FL Toxic Phosphate Site Leaked Toxins, Acid, Wastewater For Decades; Went Bankrupt 20 Years Ago
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Within a year of Piney Point being built, its original owners – a subsidiary of Borden, the glue and milk company – were caught dumping waste into nearby Bishop Harbor, a marine estuary that flows into Tampa Bay. The plant repeatedly changed hands throughout the years, all the while continuing causing numerous human health and environmental disasters and incidents. In 1989, for instance, a 23,000-gallon leak of sulfuric acid from a holding tank forced the evacuation of hundreds of people. After the owner went bankrupt, the Piney Point fertilizer plant was shut down in 2001. But the waste from more than three decades of phosphate mining still sits in massive piles at the site – the environmental equivalent of a ticking time bomb. An intense storm could easily send overflow, for instance.
Before phosphate can be used to help crops grow in fertilizer, it goes through a polluting chemical process. Phosphate ore mined from the soil is treated to create phosphoric acid – a main component of fertilizer. Phosphogypsum is the radioactive waste left over. For every ton of desirable phosphoric acid produced for fertilizer, more than five tons of phosphogypsum waste remains. The fertilizer industry that produced that waste then dumps it in large piles known as “gyp stacks” – mountains hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of acres wide. And at the top of these mountains are huge lagoons, containing hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater that is highly acidic and radioactive with heavy metal contaminants. A breach at another stack in the state after a 2004 hurricane led to millions of gallons of polluted water being spilled into Tampa Bay.
This toxic industry has plagued the state for decades. Central Florida is the phosphate capital of the world; the state produces 80% of the phosphate mined in the US, as well 25% of the phosphate used around the world. An estimated 1bn tons of phosphogypsum is housed in about two dozen stacks that dot the Florida landscape, some looming as high as 200ft, each with its own pond of acidic wastewater on top. And every year, about 30m more tons are added to them.
“Florida can’t keep ignoring the catastrophic risks of phosphate mining and its toxic waste products,” says Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “No community should have to suffer the consequence of this toxic legacy for some corporation’s short-term financial gain.” According to Compton, what happens at Piney Point sets a precedent in Florida regarding industrial waste from phosphate mining. “Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong here,” he says.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/11/florida-piney-point-fertilizer-plant-toxic-leak
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