things are toxic, you can never show that cumulative overall approach that, in concert and altogether, that they are all bad. I don't know that we have the regulatory mechanism in the U.S. today to take this comprehensive approach because things are still decided on a source-by-source, incinerator-by-incinerator, smelter-by-smelter basis. Maybe other people have comments on that.

Peter Wise

Mark is right on the money and that's the problem we've got and there was reference in the public session this morning to the Robins Incinerator in Illinois that I'm painfully familiar with. We make these decisions based on (under the Clean Air Act) based on inhalation impacts. We don't have the clear authority to deal with bioaccumulation impacts but I would suggest and I don't know how much you need to read between the lines on this -- this is part of what we're trying to get at with the Moot Court -- to see what exotic authorities we have or how we can use the Clean Water Act or others. Keep in mind that I mentioned before, TMDLs have been around a long time and now all of the sudden states have to come up with lists and they have to promulgate TMDLs. It wasn't because EPA woke up one morning and said, "gee, we're now going to implement the TMDL part of the Clean Water Act; it's because the Sierra Club sued the @$#% out of a lot of states and said you're not implementing the law." Just think about it.

Don Mckay - Any other comments from the panel. If not we can move on.

Candice Art, 1963 W. Bender Rd., City of Glendale -

Just before I came I got a call from someone taking a survey. I did put my name on it and said this was material to give to Milwaukee Journal newspaper reporters. It was a survey on the schools and in that they asked whether I thought that parents should be doing volunteer work at the schools. On this level, having been involved with W2 welfare reform, it doesn't look like this is voluntary work so I didn't know quite how to answer that.

We have been using the schools for other things like stenciling sewer grates and trying to trace those systems as to what's actually going into the rivers and into Lake Michigan.

Several years ago, I was at the first urban agenda-setting conference at the Italian Community Center and went to the brown field forum. They had a follow-up meeting a couple of months later over at Wisconsin Electric. Having been involved with the Wisconsin Greens and the Witness for Non-Violence, Rick Whaley, who's current president of Southeastern Wisconsin Greens, was a witness for non-violence and closing down non-source point pollution at the time the Indians approached him about the human rights problems. Then about 11 years ago there was a conference at Lac du Flambeau [Wisconsin] Tribe primarily about the spear-fishing rights at the boat landings but there "honor our neighbors origins of rights" really took off and since then it is specialized basically in Indian treaty rights, but we were asked to approach the international human rights issues and that's how this started up.

At the follow-up conference at Wisconsin Electric, from the brown fields, I brought up the problems of the stack cleaning and that if they didn't have their conventional technologies in place that we would be running into serious problems. This generally ends up in budget discussions about how much money is put to maintenance. So again, we're looking at an accounting process. Shortly after that, a nuclear power plant blew and. . .well, I'm saying that there is a way that we can involve the schools but we end up looking at a state welfare system at the same time. Perhaps, you would like to contact the Milwaukee Journal for that survey and see how it's being read because the data can be interpreted so many different ways.

I also do independent telephone book contract deliveries and last year I did a sample run that cut across about five different demographic zones that ran from Lake Michigan all the way to the freeway. I found a pocket in that area with a lot of unregistered or undeclared addresses; but the air quality was terrible. A lot of grit in it; and if you got out of that little hollow, you were basically OK. But things do collect in spots. We don't really have a governmental mechanism to test or the manpower to get down that far. It could be done through the school systems. We only have - now I think we just added another DNR personnel in each of the regions and Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife does not reach down into this part of the state because of disputed border and the unsettled blanket claim of the Fox Indians on all of southeastern Wisconsin which is also held by the Ho-Chunk, formerly known as Winnebago and I believe you met Jim Denomme yesterday. You have to work with different types of systems and it's basically all volunteer.

I believe the precedent is there because I seem to have what is called the public access seat on the CANLIS (Milwaukee County Automated Landmapping Information System). It's a cooperative with major utility companies and the registrar of deeds. It's a percent of the registrar of deeds that goes to Wisconsin counties for upgrading computers. At the last meeting, the survey of the blind spot approaches to Billy Mitchell field came in at that point where you collect the information -- it said to be done by the Air Force. However, at a meeting by Congressman Tom Barrett, on the schools, there's a state task force on that and he was going around with the national, that the public knows is in response to the Columbine massacres. The Civil Air Patrol was present and their representative claims that they are doing those aerial photography studies. The Civil Air Patrol is students, age 12 to 21, and you cannot be older than 18 the first year you join. So we do already have established student participation. I don't know what level you'll have to approach but the accumulations are larger in discrete pockets and I don't believe that your findings should rule out class action lawsuits or whatever else might be possible and I don't like to see you being held in the legal position of being responsible for that decision or having the onus upon yourself. Things are not clear enough yet.

Don Mckay - Thank you. Any comments?

Unidentified - I went upstairs to the third floor to the Expo and the Army Corps of Engineers has a display where they took some dredged material that was contaminated and mixed it up with some wood chips and guess what? some of contaminants disappeared. Isn't that wonderful! I think this is called passive remediation or natural attenuation and they had no explanation for where they went. They could have been photodegraded, microbial components natural to the soil and slightly aerated; could have broken them down to harmless pollutants or more harmful pollutants. We don't know what they were broken down to if that happened.

More likely, I think they probably were volatilized so my concern is that if passive remediation or natural attenuation is applied broadly and without any monitoring to find out what happened to the pollutant, we could actually have a situation where he's got a computer model that shows that they've remediated contaminated material that would fill the entire state of Iowa and then environmental levels in the fish actually rise because they're just sending it all out; aerating it; fluffing it up and letting it volatilize back into the environment.

I think EPA is aware of this problem. They seem to be sort of schizophrenic. Part of the EPA is saying "it's a cheap way to do it; let's go ahead" and the other half is going "yes, but." The Corps of Engineers, however, is like a dragon without a vulnerable spot and I don't know where you'd poke it. I know how to poke the EPA. If anybody knows how to poke the Army Corps, let me know. I really would like to hear the Board, at some point, take a position that, using the natural volatility of POPs or bioaccumulative chemicals of concern to disperse and spread the contaminants around is not remediation. Dilution wasn't a solution to pollution; but even dilution is better that simply dispersing it and spreading it back into the environment. I'd rather have it in the mud than in the fish. It's crude but that's the position right now. So if you could possibly comment on a position you could take to say dispersion or volatility is not a solution to pollution either. Thank you.

Comment? Vic?

Vic Shantora

Yes. The Water Quality Board has a group under it that's called SedPAC and as I mentioned at the outset of my remarks, we, as a Board, feel that there are two primary areas that we really have to focus on to clean up the Great Lakes. One is sediment cleanup and the other one is air deposition. One of the things that has come out of their workshops and their various studies in SedPAC is to say that there is a pretty big deficiency right now in pre, during, and post-sediment cleanup monitoring. I don't know about this volatility question. I'd look to some experts on that to give some advice on that. But it is a very key point and we've already registered it with the Commissioners to say that this whole monitoring thing on these sediments is a pretty key piece of the action if we want to see good cleanup going.

Peter Wise

If you look on the U.S. side at SuperFund sites, when you're looking at venting and things like that in terms of cleanup, they are required to get air permits but the weak link there is the same issue we've talked about before. The air permits are dealing primarily with inhalation not with bioaccumulation in the long run. So it is a weakness.

It seems like it should be relatively straightforward to at least get some puff samples. I guess, the same type of thing you do in IADN - get a notion of how that compares with ambient background in places that are well away from there.

My name is Rebecca Caters from Clean Water Action Council in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I just wanted to ask or raise a concern about cross-media transfer. We've seen a lot of projects in the last few years that seem to be a major step backwards in terms of re-disbursing materials that had been collected as part of pollution control efforts.

For instance, we have several paper sludge incinerator operations that have just started up in our area burning major quantities of sludge and taking what was a landfill problem and turning it into an air pollution problem. We see that as a real step backward.

We have sludge driers that are taking contaminated sludges from de-inking plants that are contaminated with PCBs; they're drying that sludge and creating a local air pollution problem with a permit to discharge PCBs into the air in Green Bay, but also, taking the final product of that drying and disbursing that to the land. In fact, this particular product - there's a company called Grantech in Green Bay that dries sludge from Fort James Corporation contaminated with PCBs and dioxins and a number of other things; they dry it, pelletize it, they turn it into the carrier for pesticides and herbicides; in particular, one of the major pesticides is a mosquito pesticide, that is then, disbursed over aquatic areas. It is specifically targetting aquatic areas.

Here, you are taking the PCBs; meticulously working to keep it out of the waste water discharge from Fort James Corporation; very expensively collected into a sludge; and now it is being disbursed with this other product into the aquatic environment. There's something really wrong there.

Again, we also have another process underway in Wisconsin; I serve on a PCB soil criteria committee. The ultimate result will be a criteria that may allow land spreading of sediments dredged from the Fox River or the shipping channels or other contaminated sediment sites, but it has also called my attention to the land spreading of municipal sludges throughout this state which has an air impact. All of these things disburse this material widely over the land and you get volatilization into the air. I'm just wondering if your methods are really tracking the movement from those sources that are so widely disbursed? and doesn't that really contaminate your whole background information?

Another would be sludge incinerators from sewage treatment plants. We have those also in our area. Now, today, I've learned that they're building a medical waste incinerator in our town. It seems we're just going backwards with all these dispersal methods and a lot of them are air impact problems. I'm wondering if you could comment?

Don Mckay - Anyone want to comment on that?

Go ahead, Gary.

(Air Board Tape 3 Side A)

Gary Foley

You raise a very good point. We will need to look into this and talk about it in our future deliberations, so thank you.

Rick Artz

One other comment -- with PCBs, that one is particularly difficult given the nature of that stuff. It's banned and it's all over the place so from the standpoint of the tools that we've shown here, I don't know what to do about it. I guess you legal guys are going to have to deal with that one before it's done.

Peter Wise

I was unaware that there was a Wisconsin permit limit for PCBs -- an actual discharge limit. I was unaware of that Steven Clarkson. I would say that's a concept that the Board be well advised to try and consider but there are a number of issues that you raised because of that. "You're just transferring it from one place to another" is one way of looking at it. That's something that we'd have to consider but economics are a driver that we also have to be aware of in the regulatory world. People make decisions based on what they think they want. We heard Daniel talking about problems earlier in terms of coal-fired generating plants. You shut those down, you lose electricity. You make it more expensive. These are cost-benefit type decisions that not people at this table make but we influence and recommend to politicians who finally make those decisions. But, that doesn't mean we can't have an influence and can't draw the attention that "if you are making this decision, you're actually transferring the problem from your own backyard to somebody else's and that might lead to a different conclusion." That's not going to happen overnight.

Andy Buxbaum

That's a good segue way for one of the things that I was going to bring up. My name is Andy Buxbaum. I'm with the National Wildlife Federation, Great Lakes Office working with Neil Kagen. Neil is working very hard on the Moot Court problem.

The Moot Court problem in simple terms is "how do you deal with the kinds of problems that you asked about -- particularly as they deal with water and waterways and air transport of pollutants to waterways." I think that the problem that Daniel raised and that you responded to is that there are potentially some exotic solutions under the Clean Water Act; maybe the Clean Air Act for that matter. The fact that they are - and you are right - the fact that they are exotic and they have not been tried before is a fundamental problem in the way we look at these things.

The TMDL possible solution which is one that we at NWF are trying to work at the St. Louis River in Minnesota and we're also trying to work it in Ohio. We are running into, consistently, claims by industry folks that the source-receptor relationship isn't there and has to be proven completely before any action can be taken. Actually, the TMDL solution, now is - states have 15 years to implement TMDLs - and all of the airborne problems are being pushed back 15 years.

There are potential broader solutions under the US law which would involve semi-traditional regulation of things like coal-fired power plants. (True) The difficulties we run into (and I think a recommendation from this board could help) is this idea that we have to wait until there is an iron clad conclusive scientific relationship proven between specific sources and specific receptors on a lake-by-lake basis. If this board could make a recommendation that says that there are risks; that there are classes of sources that are causing those risks and we recommend that the governments don't wait for the last molecule to be traced to take action, then that could significantly speed or at least remove some of the barriers that are being posed by those who don't want these sources to be reduced.

Just one other thing - in terms of the coal-fired power plants, I don't think the alternative is to produce less energy; the solution is to find different ways of producing that energy using cost-effective measures. I believe that the proposal in U.S. congress right now by Senator Leahy is to reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants by 95% by the year 2010. His estimate is that they would cost $2.00 per rate payer per month to do that. That estimate might be light but somebody is looking at that. That strikes me as being a much more reasonable estimate than some of the ones we have heard otherwise.

Peter Wise

On the second part, a legislative political decision on something like that is always an option and something that needs to be debated and that needs to be a public debate. I certainly support that and I think the Water Quality Board has, in many ways, supported that kind of idea. To get back to the first point which is the 15-year TMDL and that whole process - and the discussion that Mark raises which is that you have to demonstrate - industry's arguing that you have to demonstrate source-receptor - I don't buy that. I think, for example, that if you can demonstrate that a water body is stressed and you have sufficient source data, by definition any source that you can show is significant - I mean, it's a violation of the TMDL. I don't think you need to make that argument. Now, I know in October, industry is going to make that claim; but I would counter that by saying "you're here; the wind is going this way; there's no argument that some of it is getting in there; some of it is too much, period, the end." There should be a permit that bans any such discharge . . . that's where I would come at that argument that if you are demonstrating that you are already violating, then a TMDL leads to a waste load allocation; a waste load allocation says 'how much more is to be put in.' If there is already too much there the answer is zero.

Don Mckay - Any other comments?

Gary Foley - The October meeting will be fun. Bruce?

My name is Bruce Walker. I'm with STOP, a citizens' environmental group in Montreal. First of all, a comment or two regarding mercury from coal-fired power plants at least in Canada. I was one of two environmental group representatives on the Environment Canada Strategic Options Process issue table regarding that sector a few years ago and it was multi-pollutant, to its credit and actually of all the pollutants that were, at that time, being CEPA-toxic or potentially to be CEPA-toxic, we settled on mercury and respirable particulate matter and the timing now of the proclamation of the new CEPA, I gather, early in the new year, and the imminent declaration of respirable particulate matter in Canada to be deemed CEPA toxic, happening just after the new CEPA is claimed, starts the clock ticking on control measures.

Rather than simply complaining as I usually do, that the report of the multistakeholder committee is sitting on various peoples' desks in Ottawa collecting respirable particulate matter, you're actually going to have to get off your butts and do something and if you do it right you can get PM and mercury controls on a national basis so we have a level playing field at least in Canada in a cost-effective basis.

I actually have some points, Don, that relate to the Air Board as a whole and aren't necessarily specific to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. First of all, regarding your reports which at one time were semi-annual and are now annual, I can live with that, particularly if they are more useful. The semi-annual reports did literally tend to be more like extended minutes rather than true reports; but just don't continue decreasing the frequency of reports. I would ask you to make that commitment here if possible.

Don Mckay

I'll just address that, and Gary, the other co-chair, or any of the other board members are welcome to comment if they so wish - our intent was not to decrease our reporting frequency; our intent was to make sure that we provide usable and informative reports, and that's our intent so we're not looking to go to a less frequent timetable. The intent is not to go to zero elimination of reports but it is to go to informative and useful reports and give us the time to develop those useful, informative reports. I don't know, Gary, do you agree?

Gary Foley - OK

Bruce Walker

Of course the advantage of at least an annual report is if you didn't do much in the year you have to tell the world you didn't do much, right? Second point -- would the Air Board and, as they are here, I'll add, the Water Quality Board, consider holding a meeting accessible to members of the public more than once every two years - i.e. at IJC Biennials? You're allowed to reflect on that for more than five seconds.

Answer

Don Mckay

I guess the answer is, "we'll consider it," and I think one of the things is that as resource-strapped as everyone is, we want to make sure that it would be productive and we can show that having something sooner - more than just once every two years - that it would be add value to what we do.

Peter Wise

The Water Quality Board holds an annual, public event outside of this forum. Last May we were in Toronto; the year before we were in Ohio; before that, Thunder Bay; before that, Rochester; and this coming May we will be in Waukegan, Illinois and we work with the local citizens' advisory group to have a full-day workshop in which the board is accessible and engaged in a dialogue. It's been very, very fruitful and useful sessions.

Bruce Walker

The context of my question, specifically for the Air Board, of course, includes those transboundary areas outside the basin, including Maine/New Brunswick, and Washington/British Columbia and so forth. Finally, a subject that Wayne hears me go on about a lot but the rest of you probably don't - the renegotiation of the Canada-U.S. Air Quality Accord in which the International Joint Commission has a very specific, although in my view, extremely limited role.

For those who don't know the history, the Air Quality Accord was signed 13 March, 1991 and I wear, with some pride, the official pin of that accord. I wear the Canadian maple leaf on top but. . . some people wear it the other way around. Strangely enough, when that accord was signed, the International Joint Commission was given the responsibility, not to give advice to the parties on amending the accord, but simply to compile the comments they receive from members of the public and pass them on to the governments, to the parties. The IJC does a rather good job of doing more than that as these biennials point out. So it would seem logical to expand the competence and domain of the IJC under the Air Quality Accord and give the IJC the mandate to actually not simply solicit input from members of the public but also offer, I'll use the term, sober second thought, offer wisdom to the respective governments on ways to improve the Air Quality Accord. Again, you don't all have to speak at once.

Answer

Gary Foley

Unfortunately, that has to come as a mandate from the governments to the IJC before the IJC can do that so you have to urge the governments to do that.

Bruce Walker

I'm aware that some of you do wear another hat. So I'm asking you to put on your government hat. Thank you.

Don Mckay - (Sometime too many hats.) Any other comments?

Sir?

Unidentified - Yes, I wanted to just get back briefly to the situation that this lady here alluded to a few moments ago. It brings to mind a situation that evolved in Washington State a number of years ago that had to do with the commercial use of hazardous waste and where agricultural companies were buying hazardous waste and mixing it with their fertilizer and re-disbursing it out onto agricultural land. Well, this one community developed a whole set of problems from fields that wouldn't grow anything to livestock dying to people being sick. But, what that did is it brought out the whole discussion about commercial use and transport of hazardous waste inter-state. They traced the whole thing, if you had a load of this waste that had mercury and arsenic and zinc in one state, you could transport it with no type of warning signs; you get to another state you might have to hang some kind of sign on your truck and maybe go into Canada -- they wouldn't even let you across the border with it. There was a whole bunch of different scenarios here and I guess what I'm suggesting to you all is to contemplate a recommendation that talks about a state-by-state and province-by-province analysis of commercial use and redistribution of hazardous waste into other commercial products and seeing if there can be some type of agreement in terms of how these things are handled and in the case that she alluded to, redistributed back into the environment in a different form. That's all I had to say, thank you.

Don Mckay - Comments?

Peter Wise

It is a real issue and the question is, when it's reused - because we encourage recycling in hazardous waste - sometimes as fuel, sometimes in other products - and if it is recycled appropriately and it's not bioavailable then it's not a waste. Therein gets to the issue as to once you reuse it, how available is it and certainly land-spreading or something like that where it can volatilize, it becomes a waste again and so I think that you've hit a real key issue.

Don Mckay

OK. It is 15 minutes after 5:00 and I think it's been a long but a profitable afternoon. I just want to take this opportunity to thank the panel for their participation and also, again, to Harold and to Mark for their excellent presentations and to all of you for coming and hearing us. We certainly have heard you and we will certainly deliberate and certainly will make recommendations to Commissioners on things that we have heard today. I want to thank you all for an excellent workshop and please continue participation and giving us your concerns on air and water quality. Thank you very much and have a good evening.