Environmental security

Enviros Are Ignoring the Elephant In the Room: U.S. Military Is the World’s Largest Polluter

The Military Pumps Out Staggering Quantities of Toxic Waste, Water and Air Pollution and Radiation

Environmentalists are ignoring the elephant in the room … the world’s largest polluter.

Newsweek reported in 2014:

The US Department of Defence is one of the world’s worst polluters. Its footprint dwarfs that of any corporation: 4,127 installations spread across 19 million acres of American soil. Maureen Sullivan, who heads the Pentagon’s environmental programmes, says her office contends with 39,000 contaminated sites.

Camp Lejeune is one of the Department’s 141 Superfund sites, which qualify for special clean up grants from the federal government.

That’s about 10% of all of America’s Superfund sites, easily more than any other polluter. If the definition is broadened beyond Pentagon installations, about 900 of the 1200 or so Superfund sites in America are abandoned military facilities or sites that otherwise support military needs.

“Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated,” said John D Dingell, a soon-to-retire Michigan congressman, who served in the Second World War.