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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
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This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
contamination  ~ climate impacts  ~ global warming  ~ ecosystem interrelationships  ~ capitalist greed  ~ carbon emissions  ~ toxic buildup  ~ economic myopia  ~ governmental idiocy  ~ smart policy  ~ deforestation  



ApocaDocuments (9) matching "contamination" from this week
[see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "contamination"]
Sun, Dec 27, 2009
from Sarasota Herald Tribune:
Katrina survivors battle a new foe: drywall
It is fitting that the massive litigation moving forward on contaminated Chinese drywall should be heard in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina and its associated flooding killed more than 1,800 people, destroyed tens of thousands of homes and businesses and inflicted upwards of $81 billion in damages. Now, potentially thousands who returned to New Orleans and surrounding communities to rebuild their homes after Katrina are faced with having to do so all over again. The crisis of contaminated drywall may have first come to light in Florida, but as the Herald-Tribune first reported, records show that at least 60 million pounds of Chinese drywall came into the Port of New Orleans beginning in January 2006, enough to build 6,500 average-sized homes. ...


New Orleans: America's favorite guinea pig in the coalmine!

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Sun, Dec 27, 2009
from ProPublica:
New gas wells leave more chemicals in ground
Three company spokesmen and a regulatory official said in separate interviews with ProPublica that as much as 85 percent of the fluids used during hydraulic fracturing is being left underground after wells are drilled in the Marcellus Shale, the massive gas deposit that stretches from New York to Tennessee.... for each modern gas well drilled ... more than three million gallons of chemically tainted wastewater could be left in the ground forever. Drilling companies say that chemicals make up less than 1 percent of that fluid. But by volume, those chemicals alone still amount to 34,000 gallons in a typical well. These disclosures raise new questions about why the Safe Drinking Water Act, the federal law that regulates fluids injected underground so they don't contaminate drinking water aquifers, should not apply to hydraulic fracturing, and whether the thinking behind Congress' 2005 vote to shield drilling from regulation is still valid. When lawmakers approved that exemption it was generally accepted that only about 30 percent of the fluids stayed in the ground... Ninety percent of the nation's wells now rely on the process, ...


Doesn't "aquifer" translate to "hairy water"?

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Sat, Dec 26, 2009
from Mumbai Daily News and Analysis:
Disaster is around the corner for Mumbai
Mumbai: Mumbai, beware! The list of most polluted industrial clusters in the country, which were announced on Thursday, figures five in and around the city. Domivli, Navi Mumbai, Tarapur, Chembur and Pimpri-Chinchwad are names that appear in the top 50 most polluted areas out of the 88 areas identified by the Union environment and forest ministry. The areas have reached their top level in terms of air, water and land pollution. And, the worst is that all the five clusters have reached critical levels of pollution, which has forced the Centre to put on hold expansion in these areas. ...


Pollution. The new terrorism.

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Thu, Dec 24, 2009
from Environmental Science and Technology:
Flame retardants are the suspected source of a new compound in the environment
Ed Sverko didn't set out to find a new compound bioaccumulating in fish when he and a group of Canadian colleagues began looking at a Lake Ontario sediment core sample to collect data on how the concentrations of the widely used Dechlorane Plus (DP) flame retardant changed over time... DP has been detected in the environment before, so Sverko and his colleagues expected to find it in the sediment core. However, during their analysis, the researchers also noted a number of the unknown mass spectra peaks that appeared to be from unknown compounds related to DP...the research team was able to identify plausible sources of all the new compounds. To the best of their knowledge, none have been previously reported in the environment. ...


Dude. Our crap is making up its own shit.

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Wed, Dec 23, 2009
from Muncie Star Press:
Lawyers target pig, dairy farms
WINCHESTER -- Neighbors who are fed up living next door to factory farms have found three high-powered trial lawyers who vow to make Randolph County "ground zero" in a courtroom food fight over how Indiana produces pork and milk. Highly aggressive flies, harmful odors, stacks of dead animals and mismanagement of millions of gallons of manure are among the complaints of neighbors suing pork and dairy producers. The trial lawyers are bringing multiple lawsuits challenging Indiana's industrial or factory model of producing milk and pork in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) promoted by Gov. Mitch Daniels' agriculture department. ...


"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

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Wed, Dec 23, 2009
from Newsweek:
The Great Pacific Cleanup
Since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the world's biggest communal garbage dump, was discovered swirling about 1,000 miles north of Hawaii in 1997, scientists and environmentalists have dared to dream if a cleanup might be possible. Consisting of an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash and scattered over an area roughly the size of the continental United States, the garbage comes from countries all over the world, most of it flushed through waterways leading to the ocean.... Now an unlikely partnership between ocean scientists and the waste-management industry is working on ways to clean up the mess... There's no perfect way to fish it all out of the ocean, especially not without harming ocean creatures in the process. ...


As a species we have pissed in the wind, and shat where we sleep.

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Wed, Dec 23, 2009
from Environmental Health News:
EPA announces plan to require disclosure of secret pesticide ingredients
Reversing a decade-old decision, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it plans to require pesticide manufacturers to disclose to the public the inert ingredients in their products. An inert ingredient is anything added to a pesticide that does not kill or control a pest. In some cases, those ingredients are toxic compounds, but companies do not identify them on pesticide labels. Nearly 4,000 inerts - including several hundred that are considered hazardous under other federal rules - are used in agricultural and residential pesticides. ...


Oh jeez I don't think I wanna know!

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Tue, Dec 22, 2009
from Christian Science Monitor:
More herbicide use reported on genetically modified crops
DesA report released by the Organic Center found that the amount of herbicides used on genetically engineered crops has increased in the past 10 years, not decreased as might be expected. Since many genetically engineered crops were modified so that farmers could spray Roundup, or Glyphosate, to kill the weeds in their fields but not the crops themselves, the expectation was that less herbicide would be required. But the new report found that this is not what happened. The authors of the report, entitled "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use," used US Department of Agriculture data to look at America's three largest genetically engineered crops -- soybeans, corn, and cotton. They found that the amount of herbicides used on them has increased from 1996 to 2008 by approximately 7 or 8 percent, with a particularly sharp increase from 2005 on. ...


So... Roundup ain't so ready after all?

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Mon, Dec 21, 2009
from Environmental Health News:
Sharp rise in metals in Mount Everest ice mirrors growth in Central Asia.
Ice core samples from Mount Everest that represent 800 years of atmospheric history contain much higher levels of certain metals in the last three decades than in the previous seven centuries. The metals are linked to the rising use of fossil fuels in Asia during that same time period. Economic growth and more burning of fossil fuels by industries and cars in central Asia since the 1970s has resulted in higher levels of metals deposited in recent layers of ice collected from Mount Everest. Data from a recent study that examined the cores from the Himalayan Mountains are the first to show that levels of arsenic, molybdenum, tin and antimony in the ice samples have sharply increased during the last 30 years when compared to the previous 700 years. During those centuries, the metal levels varied but were fairly stable. ...


Magnetize those pitons and hooks for added stability!

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