New studies show that the earth can't stop contaminants from reaching water supplies

Jun 22, 2012 11:39 GMT  ·  By

According to reports recently made public, the US industry alone is responsible for injecting roughly 30 trillion gallons of toxic waste into the ground.

Thus, throughout the past decades, countless dangerous chemicals were laid to rest in our planet's deep layers of rock, in the vain hope that these will contain all harmful substances and prevent them from causing any damage to the environment.

However, it seems that, from time to time, these underground waste containers start to leak, which means that toxic liquids make their way into our groundwaters and, from there on, even into some of our water sources.

As well as this, there are specialists who claim that, by continually injecting the earth with such chemicals, we are in fact toying with its geology.

This means that, sooner or later, our grounds may begin to “shake” in ways we did not foresee.

Some of the alternatives to this practice are either burning the waste, or treating it so as to make sure that it no longer poses any threats to the natural world.

However, as Raw Story explains, these options involve having to spend more money, so they are most often overlooked by major industrial companies.

Presently, high officials and some geologists claim that environmentalists are overreacting, and that there are minimal risks to injecting toxic waste into the ground.

On the other hand, ProPublica, a non-profit news corporation based in New York City, tells us that up until nowadays, more than 220,000 cases of structural failures have been reported for US's waste wells.

Interestingly enough, the country's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declined ProPublica's invitation to sit down and talk about the latter's findings.

Still, according to the same source, EPA representatives explained that the said organization “recognizes that more can be done to enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes, will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control program.”

Apparently, pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries are the ones responsible for injecting the most considerable amounts of dangerous chemicals into the earth.