The sweat in the tar ponds

Somewhere in the toxis mess that is the Sydney tar ponds is the sweat of my grandfather and my wife's grandfather. Both of them gave more than 40 years of their lives to the steel plant, located in the centre of Cape Breton's largest city. The Sydney tar ponds are the size of three city blocks. The steel plant's 80 year reliance on coke-ovens technology is the culprit. In the process of turning coal into coke, benzene, kerosene, napthalene, lead, and arsenic, a dog's breakfast of hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical waste, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), were dumped into a local estuary, Muggah Creek. The creek, which leads to Sydney Harbour, received, and continues to receive, millions of litres of raw sewage each day. That this is an environmental disaster is obvious; that it is simultaneously a class issue is not. --Author's introduction