Toxics Action Center

CONTACT:

44 Winter St., 4th Floor
Boston, Ma 02108
617-747-4362
www.toxicsaction.org

Meredith Small, Executive Director

DESCRIPTION:

Having laws to protect us from poisons does not necessarily mean that they are effectively enforced. Since 1987, Toxics Action Center has helped more than 525 citizen groups throughout New England prevent and clean up toxic threats. Its mission is to work side by side with communities to clean up hazardous waste sites, reduce industrial pollution, prevent pesticide spraying, and reform dangerous waste, energy, and industrial facilities. It also aims to develop long-lasting leaders who will continue to broaden the environmental and social change movements. TAC has successfully reduced toxic exposure over the last 19 years: it has effectively stopped the siting of an asphalt plant in Boston, and the building a radioactive waste dump in western Massachusetts; campaigned to bring public water to a neighborhood in Holliston whose wells had been poisoned; and persuaded a Wilmington industrial-coatings plant to use safer materials. In 2005, TAC assisted citizen group Protect Our Water Resources in Natick as they promoted non-pesticide methods of weed control for Lake Cochituate. The result: for the second year in a row, Protect Our Water Resources successfully prevented the spraying of pesticides. There are many many more success stories; check out their website. It's messy work, but someone has to do it. Now let us help them.

(1997: NATURE: Environment: Energy, Toxics, Waste Recyling)