78 animals that rely on it. Many of the byproducts of the industries that dumped into the river were heavily toxic and many of them were harsh carcinogens. One of the main perpetrators of this type of pollution were coal mining, refining, and burning industries, and since the paper making process is very long, large-scale, and energy intensive, the paper industry is heavily responsible for a lot of the pollution created by the other industries as well since it required so much coal to be burnt in order to power the mills.1 As mentioned before, the process by which paper is created requires a lot of water. One of the big things that this process requires water for is to help submerge the wood pulp in the chemicals required to make high quality paper. This means that all the water that is used is mixed with a long list of chemicals, one of the most common being chlorine. This chemical is used to help bleach out the color of the pulp to produce the bright white results that consumers expect in paper. The only issue with this portion of the process is that the chlorine also creates organochlorine compounds, very harmful and dangerous chemicals that are carcinogens to humans and toxic to most animals. This along with other chemicals, such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) are often very difficult to separate from the water once the pulp is done being processed, so a lot of it is recycled and used in the next batch of papermaking. However, the rest of the wastewater is normally just dumped back into the water supply that the mill got the water to begin with, which in this case is the Fox River. 5 In recent history much more of this wastewater has been put to use in further production of paper, as new techniques have been found to be able to better re-use it. This in addition to the fact that a lot of work has been done to reduce the production and careless disposal of the dangerous organochlorine compounds, means that the wastewater pollution from the paper milling industry 5 Greta James and World Paper Mill, “How Does Paper Mill Work? A Short Beginners Guide,” World Paper Mill, February 22, 2019, https://worldpapermill.com/how-paper-mill-work/.
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