Tag Archives: citizen

How American recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

by BrittneyMyrick6 Posted on April 1, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by the CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“This facility is our version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”

That’s how Eileen Kao described Montgomery County, Maryland’s recycling center on a tour. Kao, who is chief of waste reduction and recycling in the county’s Department of Environmental Protection, pointed out how machines in the facility help sort recyclables. As she described how the machines worked, a magnet separated steel and tin cans into a storage silo while a shaker table collected pieces of glass that were too small to be sorted. Dozens of workers hand-sorted at certain steps along the process.

The county’s recycling center in Derwood, Maryland, processed more than 31,000 tons of commingled material and more than 45,000 tons of mixed paper last year. At this building, commingled material (bottles, cans, and containers) is sorted. Mixed paper, including cardboard, is sorted in another facility nearby.

Over recent months, news coverage has depicted China’s National Sword policy as a crisis for recycling in municipalities all over the United States. Since early 2018, China has banned many scrap materials and has not accepted others unless they meet an extremely strict contamination rate of 0.5 percent. (Contamination rates of U.S. recyclables before sorting vary from place to place, but can reach 25 percent or higher.) The decision reflects China’s desire to recycle more of its domestic waste. Previously, China had been the destination for about 40 percent of the United States’ paper, plastics, and other recyclables.

National Sword sent waves through the global recyclables market. The changes in China diverted many materials to Southeast Asian countries, whose ports were not prepared to receive them in such high volume. Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia have begun to enact their own restrictions.

Meanwhile, many municipal recycling programs in the United States have suffered. As of January, Philadelphia was sending half of the recyclables it collects straight to the incinerator. Minneapolis stopped accepting black plastics. Marysville, Michigan, will no longer accept eight of 11 categories of items (including glass, newspaper, and mixed paper) for curbside recycling, in order to cut costs. Deltona, Florida, stopped curbside pickup altogether.

Many recycling and solid-waste organizations, as well as the U.S. EPA, have dedicated resources and staff to “identify solutions to be able to help support recycling here in the U.S.,” according to Dylan de Thomas, vice president of industry collaboration at the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that gives grants to and works with communities to improve their recycling programs. The EPA, which has typically left leadership on recycling to local governments, held its first-ever recycling summit in November 2018.

While recycling centers have been closing down in some places, like in greater Birmingham, Alabama, and around California, programs elsewhere are stepping up their efforts to decrease contamination levels in the recycling bin by educating residents about their role in the recycling process. This emphasis on outreach suggests a heavier onus on citizens to stop tossing items absentmindedly into the bin, and start disposing of them in a more informed, deliberate way.

Take plastic bags, for example. Whereas most grocery chains accept plastic bags for recycling, most municipal recycling programs do not. Still, plastic bags are frequently found in recycling bins. The mistake is so pervasive that Washington, D.C., mailed postcards to residents instructing them not to put plastic bags in the recycling bin. (D.C. only prints two types of mailers each year for recycling, one an overview and another focused on a particular issue.)

D.C. also did a pilot program with the Recycling Partnership to provide curbside feedback for residents. On one route, staff left a note behind for residents who had plastic bags in their recycling bin. Another route was the control, and staff did not leave tags. The route that gave residents feedback in the form of tags saw a 19-percent drop in plastic bags over the course of two weeks. The control route? An increase in bags of 2 percent.

“What we’re suggesting … is being very strategic and consistent with your tagging,” said Cody Marshall, the Recycling Partnership’s chief community strategist officer. “You have to go to the same houses over and over again four to five times with the tagging messages to really have an impact.”

Systematic tagging is an important strategy in the toolbox, according to Marshall, because it’s a targeted intervention to decrease the high contamination levels plaguing many municipalities as they try to bring their bales of recyclables to market. Recycling programs in central Virginia, El Paso, Tampa Bay and Orange County, Florida, and Phoenix are all tracking the impact of tagging on contamination.

The need for systematic approaches to reduce contamination is clear. Even though Americans recycle more now than ever, they’re not always sure what their local recycling program accepts. Increasingly, those mistakes can be costly for municipalities that are trying to sell the recyclables in bales. And, of course, to ensure that even more materials don’t end up in the landfill or incinerator.

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Recycling and Composting Rates, 1960 to 2015

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Many Americans are either aspirational recyclers,” said David Biderman, the executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), “or they’re confused recyclers. Just because it’s made of plastic doesn’t mean it can be recycled.”

What can and cannot be recycled, as well as how recyclables are separated, differs based on where you live. Montgomery County, for example, has a dual-stream model. Residents have to sort their recyclables into two groups: commingled materials (bottles, cans, and containers) and mixed paper (cardboard and paper). Under a single-stream approach, by contrast, residents throw all household recyclables into one bin, separate only from non-recyclable trash. D.C. has a single-stream system.

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

While dual-stream recycling allows the sorting process to begin before waste reaches the facility, single-stream recycling is convenient because people can put everything in the same bin. Between 2005 and 2014, the single-stream model went from being used by 29 percent of American communities to 80 percent, according to one survey. It may lead to people putting fuller bins out to be collected, but the uptake of single-stream recycling has also meant higher contamination rates.

Some communities are switching back to dual-stream in an attempt to bring down contamination. Otherwise, they’re hoping citizens can make better recycling decisions. Ecomaine, a nonprofit that processes recycling for more than 70 communities in Maine on a single-stream model, recently hired a new educator to inform residents about what’s recyclable, what’s not, and why.

“It has certainly been a tough year-and-a-half to two years,” said Ecomaine’s communications manager, Matt Grondin. “But in the end, that landfill storage is forever storage, and to abandon recycling programs for a year or two of a down market really is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem.”

Back in Maryland, China’s policy hasn’t led Montgomery County to stop recycling anything. It continues to generate revenues from all the materials it recycles, Kao said, except mixed-color, broken glass, which it pays to recycle because it has little value. The county sells the majority of its bales domestically. In fact, one silver lining to China’s crackdown is a growing domestic market in the United States. More than a dozen North American paper mills have announced new capacity to process recycled paper, although it will be a few years before all of it comes online.

In any case, there are strategies that local programs can use, either separately or in combination, to find their way back to health and continue recycling waste. China’s policy change may not represent the much-feared “end of recycling” in the United States so much as an inflection point.

Taken from – 

How American recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, OXO, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How American recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

Air pollution from Harvey was bad. This Houston petrochemical fire is worse.

by LuisaDumaresq Posted on March 19, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

The fire blazing at a chemical storage facility in Houston has blanketed the city in smoke, shuttered schools, and released a dangerous mix of pollutants.

According to self-reported emissions data posted on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s website, the blaze had sent more than 9 million pounds of pollutants into the air by Monday morning. That’s more than the 8.3 million pounds of pollutants released during Harvey in 2017 in a single day.

The toxic mixture includes carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, toluene, and naphtha. That’s self-reported, so there may be even more pollution. The data, for instance, doesn’t include the particulate matter — or soot — spewing in black plumes from the fire.

“Particulate matter is incredibly dangerous,” said Adrian Shelley, director of Public Citizen Texas, a watchdog group. It can cause a range of effects, including asthma, heart attacks, and strokes. “It’s not out of the realm of possibility that this exposure could cause very severe health impacts up to and including death.”

The fire broke out Sunday morning at Intercontinental Terminals Company’s facility in Deer Park, a heavily industrialized area about 15 miles southeast of Houston. ITC, as it’s known, has a long history of flouting environmental rules. According to EPA data, it has violated federal clean water rules nine times in the last three years. Since 2005, the state has found Intercontinental Terminals in violation of its permits at least nine times, resulting in roughly $70,000 in fines.

The TCEQ, the agency responsible for protecting the state’s environment and public health, has been criticized for letting large corporate polluters off with a slap on the wrist. An analysis of its enforcement record by an environmental nonprofit found that the agency imposed penalties on violators in just 3 percent of cases. ITC appears to have benefitted from the lax enforcement. In 2016, for instance, the company released more than 1,500 pounds of benzene — a carcinogenic chemical — for over five days and failed to notify the state agency within the mandated 24-hour deadline. The fine: roughly $4,000.

The state agency and cities have been tracking air quality in the area. In its second press release since the fire broke out, the TCEQ said on Tuesday that particulate matter levels “increased slightly” in the hours after the fire began on Sunday to “moderate levels” but have since dropped.

Air quality data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality show particulate matter levels spiking in the hours after the fire broke out.Texas Commission on Environmental Quality

That statement is at odds with one the agency released the day before, in which it appeared to downplay the effects of the fire on public health, noting that it “had not detected any immediate health concerns at ground level.” Residents have reported headaches and itchy throats on Twitter and to Texas journalists. And the fire is expected to keep burning for another two days.

All this comes two weeks after the Los Angeles Times reported that the TCEQ turned down NASA’s assistance with air quality monitoring during Harvey.

“TCEQ hasn’t built up a very big trust bank with the public,” said Luke Metzger, executive director at Environment Texas, an Austin-based environmental group. “During Harvey, they downplayed some of the concerns, and it’s hard to say whether they’re being straight with us. I wish I could take them at their word, but it’s hard to know for sure.”

Continue reading here: 

Air pollution from Harvey was bad. This Houston petrochemical fire is worse.

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Air pollution from Harvey was bad. This Houston petrochemical fire is worse.

Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

by IsmaelWicks Posted on March 16, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed “loyalty freak,” found a loyal friend and unwavering supporter in former Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah.

So when Hatch’s office sent a letter in mid-March 2017 requesting that the Interior Department shrink the boundary of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to free up fossil fuel-rich lands, as the New York Times revealed, the Trump administration sprang into action.

A little more than a month later, Trump signed an executive order calling for a review of more than two dozen recent national monument designations. It was clear that Bears Ears was the primary target. At the signing ceremony, Trump said he’d “heard a lot about” the 1.35 million-acre site in southeastern Utah and how “beautiful” the area is. He painted the Obama administration designation as a massive federal land grab. And he boasted that it “should never have happened” and was made “over the profound objections” of the state’s citizens, and that he was opening the land up to “tremendously positive things.”

He made no mention of the five Native American tribes that consider the area sacred and jointly petitioned for the monument’s creation. Instead, he thanked Hatch for his “never-ending prodding.”

“[Hatch] would call me and call me and say, ‘You got to do this,’” Trump said. “Is that right, Orrin? You didn’t stop. He doesn’t give up. He’s shocked that I’m doing it, but I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Again, this was before former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke launched what he promised would be an objective, thorough review of recent monument designations; one he said would give all stakeholders a voice. In the end, Trump signed a pair of proclamations to cut more than 2 million acres from Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history. Seemingly every action leading to that decision suggested the outcome was predetermined.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee held an oversight hearing to examine what they described in a news release as Trump’s “illegal decision to shrink” the Utah sites. The event, titled “Forgotten Voices: The Inadequate Review and Improper Alteration of Our National Monuments,” featured testimony from several tribal leaders, the Utah state director of the Bureau of Land Management and other stakeholders. Zinke turned down an invitation to testify through his attorney, according to a committee spokesperson.

Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona and the committee’s chair, told HuffPost in a recent interview that Zinke created a culture at the Department of the Interior centered on “making life easier” for oil, gas, and mining interests at the expense of conservation and environmental stewardship. The monument rollbacks, he added, “epitomizes” that culture.

Grijalva echoed that sentiment during the committee’s hearing. He said the administration’s review was “hollow and improper” and gave industry “special consideration.”

“It is my firm belief that this was a predestined outcome and that everything that has occurred since then has been to justify that outcome,” Grijalva said. “I don’t think it’s justifiable.”

BLM directed to free up coal deposits

One of the biggest revelations about the administration’s motives came during Wednesday’s hearing, when Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, cited testimony from a BLM employee who said he was directed to redraw the boundary of Grand Staircase-Escalante to exclude coal-rich areas and to be no more than 1 million acres.

“The first area I was told to exclude from the boundary, with no discussion, was the coal leases from 1996,” the BLM mapping specialist told investigators at Interior’s Office of Inspector General, according to Huffman.

Huffman went on to reveal that the expert was told to carve out areas rich in fossils, the very resources the monument was established to protect.

“The big one was the paleontological resources — huge dinosaur area,” the BLM expert told investigators, according to Huffman. “These coal areas are all pretty high dinosaur resources areas. We were told they are out regardless.”

This testimony is included in an unredacted version of an OIG report release in January that concluded there is “no evidence” that Zinke gave retired Utah state Representative Mike Noel preferential treatment when he redrew the monument’s boundary.

Ed Roberson, BLM’s Utah state director, told lawmakers Wednesday that the review was open, fair, and thorough. Huffman told Roberson that the order given to the BLM mapping specialist “does not sound like an honest and exhausted process,” but rather “a pre-cooked decision to allow coal companies to mine this coal.”

In his final report to the White House, Zinke acknowledged the potential for mining coal in Grand Staircase-Escalante, noting that the site contains “an estimated several billion tons of coal.” Downey Magallanes, the daughter of a former executive of coal giant Peabody Energy, was a top Interior official who oversaw the Trump administration’s monument review. She left the agency last year for a job at oil giant BP.

Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke during a visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Zinke cozied up to monument opponents

In the week after Trump signed the orders threatening the future of 27 national monuments, Zinke met with Utah’s Republican delegation and the San Juan County Commission — staunch critics of Bears Ears — to discuss next steps. He sat down with members of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a group of five area tribes that petitioned for monument status, only after they traveled to Washington to demand a meeting, claiming that neither Trump nor anyone on his team had consulted with them.

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

A week later, Zinke traveled to Utah as part of a monuments “listening tour,” when he spent four days visiting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Monument opponents, including Utah Governor Gary Herbert (a Republican) and members of the San Juan County Commission, joined him on the tour of Bears Ears. Representatives of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition were given a one-hour meeting with the agency chief.

In an op-ed published Sunday in the Salt Lake Tribune, the coalition, one of several groups now suing the administration, called Trump’s rollback of Bears Ears “devastating” and said the administration “failed to meaningfully engage our sovereign nations.”

“The upcoming hearing will uncover the bias, the outsized influence of the mining and drilling industries and the political motivations of the administration that led them to their illegal decision,” the coalition wrote.

Cherry-picked data

In launching its review, the Interior Department claimed that the size of national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906 “exploded from an average of 422 acres per monument” early on and that “now it’s not uncommon for a monument to be more than a million acres.”

The figure formed the foundation of the administration’s argument that Trump’s predecessors abused the century-old law. But a look at early monument designations upends the agency’s math. In 1908, two years after the Antiquities Act became law, Theodore Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument. Only a few Obama-era land monuments are larger. Roosevelt also designated the 610,000-acre Mount Olympus National Monument and the 20,629-acre Chaco Canyon National Monument. Republican presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover both designated monuments of over a million acres. Coolidge set aside Alaska’s Glacier Bay in 1925, and Hoover designated California’s Death Valley in 1933.

The Interior Department has never substantiated the 422-acre figure, despite HuffPost’s numerous requests.

Not about extraction, they said

Throughout the process, Zinke maintained that the review and subsequent rollbacks were not aimed at boosting energy and mineral development on once-protected lands.

“I’m a geologist,” Zinke, who is not a geologist, said at a congressional budget hearing last year. “I can assure you that oil and gas in Bears Ears was not part of my decision matrix.”

Media reporting over the last year suggests otherwise. The New York Times obtained emails via a public records request that show potential future oil extraction played a central role in the decision. The Washington Post uncovered a lobbying campaign from uranium company Energy Fuels to shrink Bears Ears. And Roll Call reported this month that Energy Fuels, which owns a uranium mill adjacent to the original Bears Ears boundary, met with a top Interior Department official to discuss Bears Ears even before the agency launched its review.

The Washington Post also reported on agency emails that show Interior Department officials dismissed information about the benefits of establishing protected monuments, including increased tourism and archeological discoveries, instead choosing to play up the value of energy development, logging, and ranching.

A man holds a sign in protest, during Ryan Zinke’s visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Nothing to learn from the public

Early in the review process, Interior announced a comment period to give the public a chance to weigh in. It was a move that Zinke said “finally gives a voice to local communities and states” that the Trump administration claimed previous administrations had ignored.

That invitation appears to have mostly been for show. As HuffPost first reported, the agency conducted its review of Bears Ears assuming it had nothing to learn from the public.

“Essentially, barring a surprise, there is no new information that’s going to be submitted,” Randal Bowman, an agency official who played a key role in the review, told colleagues during a May 2017 webinar to train a dozen agency staffers on how to read and catalog public comments. And in a May 2017 email exchange with Downey Magallanes, a former top aide of Zinke’s who played a key role in the review, Bowman said he expected the comments to be “99-1 against any changes.”

The support for keeping monuments intact was indeed overwhelming. An analysis by the Colorado-based Center for Western Priorities found that 99 percent of the more than 685,000 public comments submitted during a 15-day comment period voiced support for Bears Ears.

In a report summary made public in August 2017, Zinke acknowledged that the vast majority of the 2.8 million public comments the department received as part of its sweeping review favored maintaining national monuments, which he chalked up to “a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.”

He didn’t appear to consider that the comments were the honest opinions of individual Americans.

View original post here:

Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

‘Moment of reckoning:’ U.S. cities burn recyclables after China bans imports

by Garland36G Posted on February 22, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The conscientious citizens of Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yogurt containers, and other items into recycling bins.

But in the past three months, half of these recyclables have been loaded onto trucks, taken to a hulking incineration facility, and burned, according to the city’s government.

It’s a situation being replicated across the U.S. as cities struggle to adapt to a recent ban by China on the import of items intended for reuse.

The loss of this overseas dumping ground means that plastics, paper, and glass set aside for recycling by Americans is being stuffed into domestic landfills or is simply burned in vast volumes. This new reality risks an increase of plumes of toxic pollution that threaten the largely black and Latino communities who live near heavy industry and dumping sites in the U.S.

About 200 tons of recycling material is sent to the huge Covanta incinerator in Chester City, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, every day since China’s import ban came into practice last year, the company says.

“People want to do the right thing by recycling but they have no idea where it goes and who it impacts,” said Zulene Mayfield, who was born and raised in Chester and now spearheads a community group against the incinerator, called Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living.

“People in Chester feel hopeless — all they want is for their kids to get out, escape. Why should we be expendable? Why should this place have to be burdened by people’s trash and shit?”

Some experts worry that burning plastic recycling will create a new fog of dioxins that will worsen an already alarming health situation in Chester. Nearly four in 10 children in the city have asthma, while the rate of ovarian cancer is 64 percent higher than the rest of Pennsylvania and lung cancer rates are 24 percent higher, according to state health statistics.

The dilemma with what to do with items earmarked for recycling is playing out across the U.S. The country generates more than 250 million tons of waste a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, with about a third of this recycled and composted.

Until recently, China had been taking about 40 percent of U.S. paper, plastics, and other recyclables, but this trans-Pacific waste route has now ground to a halt. In July 2017, China told the World Trade Organization it no longer wanted to be the end point for yang laji, or foreign garbage, with the country keen to grapple with its own mountains of waste.

Since January 2018, China hasn’t accepted two dozen different recycling materials, such as plastic and mixed paper, unless they meet strict rules around contamination. The imported recycling has to be clean and unmixed — a standard too hard to meet for most American cities.

It is “virtually impossible to meet the stringent contamination standards established in China,” said a spokesperson for the city of Philadelphia, who added that the cost of recycling has become a “major impact on the city’s budget,” at around $78 a ton. Half of the city’s recycling is now going to the Covanta plant, the spokesperson said.

There isn’t much of a domestic market for U.S. recyclables — materials such as steel or high-density plastics can be sold on but much of the rest holds little more value than rubbish — meaning that local authorities are hurling it into landfills or burning it in huge incinerators like the one in Chester, which already torches around 3,510 tons of trash, the weight equivalent of more than 17 blue whales, every day.

“This is a real moment of reckoning for the U.S. because of a lot of these incinerators are aging, on their last legs, without the latest pollution controls,” said Claire Arkin, campaign associate at Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. “You may think burning plastic means ‘poof, it’s gone’ but it puts some very nasty pollution into the air for communities that are already dealing with high rates of asthma and cancers.”

Hugging the western bank of the Delaware River, which separates Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Chester City was once a humming industrial outpost, hosting Ford and General Motors plants. Since the war, however, Chester has been hollowed out, with an exodus of jobs ushering in an era where a third of people live in poverty.

The industry that remains emits a cocktail of soot and chemicals upon a population of 34,000 residents, 70 percent of them black. There’s a waste water treatment plant, a nearby Kimberly-Clark paper mill, and a medical waste facility. And then there’s Covanta’s incinerator, one of the largest of its kind in the U.S.

Just a tiny fraction of the trash burned at the plant is from Chester — the rest is funneled in via truck and train from as far as New York City and North Carolina. The burning of trash releases a host of pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides, and particulate matter, which are tiny fragments of debris that, once inhaled, cause an array of health problems.

It’s difficult to single out the exact cause of any cancer, but a host of studies have identified possible links between air pollution and ovarian and breast cancers, which are unusually prevalent in Chester. A 1995 report by the EPA found that air pollution from local industry provides a “large component of the cancer and non-cancer risk to the citizens of Chester.”

“There are higher than normal rates of heart disease, stroke, and asthma in Chester, which are all endpoints for poor air,” said Marilyn Howarth, a public health expert at the University of Pennsylvania who has advised Chester activists for the past six years.

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

Howarth said residents now risk a worsened exposure to pollution due to increased truck traffic rumbling through their streets, bringing recycling to the plant. Once burned, plastics give off volatile organics, some of them carcinogenic.

“It is difficult to link any single case of cancer, heart disease, or asthma directly to a particular source. However, the emissions from Covanta contain known carcinogens so they absolutely increase the risk of cancer to area residents.”

Covanta say that pollution controls, such as scrubbers in smokestacks, will negate toxins emitted by recyclables. After passing through the emissions control system, the plant’s eventual output is comfortably below limits set by state and federal regulators, the company says, with emissions of dioxins far better than the expected standard.

The company also argues that incineration is a better option than simply heaping plastic and cardboard in landfills.

“In terms of greenhouse gases, it’s better sending recyclables to an energy recovery facility because of the methane that comes from a landfill,” said Paul Gilman, Covanta’s chief sustainability officer. “Fingers crossed Philadelphia can get their recycling program going again because these facilities aren’t designed for recyclables, they are designed for solid waste.”

Covanta and its critics agree that the whole recycling system in the U.S. will need to be overhauled to avoid further environmental damage. Just 9 percent of plastic is recycled in the U.S., with campaigns to push up recycling rates obscuring broader concerns about the environmental impact of mass consumption, whether derived from recycled materials or not.

“The unfortunate thing in the United States is that when people recycle they think it’s taken care of, when it was largely taken care of by China,” Gilman said. “When that stopped, it became clear we just aren’t able to deal with it.”

Read article here: 

‘Moment of reckoning:’ U.S. cities burn recyclables after China bans imports

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on ‘Moment of reckoning:’ U.S. cities burn recyclables after China bans imports

The Green New Deal is here, and everyone has something to say about it

by NMOChristi Posted on February 7, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

For the past several weeks, there’s been rampant speculation about what would be included in the much talked about Green New Deal, the ambitious plan to tackle climate change and remake much of the American economy. That anticipation came along with trepidation from some corners over whether the deal would include controversial elements that have already led to heated debate. Will a future bill include a jobs guarantee? Will nuclear energy be part of our energy mix of the future? Will it fold in universal healthcare?

Well, the nail-biting can stop now that there’s an outline of the plan to chew on. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey’s resolution arrived Thursday morning.

“Today is a really big day, I think, for our economy, the labor movement, the social justice movement, indigenous peoples, and people all over the United States of America,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, at an introductory press conference. “Today is the day that we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social, and racial justice in the United States of America.”

NPR first published the 14-page non-binding resolution — basically a target list for what future legislation would aim to achieve. It calls for a 10-year plan to build more climate-resilient communities, upgrade American infrastructure, ramp up renewable power, make buildings energy efficient, reduce pollution, restore ecosystems, and clean up manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation.

Early indications are the plan has managed to thread the needle and get a lot of folks in the environmental movement on board — even those who might have been wary about what the proposal would entail.

The Peoples Climate Movement quickly offered its endorsement. The coalition’s diverse membership includes labor, green groups, environmental justice advocates, and activists — including Sierra Club, Service Employees International Union, and Indigenous Environmental Network. Getting all of those organizations in agreement is easier said than done; each has its own priorities and strategies for combating climate change.

“The Peoples Climate Movement has worked over the last four years to align different sectors of the progressive, labor and environmental movements,” said National Director Paul Gestos in a statement. “While many of our partners are assessing the legislation for strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement — and we know that much work lies ahead — the Peoples Climate Movement is proud to support this important first step toward a real climate solution.”

One of those groups that is assessing Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s offering is the Climate Justice Alliance, which had signaled that it would not support any proposal that allowed for the continued use of nuclear energy or adoption of schemes or technologies, like carbon pricing and carbon capture, that it sees as potentially extending our reliance on fossil fuels.

The just-released resolution calls for “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” In lieu of a totally carbon-free economy, it sets up a net-zero one, where carbon emissions are canceled out — leaving on the table both nuclear and dirty energies outfitted with carbon-capture mechanisms. The resolution is also vague on pricing and the “costs” of emissions.

“The resolution is silent on any individual technology,” Senator Markey said during a press conference Thursday. “We are open to whatever works.”

In response to the resolution, Angela Adrar, executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, wrote to Grist, “The Climate Justice Alliance welcomes the bold Green New Deal initiative from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Members of Congress; to truly address the interlinked crises of a faltering democracy, growing wealth disparity, and community devastation caused by climate change and industrial pollution, we must reduce emissions at their source.”

The bipartisan Citizens Climate Lobby, which has pushed hard for a price on carbon, said in a statement that while it shares the goal of “a swift transition away from fossil fuels.” It favors measures that could garner support from both sides of the aisle in a divided Congress. “The private sector can do much of the heavy lifting with this transition if it has the proper motivation, like a robust price on carbon,” said executive director Mark Reynolds.

Meanwhile, former Vice President Al Gore hailed the resolution as “ambitious and comprehensive” — but added that it’s only a first step. “Now the work begins to decide the best ways to achieve them, with specific policy solutions tied to timelines,” Gore said in a tweet.

There will no doubt be some hiccups moving forward. Aside from the debate over what the right energy mix should be, the resolution as it stands includes language promoting a jobs guarantee, universal healthcare, and housing for all — all topics that could rankle conservatives and even some moderates. Trying to get those kinds of federal guarantees to pass through Congress is a moonshot to say the least.

While politicians might differ in their responses to the resolution, its language centers on inclusivity, attempting to incorporate putting people first as part of the mainstream environmental agenda. The outline states up front that a Green New Deal must not only “promote justice and equity” but also seek to repair harm and prevent future injury to those most vulnerable to climate change and the fossil fuel economy — namely communities of color, indigenous peoples, migrants, rural communities, the poor, people with disabilities, the elderly, and young people.

Ocasio-Cortez worked closely with the youth-led environmental organization Sunrise Movement to craft the Green New Deal deal and whip up interest in it. Through a series of sit-ins and other actions, the activist group chased down Democratic politicians to win support for the plan. The tactic seems to have worked: The Guardian reported that 60 House members and 9 senators are co-sponsoring the resolution. That includes presidential hopefuls Corey Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren.

“In 2018, young people put the Green New Deal on the national agenda,”Varshini Prakash, founder and executive director of Sunrise (and a Grist 50 alumna) wrote in a statement. “The historic support for this resolution, especially among 2020 contenders, shows how far the movement has shifted the political conversation.”

Read this article: 

The Green New Deal is here, and everyone has something to say about it

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Green New Deal is here, and everyone has something to say about it

Reason No. 1,326 not to take a cruise: The air is putrid

by ElkeHinchcliffe Posted on January 28, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ryan Kennedy had never been on a cruise ship until two years ago when he embarked on four North American cruises armed with a P-TRAK Ultrafine Particle Counter. This device is a portable digital contraption. It measures minute particles of air pollution that, when inhaled, can cause harm to your heart and lungs.

Kennedy, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, is the author of a new study, released Thursday, which details the findings of a two-year study exposing poor air quality on four Carnival Corporation ships — the largest cruise operator in the world — including one that left Vancouver for Los Angeles in October 2018.

The report, titled “An investigation of air pollution on the decks of four cruise ships,” found that air pollution on these ships was significantly worse than some of the world’s most polluted cities like Beijing, China or Santiago, Chile.

Kennedy measured air pollution every second for one minute and created an average for each minute for 20 minutes at time, during the day and night. His findings reveal that while all four ships were traveling at sea, average pollution particle counts were significantly higher at the stern — the area on a ship behind the smokestacks.

The lowest particle count across these four ships was 38,888 particles per cubic centimeter (pt/cc), while the highest was 157,716 pt/cc. Particle counts on the L.A.-bound ship got as high as 76,000 pt/cc while out at sea, the investigation found.

In comparison, pollution measurements taken with the same equipment in Beijing, China in 2009 were 30,000 pt/cc on a busy street, and in Santiago, Chile in 2011-2012 were in the ranges of 8,000-30,100 pt/cc.

“It’s very compelling data,” Kennedy told reporters on a conference call from Baltimore, Maryland. “People who are predisposed with cardiovascular or pulmonary conditions are at greater risk.”

He continued: “It’s dangerous. It’s not a healthy thing for us to be exposed to.”

The study was commissioned by the international environmental organization Stand.earth, and is the first to measure air quality on cruise ships when docked at port and while moving at sea, during multi-day cruises. The research has not yet been submitted to a scientific journal for peer review, but Kennedy said he was considering this as a next step.

Ultrafine particulate pollution can be detrimental to human health because of increased toxicity. These particles are small enough to be inhaled into a person’s lungs and move into the bloodstream, where they can cause higher rates of cardiovascular disease and asthma, Kennedy explained.

Recent studies have suggested that the smallest ultrafine particles may be the most dangerous to human health, and that particulate matter from ship exhaust may be responsible for tens of thousands of annual deaths, according to the report.

In light of the study’s findings, Stand.earth is calling on Carnival Corporation, which holds 40 percent of the global market, to transition away from heavy fuel oil to power its ships, to help reduce ultrafine particulate pollution — and “to step up to the plate and clean up its act,” according to Kendra Ulrich, Stand.earth’s senior shipping campaigner.

Of the 26.6 million people that went on cruises last year, nearly half, about 12 million people, went on a Carnival or one of its 10 subsidiary cruise lines. Most of Carnival Corporation’s ships burn heavy fuel oil where allowable, according to the report. Heavy fuel oil is a toxic, “bottom of the barrel waste sludge leftover” from the refining process, Uldrich explained, and is often classified as hazardous waste.

Ulrich believes the findings have implications far beyond the passengers and workers on the cruise ships. It could impact those who live and work in port and coastal communities where the ship docks or passes. Some studies have shown approximately 70 percent of ship emissions occur within 250 miles of land, she explained.

More than 30 million people worldwide are expected to go on a cruise in 2019 — many of whom are expected to be senior citizens.

“What Dr. Kennedy found on board was shocking,” Ulrich told reporters on the same conference call, noting that the stern — where the highest pollution levels were found — is usually where running tracks, swimming pools, or lounge areas are located on a cruise ship, where people spend the most time. “But, this is a pervasive health concern that extends far beyond the short term acute health exposures on the ship.”

Ulrich is urging Carnival Corporation to switch to a cleaner-burning fuel while installing filters to help reduce ultrafine particulate pollution, and eventually transition away from fossil-fuel powered ships completely.

Kennedy told reporters that there were limitations to his study, in that he conducted it inconspicuously so as to not disrupt cruise passengers and workers. His study measured emissions aboard only four ships, over short intervals rather than extended periods. He told reporters that the potential health impacts from particulate matter can also differ depending on how long someone is exposed to it.

“There are physical models and human studies that can be linked to a physiological impact to even short-term exposure,” Kennedy said. “There would be people who are more vulnerable, there are people who would have asthma, people who would be more concerned.”

But, Kennedy said he “made every effort to be consistent with my methods across environments. But I wasn’t able to measure everything, everywhere, always.”

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

The report goes on to say that the size of the particulate matter measured by Kennedy’s device “aligns closely with the size of particles known to be generated by ship engines, and the ship’s exhaust system is located between the environments” in question in the study, “suggesting the particulate matter is likely, in part, the ship’s engine exhaust.”

But, the study also says that “there is not universal agreement on how to measure or report particulate matter,” and that there remain unknowns in the study, including which fuel types were used by the ships and how efficient the engines were. The report also notes that higher winds could play a factor in the disparity between measurements in the front and back of the ships, at port and at sea.

In an email statement to National Observer, a Carnival Corporation spokesperson responded to the study, saying “these so-called fly-by tests are completely ridiculous, inaccurate, and in no way represent reality.”

“We test the air quality of our ships and they meet or exceed every requirement,” the spokesperson said. “The air quality on our ship decks when in port compares favorably with a typical urban or suburban environment. Independent testing on our funnels — which is the area where the exhaust originates — further validates our claims.”

The company declined to answer questions about how they test the air quality.

The spokesperson told National Observer that they have installed Advanced Air Quality Systems on nearly 80 percent of its global fleet, as required by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, “so these systems are environmentally friendly, in addition to rolling out new ships powered by LNG, the cleanest burning fuel available, so their study is misleading and inaccurate.”

The company added in their statement that Stand.Earth is creating “fake tests that really have no scientific basis,” to aid in their fundraising efforts. The organization, the statement said, “is constantly in search of a problem in our industry. The safety of our guests is our top priority and we undertake our cruises in close coordination with national and international regulatory bodies like the EPA to insure the utmost safety of our guests and crew.”

Some cruise ships and shipping lines began phasing out bunker fuel as the International Maritime Organization — a body of the United Nations — gears up to implement rules in 2020 that will require ships to either install expensive scrubbers or switch to different fuels.

Visit link:  

Reason No. 1,326 not to take a cruise: The air is putrid

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Reason No. 1,326 not to take a cruise: The air is putrid

Just a reminder: The world is perilously close to annihilation!

by ErnestiCardell Posted on January 24, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

The world’s most eminent predictors of doom, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, gathered Thursday to announce just how close humanity is from irreversible collapse. The answer: pretty damn close.

The Doomsday Clock is two minutes from midnight (read “the end of everything”), thanks largely to climate change and the threat of nuclear annihilation. That’s exactly where it was last year, when the collection of scientists set it at 11:58, the nearest it’s been to midnight since 1953 when the Soviet Union and the United States were testing nukes.

The current state of climate and political doom is starting to feel familiar. The Bulletin’s name for it is the “new abnormal.”  

“The longer world leaders and citizens carelessly inhabit this new and abnormal reality, the more likely the world is to experience catastrophe of historic proportions,” said Robert Rosner, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Chicago, during a press conference announcing the Doomsday Clock’s settings in Washington, D.C. The most serious global threats — climate change, nuclear, and information warfare — are all being denied or ignored, Rosner said.

Since 1947 when the Cold War was getting underway, the Doomsday Clock has been used to bring awareness to the biggest existential threats. The first team behind the iconic clock came from The Manhattan Project, the scientists and engineers who produced the first atomic bomb. For most of the clock’s history, nuclear war has been the largest threat (it started at seven minutes to midnight). Yet since 2007, climate change has become a growing risk, nudging the clock’s minute hand closer to Doomsday.

The scientists noted that there’s another way to measure of our proximity towards doom: carbon dioxide levels. “Every year that we continue to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, irreversibly ratchets up the level of human suffering and ecosystem destruction that will occur due to global climate change,” said Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist and professor at MIT, at the announcement.

After years of remaining stable, global emission levels rose in 2017 and reached an all-time high in 2018. Part of the reason is that the United States, China, and other big polluters have increased their emissions, which Solomon called an “act of gross negligence.”

That the clock didn’t tick this year is a sign that we’ve made no progress on avoiding impending disaster. “The new abnormal climate that we already have is extremely dangerous,” said Solomon. “And we’ve moved onto a path that will make our future much more dangerous still.”

Original article:

Just a reminder: The world is perilously close to annihilation!

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, global climate change, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Just a reminder: The world is perilously close to annihilation!

The White House calls food stamp funds for Puerto Rico ‘excessive and unnecessary’

by ZaneService46 Posted on January 18, 2019

Link to article – 

The White House calls food stamp funds for Puerto Rico ‘excessive and unnecessary’

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The White House calls food stamp funds for Puerto Rico ‘excessive and unnecessary’

Historically black community could face a toxic facility for Atlantic Coast Pipeline

by OlivaKrimper Posted on January 9, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

The saga continues for the embattled Atlantic Coast Pipeline. On Tuesday, a Virginia board approved a controversial plan to build a natural gas compressor station in Union Hill, a historically black community in Buckingham County. The decision was met with uproar from opponents, who vowed to keep fighting in protests and in court.

“It’s a real tragedy that the board that has been appointed to protect our air makes a decision that seals the fate and disregards the ongoing health and welfare of an entire community,” said Chad Oba, chair of the Friends of Buckingham, an organization of Buckingham citizens, and a local resident that will be impacted by the decision.

“This is just another example of institutionalized racial discrimination,” she told Grist.

The state Air Pollution Control Board voted 4-0 in favor of a station permit for the approximately 600-mile underground pipeline that would carry fracked natural gas from West Virginia into Virginia and North Carolina. The development is a joint venture from several energy companies, but Richmond-based Dominion Energy is leading the pack in building the $7 billion pipeline.

AP Photo / Steve Helber

“Today’s unanimous approval is a significant step forward for this transformational project and the final state approval needed in Virginia,” wrote Dominion spokesman Karl Neddenien in an email to the Washington Post. “We have a profound respect for this community and its history, and we will continue working together to build a better future.”

Here’s the rub: Pipeline opponents are concerned that exhaust from the compressor station will hurt the surrounding community, putting them at risk of a range of ailments including asthma. Rebecca Rubin, an air board member, was dismissed by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam less than a week after she raised concerns about the disproportionate impact of the pipeline compressor station on Union Hill (ahem, Dominion energy is the state’s biggest corporate political donor).

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Rubin writes that the compressor station’s designated location “would disproportionately affect a minority community, a classic environmental justice issue.”

Dominion Energy presented survey data based on broad Census Bureau information they say indicates the area surrounding the site is sparsely populated and made up of no more than 39 percent minority residents based on race. Company representatives argued that, based on those demographics, the neighborhood was“not an environmental justice community.”

An anthropologist working with Friends of Buckingham, however, submitted the results of door-to-door research, finding that of the approximately 200 people who live within a one-mile radius of the site, 83 percent are racial minorities.

Supporters of the station say it will boost development in the rural area. In an effort to help build local support for the project, Dominion offered community improvement package valued at $5.1 million. The offer won over some residents but was not enough of an incentive for many residents of the Union Hill community, which was settled after the Civil War by free blacks and former slaves.

“The legacy of placing toxic facilities in places where they disproportionately affect poor communities of color is unjust and unacceptable and needs acute examination,” wrote stakeholders in an open letter calling for the permit’s denial. “It is not right to look the other way while this continues.”

One thing is clear: the battle is still a long ways from over. The project’s opponents will likely challenge the decision in state court, adding to the pipeline’s hodgepodge of setbacks. Notably, the plan was stalled after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that the U.S. Forest Service did not have proper permissions for the pipeline to cut across the Appalachian Trail. (Dominion plans to appeal the decision.)

Despite the board’s approval of the natural gas compression station, members of the Friends of Buckingham County say they too plan to keep fighting. “We have not given up,” Oba added. “If anything, it’s given us more resolve.”

Originally posted here: 

Historically black community could face a toxic facility for Atlantic Coast Pipeline

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Historically black community could face a toxic facility for Atlantic Coast Pipeline

Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps

by WillardFuerst Posted on December 11, 2018

Invest in nonprofit journalism today.Donate now and every gift will be matched through 12/31.

Our current rate of warming will quickly lead us back to a climate that predates the evolution of modern humans, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That kind of rapid change has no direct comparison in all of Earth’s multi-billion year history.

“The only thing that comes to mind is a meteorite impact,” says co-author Jack Williams, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The researchers analyzed the current, near-past, and near-future climates for every part of the planet, and then compared them to what likely existed during similar warming periods of the distant past. The results were shocking, even to Williams.

“We are creating a geological-scale climate event,” Williams says. “These things don’t happen that often, and we don’t know how humans will do through it.”

Without rapidly reducing emissions, we’ll quickly go back to a climate similar to somewhere between the Pliocene and Eocene — geological epochs that occurred about 3 million, and about 56 million years ago, respectively. Both would have hellish consequences and likely reshape human civilization permanently.

During the Pliocene period, global temperatures were about 2-4 degrees Celsius warmer than today and sea levels eventually stabilized about 60 feet higher than current levels. It was a world largely inconsistent with natural ice formation.

By 2030, under a business-as-usual scenario, Pliocene-like conditions become the closest match for most land areas, according to the study. Under a moderate climate action scenario, like the lax pledges of the Paris Agreement, that could be extended out to 2040. Only a drastic, economy-wide makeover within the next decade, consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, would avoid the transition.

“This is coming up pretty fast,” Williams says.

An even more worrying period in Earth history was the Eocene, about 56 million years ago. The warmest part of this period — the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum — lasted around 200,000 years and was one of the warmest times in Earth history. The 8 degrees C-warmed world triggered a deep-sea mass extinction event and rainstorms so intense they scoured away the land surface at a continent scale. Humans are currently releasing carbon into the atmosphere at approximately 50 times the rate of the volcanic eruptions that led to the Eocene warm period.

According to Williams and his team, the Earth could tip toward Eocene-like conditions in just 120 years, based on current emissions trajectories. Millennials’ grandchildren would likely still be alive. Over the long haul, such conditions would be consistent with Greenland transforming from a mile-thick ice sheet to a marshy swamp, similar to Louisiana or Florida.

In 250 years from now on our current path, about 9 percent of the Earth’s land surface — mostly in East and Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and the coasts of the Americas — would transform into climates beyond the Eocene with no known precedent in all of Earth history, at least since life first formed.

But with rapid, near-term emissions reductions, those kinds of unprecedented and unknown climates can be almost entirely avoided, Williams says. Understanding the urgency and the scale of the choices currently facing humanity requires “balancing hope and despair,” he says.

“We’ve been talking about these challenges for years and there’s not been much measurable progress in stabilizing our greenhouse emissions,” Williams says. “We’ve built our cities and our societies for the current climate.” As a scientist and a concerned citizen, he said that observing the nations of the world not taking urgent action is like watching “a slow-motion train wreck.”

The challenge, according to Williams, is that “our options narrow as time goes forward.” The longer we wait to institute radical changes in society, the more likely the climate will become radically and irreversibly different, during the lifetimes of people alive today.

Talking about the choice we currently face as a civilization is perhaps the most important thing that any of us can do. The choice between a liveable world and a world completely unknown in all of Earth history, as Williams and his colleagues uncovered, is one of the starkest talking points yet.

Want to see more award-winning news?

Help us raise $50,000 by December 31! Support nonprofit journalism by making a donation today and all gifts will be matched

.

See original article here – 

Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps