Business
Boeing Comes To Idaho
October 20, 2006 
For many years various Idaho firms have been after the big bucks from aviation giant Boeing. There was even a dream of an airport of some sort south of Kuna at one point.
Now Idaho finally has something from Boeing–HAZARDOUS WASTE!
Boise-based American Ecology Corp. proudly announced Friday in the Daily Paper they have a contract “providing all hazardous waste land disposal services.
They said the contract is expected to generate $1-2 million annually in new treatment and disposal revenue for the American Ecology Idaho operation near Grandview.
With that kind of incentive people will be flocking to that ranching community to either work among the chemicals or build houses overlooking the site! Gotta love Idaho business savvy.
To insure more advertising-free Boise Guardian news, please consider financial support.
Comments & Discussion
Comments are closed for this post.
Oct 20, 2006, 8:43 pm
This is just great,1st out of state developers want to ruin the area and now out of state companys want us to take their waste. What do we do to stop all this crazy stuff. Suggestion that first comes to mind is kick them all out.
I don`t mind progress if it is a positive for the people who live in Idaho.
It seems once again money talks regardless of the outcome.
Oct 20, 2006, 11:23 pm
I liked Idaho better when nobody knew we were here. Actually, I thought Idaho was really boring. Now, I think boring is good. Amazing how your thinking changes as you get older.
Oct 21, 2006, 12:40 am
American Ecology have a great set up out there and have been taking waste from out of state for years. They got the rods from Trojan when they decommissioned it.
Nasty waste like that has to go someplace and given the size and empty space in Idaho, it is a pretty good place for it to go. Especially when it is contained properly like American Ecology is capable of doing.
EDITOR NOTE–All true. Seattle gets the good jobs and runs a highly profitable international company and dumps their waste in Idaho where we are proud to make $2 million for taking their trash.
Oct 21, 2006, 3:18 am
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Your polluting cars, your toxic waste,
Send these, too, we’ll take them all
Then, pray thee, send us more.
We’ll build houses, wall to wall,
We’ll turn our land to toxic dumps,
Please, use up our forests, all our trees,
And leave us just the stumps,
Pollute our water, subdivide our farms,
In each pasture, build a mall,
We’ll improve our lovely Idaho,
‘Til, by God, we destroy it all!
OK, so I’m a lousy poet, but it think it does somewhat express the attitude of our grab-every-buck-no-matter-what leaders, businesses etc.
Oct 21, 2006, 9:44 pm
Dear Mr. Business Man,
Thinking of moving your business to a third world country
– For the low taxes,
– Give away land prices,
– Lax environmental laws.
– Cheap wages,
– And compliant politicians?
THINK IDAHO,
You already speak the language.
Oct 21, 2006, 10:15 pm
I understand that taking waste from another state sounds bad, but what environmental impact is there for the state clear out there unless that area either becomes populated or in several millenia it becomes a rain forest?
Oct 22, 2006, 1:11 am
John:
Both of those are possibilites. So are dozens of other things, including probably some we can’t even guess at yet.
Think about it: If this stuff were relatively safe, the states it’s in would all just keep it, instead of constantly finding ways to ship it to Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico.
They tout it as a financially benificial business, providing jobs, taxes, etc. Wouldn’t they want those benefits in their own states? Hmmm???
Oct 22, 2006, 4:32 pm
This is a very dangerous idea for idaho. We already have INL , with its tons of leaky barrels full of nuclear waste buried right on top of the largest water table aquifer in S.E. Idaho. Thats a situation that could pollute all of S. Idaho’s water with dangerous radioactive waste. Now we have another large company, Boeing, wanting to use ” American destructive ecology” to bury their hazardous waste in a beautiful, rural ranch area. Idaho has some of the most pristine, ecolologically unblemished rural areas in the USA. Are we going to let our federal reps. ( Craig and Simpson ,especially) turn our State into a garbage dump for business greed?
EDITOR NOTE–Joe, it has already happened. The site at Grandview is legal and has been up and running for close at least 25 years.
Oct 24, 2006, 10:42 pm
A few years back there were some economists that speculated that environmental clean-up regulations, enforced in most first world countries, were actually damaging the world-wide environment. This wasn’t a report from the Cato Institute, honest.
They asserted that since so much raw material had to be extracted to produce a refined product, that placing tough restrictions on the manufacturers simply passed the impacts further down the fabricators’ supply chain. Ultimately, its the resource rich third world countries that experience wide-spread environmental degradation through vast (and greatly sped-up) extraction efforts – just so the manufacturing companies (with first world production plants) can remain profitable enough to ensure that their refineries can pay the costs of environmental clean-up.
The end result is a “clean” first world, and an environmentally devastated third world. Yet, the people living in these remote corners of the world flood the labor market in the first world countries, as their homelands become increasingly polluted. This just places greater pressure on the belabored working middle class who have already had to absorb a large share of the clean-up costs via pay cuts, and having to pay for higher-cost manufactured products. What’s then experienced is a visceral manifestation of an Oroburos – an economic/environmental snake consuming its own tail.
These economists proposed a solution, invest in technologies (tax incentives, public subsidies) that allow innovative manufacturers to reduce the amount of raw material needed to produce refined products, and also reduce the amount of energy consumed – nanotechnology and biotechnology being just two such methods. Essentially, place a restriction at the inlet to the material/manufacturing pipeline – rather than just a filter at the outlet.
Without this approach, I imagine that Idaho (and other low-population western states) will continue to experience the same fate as poor third world countries.
Viva la revolucion!