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Alcoa West’s current “State Pollutant Discharge Elimination System” Permit (SPDES) was found through New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) archival research. The SPDES document exposes NYS DEC’s legal allowance of Alcoa West facilities to discharge substances such as Cyanide (60 μg/L), Oil & Grease (10 mg/L), Iron (17 lbs/d), Fluoride (240 lbs/d) and Lead (unspecified lbs/d) into the Grasse River. Even with this limitations, there has been a 23% total cyanide exceedance found in March ’21 and 410% total fluoride exceedance in May ’22 reported (according to ECHO). 

This permit was granted June 1st of 2018 and expired May 31st 2023. After May 31st, the permit will be up for renewal, which would provide Alcoa West 5 more years of “legal” toxicant discharging. Presently, the permit is under SAPA permit extension, this will allow the continual discharge of the existing toxicants at Alcoa West until renewal process is finalized, which will not be completed in the near future.The Grasse River is a NYS-declared impaired waterway and a current remediation zone.

History of SPDES

The SPDES Permit was born out of the Clean Water Act (CWA, 1948). In the 1972 CWA amendments session, legislatures declared the CWA’s objective is the “restoration and maintenance of the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters.” Two goals also were established: zero discharge of pollutants by 1985 and, as an interim goal and where possible, water quality that is both “fishable” and “swimmable” by mid-1983. Neither objectives were met. In Clean Water Act: A Summary of the Law, Copeland admitted this failure, stating “While those dates have passed, the goals remain, and efforts to attain them continue.”

Presently, the NYSDEC SPDES program is designed to “eliminate the pollution of New York waters and to maintain the highest quality of water possible, consistent with: “1) Public health 2) Public enjoyment of the resource 3) Protection and propagation of fish and wildlife 4) Industrial development in the state.” The last goal is incongruent with and counterintuitive to the first 3 goals stated. And as demonstrated through the material found in Alcoa’s SPDES permits, the DEC prioritizes industrial well-being over socio-ecological health that disproportionately affects Native communities. 

The Politics of Pollution

In March of 2019, Sen. Chuck Schumer was quoted saying “The entire Massena community can breathe a big sigh of relief and look to the future, but nonetheless, as I have under the three previous governors and past CEO’s, I’ll continue engaging with Alcoa – and will partner with local leaders, my federal partners, and New York state, to make sure this facility is productive and thriving for years to come.” The same toxicants that continue to poison our families, our water, and our land- are vital components to Alcoa’s thriving productivity.

With the history of this permitting, pollution, and policy, it is useful to understand how toxicology and related fields differentiate toxins and toxicants. Toxins 1) naturally occur in biological and mineral life, 2) circulate locally and occur in minute quantities and 3) are naturally metabolized by the environment. Contrastingly, toxicants are “characterized by human creation via industrial and/or lab processes, mass tonnage, temporal longevity, both acute and latent effects.” Toxicants can also include minerals that may occur naturally but exist in particular forms, locations, and amounts corrupted by different processes, such as lead and fluoride in drinking water or arsenic and mercury in river sediment. Toxicants are engendered by specific systems, including settler-colonial regimes of industrialization and capitalist economic growth.

Davis (2014) emphasized that the primary role of the US EPA is to establish national standards that regulate the amount of pollution that is acceptable. The cost of implementing these standards is taken into account, specifically the cost of limiting chemical toxicity and the availability of technologies that maintain industrial production levels. As a result, the acceptable levels of toxicants are set according to what is affordable for industry, rather than solely what is “scientifically” ideal for protecting human and environmental health. This approach prioritizes and optimizes economic considerations over the potential impact of toxicity on organs and organisms.

“Dominant measures of toxic harm are primarily enabled and defined by international organizations (such as the World Health Organization) or the state and its economic and scientific systems. Nearly all existing environmental regulations and laws around toxicants are based on threshold limits (Cram, 2016).  A certain amount of a toxicant is allowed to enter bodies and environments, such as 0.002 mg of mercury per liter of drinking water (US EPA, n.d.) or five micrograms of lead per deciliter of human blood (US EPA, 2017). Threshold limits assume that ecosystems and bodies can assimilate a specific amount of toxicant before harm occurs (Liboiron, 2013; Vogel, 2012; Walker, 2000). Based on these thresholds, toxicants are systematically and legally allowed in water, environments and bodies via regulatory structures.”

Though the permissible toxicant levels mentioned in Alcoa’s SPDES permits may seem low or negligible to some, these pollutants are a form of “slow disaster,” a form of violence that occurs gradually and often unnoticed by government agencies and testing facilities, dispersed across time and space. These harms are difficult to quantify and may not be captured by standard regulatory metrics, as they do not fit into neat categories or easily observable patterns.  The scales of slow violence can be either too small or too proliferated to be detected directly, making it challenging to capture the occurrence of harm through typical approaches of studies. Even in cases in which toxicant levels are captured by community members exceeding “safe parameters” via water, plant or soil sampling, the NYS DEC and US EPA often disregards data that is not obtained through their affiliated and partnered agencies. This was observed in Wilson Center: Commons Lab’s “An Exploratory Study on Barriers.”

Settler-colonial governing agencies such as the US EPA and NYS DEC regulate how much industries are allowed to pollute, the limits to which they can release toxicants into our waterways. In reality there are no “safe” levels of toxicants; these levels are bureaucratic treaties with industries- operating in modes and fashions that allows for slow violence and unnoticeable contamination across multiple borders (reservation, county and international). Borders that waters, fish and toxicants do not adhere to.

For decades our lands and bodies have been treated as sacrifice zones, attempting to dispossess Akwesasne via accumulation by industrial degradation. Federal and state agencies have proven they cannot attain the goals of environmental well-being and sustainability they set forth. The waters, the lands and our bodies have a right to rest, restore and rebalance themselves. They are not given that opportunity when government agencies permit toxicant carcerality. 

What’s Needed-

• Access to Alcoa West documents not available in the DEC Info Locator including Whole Effluent Toxicity (WET Tests), Temperature Monitoring reports, SPDES modification requests, past SPDES permits, etc. 
• Akwesasne community consultation with NYS DEC to review and discuss the SPDES material
• NYS DEC to open public commenting period for the May permit renewal in accordance with Step 9 of their State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR)