The Leblanc alkali production processes were especially pernicious, but they followed along the lines of previous industrial processes. In other words, the first British environmental legislation was a response not so much to a qualitative change in industrial processes and their environmental impact but more to a quantitative increase in sources of pollution that had up to that point been (if only barely) tolerable.
Legislation Arising From Public Anger
At the center of the first British environmental legislation was the Leblanc process, an industrial process that produced of soda ash (which is chemically sodium carbonate) that came into use in the first decades of the 19th century. Named after its inventor, Nicolas Leblanc, it replaced an older process in which soda ash had been produced from wood ash. However, as the availability of wood ash declined (because of deforestation, a process that was occuring both in Great Britain and across Europe at the time. (Some soda ash was imported to Europe from the New World, where deforestation was also occurring. However, because the process of deforestation had begun later in the New World, including in Canada, there were still large stands of forests.)
At the same time that the availability of wood ash was declining, the demands for soda ash were steeply increasing. Soda ash along with potash (which is chemically potassium carbonate) are both essential ingredients in a number of industrial processes, including the production of paper, soap, glass, and fabric. While the Leblanc process was first used on a wide-scale basis in France -- which by the first decades of the 19th century was producing 10,000-15,000 tons of alkali each year -- it was in Britain that the process (and its environmental consequences) was used at its highest levels.
The first British soda works using the Leblanc process was established in 1816 on the River Tyne (thereby producing both water and air pollution).
At this time, while there were no legal restrictions on the polluting aspects of the alkali-production process; however, there were tariffs in place on salt. This fact -- given that salt is an integral ingredient to the Leblanc process -- kept the use of this process in check and so coincidentally limited the environmental effects of the process.
When the salt tariffs were repealed, large chemical works were established in both England and Scotland and by the 1850s Britain was producing 140,000 tons of soda and by the 1870s the British were producing over 200,000 tons of ash, a number larger than the production of the rest of the world combined.
The serious consequences of the Leblanc process were quickly apparent. The byproducts of the process were vented directly into the air and were in part absorbed into the nearby rivers. There was also a sulfurous smell that clung to the factories, and the solid waste that was produced by the process was simply dumped on local fields, where it began to leach into the water table and aquifers.
By 1839, there were law suits against different soda works. This is an important aspects of environmental law, because it remains the case in both Britain and Canada that much of environmental law is derived from lawsuits. While it is also true that important environmental law emanates from other aspects of the polity, citizen intervention in the form of lawsuits, remains a driving force to improve the legal environmental protections in both nations.
One of the first lawsuits against a soda ash plant argued that:
…the gas from these manufactories is of such a deleterious nature as to blight everything within its influence, and is alike baneful to health and property. The herbage of the fields in their vicinity is scorched, the gardens neither yield fruit nor vegetables; many flourishing trees have lately become rotten naked sticks. Cattle and poultry droop and pine away. It tarnishes the furniture in our houses, and when we are exposed to it, which is of frequent occurrence, we are afflicted with coughs and pains in the head ... all of which we attribute to the Alkali works.
It was precisely such concerns by the government, prompted through the action of lawsuits, that prompted the British Parliament to pass the first of the Alkali Acts, which were the first modern air pollution legislation.
However, while this was arguably an important step in the right direction in terms of legislation that acknowledged that the government had an obligation to protect the public good and the environment as a whole from the actions of industry and capitalism, it was also true that the changes in the manufacturing process that this law brought about actually increased the water pollution that resulted. Early environmental...
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