[rsaxvc]

You're eactly right. I saw the blight at Herculaneum, MO in the 2000s - dozers plowing down houses in a slowly expanding circle centered on the smelter.

1 in 5 students had excess blood lead. The schools nearby were scraped down and soil was replaced whenever the lead levels got too high from the dust blowing off the open ore and slag trucks running town. The smelter didn't hit EPA requirements for 25 years, and when faced with enforcement, decided to leave rather than produce lead cleanly, because it is not economical to do so cleanly. Cheap lead offloads the environmental and health effects to someone.

https://health.mo.gov/living/environment/hazsubstancesites/p...

https://www.kbia.org/science-and-technology/2012-08-08/the-e...

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Doesn't have to be a smelter. Battery factory is enough. Like former VARTA, now Hawker, now closed (2021) in Hagen i.W., Germany.

Lead, so sweet, its dust a sheet, over kindergardens, parks and shools, the fools!

https://osm.org/go/0GMgy_p2J--?m=

[doubloon]

thats very interesting, i never heard of this, i wonder how many other towns are off-the-radar. and in China probably even more now.

i wonder if the EPA could be better off if it gave grants instead of fining people.

[jjtheblunt]

government handouts seem to escape their original purpose, famously.

For a recent example there are the covid relief scams galore. very often in the news the last year or two at least in Arizona, where some egregiously shameful people 'embezzled' and 'gamed' the grants system to buy super extravagent properties, etc. .

[analog31]

Superfund is such a a program.