Carol Blood, a Nebraska state senator, said the situation in and around Mead, a tiny village of roughly 500 people, is “dire”. Emails between state regulators and Bayer’s senior remediation manager, Mark Bowers, show Bayer overseeing a range of actions on the AltEn site. AltEn later restarted the plant, telling regulators in 2013 the plant would be using grain, “mainly corn”, as its primary raw material. Nebraska regulators discovered in 2015, however, that AltEn was using pesticide-coated seeds, one of only two ethanol plants in the United States known to do so. Monitoring healthWhile regulators sample water and soil, many area residents worry that the beef cattle operation adjacent to the AltEn plant has also been contaminated.

Source: The Guardian May 29, 2021 09:56 UTC