Editor,

I am going to be taking contrarian positions on the state of the environment, so let me say at the outset, I have seen, and fully appreciate the magnitude of the problems facing the future of this planet. I have intimate knowledge of three Superfund sites, one I grew up near, one I helped a fellow classmate investigate while in college, and one that I worked at in the late 70s. My head was not in the sand environmentally then and isn't now.

One of the last jobs I had professionally before I retired involved testing water samples for a wide range of trace metals, contaminants in the parts per million or billion range. Through my work there I found out just how good ground water in our area is.

Imagine you have a five-gallon bottle in front of you filled with dry sand, with all of the grains white except for one red one. If there were a million grains of white sand in the bottle with one of them red, one would say the concentration of red sand is 1PPM or one part per million.

Testing for trace amounts of metals, usually expressed in PPM or PPB, parts per billion, depending on the element, is complicated by statistical tests done on standard samples to determine what the minimum concentration of each element is that the given test method will reliably detect. This is know as the MDL, or method (or minimum) detection limit.

The effect of all this is that in the grains of sand sample, you might indeed only have that one red grain, or indeed none, but if the test devised for detecting the red grains, is only reliable down to 1.2 PPM, that is how any result less than 1.2 gets reported as less than 1.2 PPM. There may indeed be no red grains but the test cannot be relied on at that low a concentration. The actual result could be 1.999 and still get reported as less than 1.2.

Too often people who would see the <1.2 result erroneously conclude that the concentration is 1.2. As test methods get better the detection limits go down, but there will never be a test method that gives an answer of 0.0 reliably.

A lot of the debate over industrial waste overlooks one thing. Waste from any industry is not created in a vacuum of responsibility. There was a plant near where I grew up that produced insulation for home building from the abandoned heaps of slag left in the area from the days of the iron smelters. It was called rockwool and resembled in form the fiberglass insulation we see today. They had a very noxious stack smoke and were eventually asked to leave the area.

My point is the demand for new homes, maybe even the home you live in if it was built in the late 40s, created the rockwool, and with it the waste stream from that plant. Our grandparents created the waste.

That is not to absolve the manufacturer of the responsibility of providing a clean and safe work environment and from having processes that are environmentally friendly. I just want to make sure that there is proper responsibility placed on all responsible parties and that there is an understanding of the limitations of modern chemical testing.

Richard Coleman,