In East Texas, Chicken Plants are Polluting Rivers and Lakes with Oxygen-Sucking Contaminants
The Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone” — a Connecticut-sized stretch of saltwater where chemical runoff from farms in the Mississippi River watershed feeds oxygen-stifling algal blooms — gets a lot of press. The low oxygen levels spur massive fish kills that disrupt the region’s lucrative fishing industry. The largest dead zone ever recorded cropped up in 2017.
But you’re less likely to hear about the areas of water with dangerously low levels of dissolved oxygen in rural waterways hundreds of miles inland. In East Texas, the nation’s biggest chicken growers reportedly are pushing high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus — the nutrients responsible for excessive algae growth — into rivers and lakes. That’s in addition to harmful bacteria and pathogens that wastewater from animal processing plants can contain, which sometimes find their way into the public water supply.
In a report released earlier this month, the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, identified two processing plants operated in East Texas by Tyson Farms and Pilgrim’s Pride as particularly heavy polluters. The group’s analysis showed that the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Mt. Pleasant, an hour-and-a-half northeast of Tyler, discharged the third most nitrogen among large slaughterhouses nationwide in 2017. Discharges from that plant and the Tyson facility in Center, at the Texas-Louisiana state line, have both been linked to low dissolved oxygen levels in popular lakes.
It’s a problem you don’t hear about much because it happens in “rural areas where you don’t have major media coverage,” said Eric Schaffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project. Meanwhile, Big Ag uses the lack of scrutiny to save money by pumping harmful contaminants into public water sources. “This is just wrong. It’s a public waterway, not a drainage ditch for a bunch of factories,” Schaffer said.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/in-east-texas-chicken-plants-are-polluting-rivers-and-lakes-with-oxygen-sucking-contaminants/
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