Boycott Georgia Pacific Products!
Won't People Lose Their Jobs?!

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The Problem | How Can I Help The St. Johns River? | Won't People Lose Their Jobs?!

What The Opposition Says

Reasonable people can disagree and there is an opposing viewpoint here, so to be fair, we wanted to make sure you heard their side of things.

"Won't people lose their jobs?!"
They shouldn't and we hope not. GP employs around 1200 people in the Palatka area and that's good for the economy. The products we're boycotting are not bad products and many construction workers swear by the GP building materials. If you go to the GP home page, you'll be able to link to their corporate earnings and they'll be the first to tell you, they're making fairly good money. We just want them to spend a little on alternative methods of getting rid of their garbage, that's all. And don't let them tell you these methods don't exist, their engineers know better!

"This '60 million gallons' is mostly water anyway and the amount of poison released in the River is actually a very small amount."
The bottom line to this argument is only GP knows the exact amount of poison being released and they're a little fuzzy with those details, if you know what we mean. People who live and work around the St. John's River and the Rice River in North Palatka report obvious and significant signs of poison in that area. Even the FDA is unsure about how much Dioxin makes up an 'unsafe' amount but they more they learn about it, the more deadlier it seems to get! The fact is, human stool is mostly made up of water and harmless amounts, too, but I still wouldn't want it in a glass of water!

"Georgia Pacific has been dumping their stuff into the Rice River, a tributary off the St. John's River, for years. This is not news!"
Actually, this is true. The Rice River, which runs along side the GP factory, is a fairly good size river in itself and now it's been burnt out and exhausted from GP's dumping there over many, many years. They've recently been ordered by the government to clean it up or find an alternative place to dump their garbage. They'll tell you they're trying to clean up the Rice but it's all wink, wink and what they're planning to do is build a long pipeline out into the middle of and deep to the bottom of the St. John's. We guess they figure that if you don't see it coming out, that'll make it alright.

"The St. Johns is a much bigger river and can handle the waste much better than the Rice River."
Again, this is true. But it's like saying arsenic is better for you if it's in your bathtub than in a glass of drinking water. The main argument against this thinking is how slow the St. Johns River actually moves. If it was one of the fast moving rivers, hey, maybe no problem. But since it only dips about an inch every mile, it's one of the slowest moving rivers in America. That poison will have a chance to settle into the sediment and bottom of the river and guess, what? It'll be there for your children and their children and even their grandchildren for years to come.

"The '60 million gallons a day' is just a ceiling figure, a maximum amount. The actual dumping amount is more around 20 to 30 million gallons a day."
Well, now, don't that make you feel better?! This also is true, but when the ceiling is 60 million, what's to say that can't get that 30 million a day up to that 60 million figure fairly quickly? And by the way, what's gonna happen when they start approaching the 60 million figure? Who's gonna monitor that ceiling? The EPA? Georgia Pacific? You?

"You people are just environmental wacko-s and all you really want to do is close this plant down."
We admit there are people out there who wish to close the plant down but let's make it clear right now, we're not with that group. You don't see any Greenpeace, Sierra Club or Mother Jones links on this web site. We like Rush Limbaugh and we think he and Bill O'Reilly are good Americans, too. And to boycott Richard Petty and his NASCAR team just about breaks our heart. We want this plant to stay open and we want the good people of Palatka to keep those jobs. We just don't want Georgia Pacific to dirty up the St. Johns River, that's all (By the way, when you hear this sort of emotional argument, it usually means the other side has run out of logic and is resorting to name calling. We're gonna try to not do that here).

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