Something truly horrific and shocking has happened.
Hexavalent chromium is a cancer-causing material that can lead to skin ailments, asthma, bronchial complications, and even lung and stomach cancer. It was none other than hexavalent chromium that was behind the true story of a small town in the United States where a large number of the locals suffered miscarriages or early death, as portrayed in the movie Erin Brockovich.
It was recently revealed that cement produced in Korea contains a high amount of this deadly material. Korea is the world’s fifth largest user of cement: in apartments, schools, hospitals, commercial buildings, offices, roads, and other parts of the infrastructure of daily life. This makes everyone in the country at serious risk.
The reason there are so many harmful metals in domestically produced cement is that a lot of industrial byproducts and waste are used as supplementary ingredients, all in the name of recycling our resources. The result is that that Korean cement has no less than 170 times the amount of hexavalent chromium that you find in cement made in China, which does not use industrial waste as an ingredient. Japanese cement has industrial waste material mixed in during the production process, but Korean cement still has three times the amount of hexavalent chromium as the Japanese product, because Japan began restrictions on the practice in 1998. Korea still has no legal standard.
Korean producers have been legally allowed to use industrial waste in cement production since August 1999, when the National Assembly amended the Waste Material Management Law. It had been decided that the law would adopt the Japanese standard, but when the actual legislation was drafted, lawmakers completely disregarded the country’s health. Seven years later, and the people are still exposed.
There are 15 legal clauses on gas emissions from incinerators used to burn garbage, but there are only four clauses in the legislation that dictate how to burn harmful industrial waste in cement factory furnaces. As if that were not problem enough, ordinance changes proposed by the Ministry of the Environment would actually deregulate the amount of hydrogen chloride that cement furnaces are allowed to release into the air. Korea’s unprincipled and unguided environmental policy has turned the country’s cement furnaces into treatment plants for harmful garbage, including the more than 500,000 tons of harmful waste materials imported yearly from other countries.
The lack of interest and responsibility on the part of Korean politicians and government officials is making the population sick. The first victims are the people who live near cement factories. According to the National Cancer Center, residents of the Seo-myeon area of Yeongwol, Gangwon Province, contract laryngeal cancer at a rate three times the national average. These people must not be ignored just because they represent a small part of the population. The government needs to move quickly to find a way to secure the health of those suffering and give them compensation.
Furthermore, there needs to be an overall structure in place for preventing furnaces and cement products from harming citizens, and by that we mean something that goes well beyond quick-fix solutions that try to patch up the problems, such as merely establishing standards for hexavalent chromium alone. There will be similar discoveries of harmful materials in the future, due to the government’s disregard for life and a way of thinking that places the greatest priority on economic growth.
Preventing additional problems in the future will require a thorough inquiry into how the ignorance of people’s health has come to pass. We need to look at this lack of concern since the law was amended in 1999, and then anyone directly responsible for the laxity of regulations needs to be held accountable. The government then needs to fix the policymaking process so that important goals are thoroughly examined in the course of drafting legislation.
Finally, it urgently needs to come up with a plan for protecting the country from an increased risk from dangerous metal poisoning resulting from the aging of cement buildings constructed after 1999.
[Editorial] Danger from cement an urgent issue |
