Paper Mill

Oscar Sommer sits in his 1989 Dodge Dakota pickup truck on the White Hall Post Office parking lot. A steamy fog, boiled from a late-afternoon rain on hot earth, drifts down from the green hills near Wiseburg Road."

Baltimore County police were searching yesterday for the driver of a blue Mercedes that hit a 15-year-old boy the night before as he tried to help an accident victim on Paper Mill Road.Dan Lally of the 14000 block of Quinn Lane in Baldwin was on his way home from Hunt Valley Mall with a friend at 10:10 p.m. Friday when they saw a car that had run off the road and into a tree on Paper Mill Road near Green Branch Drive in Phoenix, said Cpl. Thomas McCreer.Young Lally, a junior at Loyola High School in Towson, said he was at the driver's-side door of the car when the blue Mercedes came around the curve and hit him, pinning his left leg against the tree the first car had hit."

If you believe Westvaco Corp. officials, the small quantities o dioxin their paper mill discharges into the Potomac River will have little or no effect on the fish that live there.But if you believe most environmentalists, you would be foolhardy to fry up a bit of freshly caught trout and pop a morsel in your mouth.Whom do you believe? Both sides can cite scientific evidence to support their positions.Such is the confusion that now surrounds dioxin. Once thought to be the most potent cancer-causing chemical, dioxin has come under scrutiny recently as new evidence suggests it may not be as dangerous as was first believed.

ANNAPOLIS -- A House committee overwhelmingly defeated legislation yesterday that would have cut the amount of the toxic chemical dioxin that is allowed into rivers -- a change that could have cost a Western Maryland paper mill as much as $100 million.Delegate Ronald A. Guns, D-Cecil, chairman of the Environmental Matters Committee, said after the 19-3 vote that a pending lawsuit by environmental groups challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's approval of Maryland's standard for dioxin levels had left the issue "up in the air."

This newspaper is grayish. Grocery bags are brown. Copy paper is white. Ditto paper towels. Ditto toilet paper, typing paper, note pads, stationery, food packaging and office paper. Snowy white and pure.Well, not so pure. You see, the reason most paper is so dazzling white is that it is bleached with chlorine at the pulp and paper mill. And among the byproducts of the chlorine bleaching process are hundreds of synthetic compounds called organochlorines. One group of these compounds is a family called dioxins, which includes the most toxic substances ever made.

Environmentally conscious people urge us to recycle the cans in which we buy our vegetables and soda, to reuse bags, bundle newspapers and put less waste in the landfills.But Lewis "Buss" Shafer hasn't bought vegetables in all his 72 years. The retired farmer still keeps a garden, and each fall he puts up the surplus in glass jars he reuses year after year and in reusable plastic containers in a large freezer chest in the garage.He buys super-concentrated frozen orange juice to which he can add five, instead of three, parts water.