There’s a 6,475-square-mile “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Roughly the same size as Connecticut and Rhode Island, this area located off the Louisiana coast becomes so polluted that it can’t support the fish and shrimp populations that are vital to southern fisherman. While actions by those living in the bayous play a part, the real cause is located 1,000 miles north: Iowa’s golden cornfields, whose runoff is dirtying the Mississippi River and its tributaries, says Dan Jaynes, a research soil scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Laboratory who’s studying ways to decrease the contamination.
While the prairie’s black soil is extremely fertile — roughly 25 million acres of cropland were harvested last year — the former swampland is also excessively moist. “It’s a fairly flat landscape, so water has no place to go,” Jaynes says. That’s why, beginning a century ago, farmers in the Hawkeye State built artificial drainage systems (that consisted of four-inch-wide clay pipes buried a few feet underground; today, perforated, plastic tubing is used) to shunt water into streams.
Today, these small-scale systems add high levels of nitrates (a form of nitrogen) and phosphorous (additives that largely come from fertilizer) to nearby waterways. During the spring, these nutrients fuel algal growth, presenting a health hazard to the many cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids that obtain their drinking water from the rivers. (Des Moines’s water utility has filed a controversial federal lawsuit against drainage districts upstream.)
Jaynes has a simple solution to the problem that’s impacting the entire Midwestern Corn Belt, from Ohio to southern Minnesota: just shift the pipes 30 to 50 feet away from the streams to allow the water to percolate through the vegetated land between the fields’ edge and the riverbed. Grasses and soils retain some of the nitrates or send them back to the atmosphere as harmless gas, and in the process, the water’s nitrate levels drop anywhere from two-thirds to zero, according to several pilot projects of the “saturated buffer,” which was built in partnership with Iowa State University. The fix comes at a reasonable cost: ranging from $3,000 to $5,000 and can be installed within a half hour, Jaynes says.
If citydwellers along the Mississippi River and fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico want to see clearer waters, saturated buffers will have to be implemented, along with other land management practices, Jaynes says. The only alternative? “We can get rid of all the corn or soybeans in the area,” he adds, “but I don’t think that’s very practical.”
Tag: pollution
7 Environmental Disasters That Are No More
On the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, N.Y., 100 homes and a public school stood on Love Canal — an unfitting name for a ditch filled with industrial waste that had been covered over with earth and sold for $1. The three blocks of working-class households looked like any other community, but in basements and backyards, residents found carcinogenic compounds seeping through the soil, leached out of the rotting drum containers buried underneath.
“Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals,” recounts Eckardt Beck, an EPA administrator in the 1970s. “Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play[ing] with burns on their hands and faces.”
The environmental calamity at Love Canal prompted officials to launch a national cleanup of the country’s most toxic wastelands. The program — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund, named for a trust fund bolstered by taxes on petroleum and chemical products — promised long-term remediation for dangerous sites and gave the agency power to bill offending companies for the costs. Since its inception in 1981, 387 sites have been officially cleared. But chronic underfunding — the petro-chemical taxes expired in 1995 — has weakened the EPA’s efforts. Most funding goes to less than a dozen major projects, even though there’s still 1,322 sites in need of further detox, according to an EPA spokesperson.
Despite the odds, here are seven projects that prove a cleaner future is possible and that the residents of Love Canal didn’t suffer for naught.
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Cities Need to Learn These 5 Lessons About Parking Meters
American cities are realizing the importance of an efficient parking system. And as a result, new technology, smartphone apps and other innovations cropping up across the country.
But as UCLA’s “prophet of parking” Donald Shoup notes in ACCESS magazine, there are a few simple ways municipalities can get more residents on board with pesky parking regulations. The author of the 2005 book “The High Cost of Free Parking” shares five strategies that American cities should implement in order to making parking meters popular.
Use pay-by-plate technology
While many communities have replaced traditional parking meters with designated kiosks that enable drivers to pay by credit card or cash, Shoup suggests more cities should embrace tying a credit card to a license plate and allowing people to pay via smartphone.
Though more common in Europe, pay-by-plate systems have emerged in several U.S. cities, including Pittsburgh. Two years ago, Pittsburgh rolled out a system that asked drivers to submit their plate numbers at the kiosks and then pay by credit card or cash. The concept removes the process of printing new receipts to display on car dashboards and allows drivers to re-park their cars in the same zone without repeating the transaction. Police officers can also scan a plate to see if its driver has paid rather than searching for payment receipts. The new system has led to an increase in parking revenue for Pittsburgh, according to Shoup, as well as a decline in tickets issued as more people are using the easy process rather than taking the risk of receiving a ticket.
Offer discounts for greener cars
Environmental concern is increasingly playing a bigger role in new government initiatives, and Shoup explains that cities should implement green incentives into parking systems. For example, drivers can receive a discount for smaller cars that take up less space. By rewarding tiny sets of wheels, the city encourages residents to reduce the amount of emissions — saving on environmental cost.
Charge fees based on size
Streets come in all different sizes and so do parking spaces. Which is why Shoup suggests cities consider charging fees based on car length. Aside from the fact that smaller cars tend to be more fuel efficient, Shoup adds that they enable more cars to park in the same amount of space than large vehicles allow for. In many cases, street parking does not have lines to demarcate car spaces, which is why charging more for larger cars would discourage people from driving bigger cars in the city. “Most people who can afford to buy a longer car can probably afford to pay more to park it,” Shoup says.
Give residents a price break
Members of a community already pay taxes for local street maintenance and municipal parking garages, so rewarding them with a resident discount is not too much of a stretch. Local discounts can also help garner support for adding more parking meters to manage the system. Miami Beach, for example, gives its citizens a lower meter rate than non-residents and visiting tourist ($1 versus $1.75 per hour). That system also encourages locals to shop closer to home to receive the rate — ultimately decreasing driving and congestion.
Be charitable with earnings
While much of collecting parking fees is about making more revenue, Shoup adds that it can take on a different type of investment. Communities can be more innovative by donating portions to local nonprofits or park rehabilitation programs. For example, the Ventura, Calif., neighborhood used parking revenue to pay for safety patrol, as well as to implement public WiFi.
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Despite Reports About Increasing Environmental Hazards, the Air in Our Cities is Getting Much Safer to Breathe
For all the hot air we often hear from politicians and pundits alike, the quality of the air we breathe in this country has actually gotten a lot better in the last two decades.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently released their Second Integrated Urban Air Toxics Report to Congress, which surprisingly, shows that a lot of progress has been made to reduce harmful pollutants in cities due to the Clean Air Act updates from 1990, reports Think Progress.
Some highlights in the report include:
– A 66 percent reduction in benzene
– A nearly 60 percent reduction in mercury from man-made sources like coal-fired power plants
– An 84 percent decrease of lead in outdoor air, which slows brain development in children
– The removal of an estimated 1.5 million tons per year of air toxics like arsenic, benzene, lead and nickel from stationary sources
– Another 1.5 million tons per year (about 50 percent) of air toxics from mobile sources. This is significant because air toxics (also referred to as hazardous air pollutants or HAPs) are known or suspected of causing cancer and can damage the immune, respiratory, neurological, reproductive and developmental systems
– Approximately 3 million tons per year of criteria pollutants, like particulate matter and sulfur dioxide, have been reduced as co-benefits of air toxics reductions
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And if you think the EPA is just tooting it’s own horn, NASA also studied satellite images from 2005 to present day and saw physical proof that air pollution is decreasing in major urban areas.
Not only is cleaner air good news for our health, it’s good for the economy, too. CNN reports that better air quality prevented 160,000 deaths in 2010, 1.7 million asthma attacks and cut down hospital admissions and emergency room visits by 86,000. By 2020, the dollar savings in cleaner air will amount to $2 trillion annually in alleviated health risks.
In a statement, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy emphasizes that strict environmental regulations do not hinder this country’s economic growth: “This report gives everyone fighting for clean air a lot to be proud of because for more than 40 years we have been protecting Americans — preventing illness and improving our quality of life by cutting air pollution — all while the economy has more than tripled.”
“But we know our work is not done yet,” McCarthy notes. “At the core of EPA’s mission is the pursuit of environmental justice — striving for clean air, water and healthy land for every American; and we are committed to reducing remaining pollution, especially in low-income neighborhoods.”
So yes, while this is a small victory for all of our lungs, we shouldn’t breathe easy just yet.
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Do Ants Hold the Key to Reducing Pollution?
Ants — some bite, some eat wood and others just come crawling when there’s food left out on the counter. Turns out, however, that these insects (that most of us find downright annoying) could be helpful in reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
How so?
A recent study from Arizona State University, conducted by geology professor Ronald Dorn, found that the presence of ants can cause certain rocks to capture carbon dioxide, therefore preventing it from going into the atmosphere. This CO2 absorption isn’t small either. Ants can increase the natural amount a rock takes in by up to 335 times.
What’s the secret to this powerful partnership? Well, even Dorn doesn’t quite seem to know yet. In fact, he basically discovered the connection by accident. Back in the early 1990s, he was conducting a study about the weathering of minerals, and one of the rocks he was studying happened to become ant-infested. The bugs were annoying to him, pouring out whenever he tried to drill for a sample. Over time, however, he realized their effect on capturing carbon dioxide.
Even without the help of insects, though, rocks absorb a lot of carbon from the air.
The dangerous polluter seeps into calcium and magnesium deposits found in many rocks, which then transforms into limestone or dolomite. If it weren’t for rocks taking in carbon, our earth would be a whole lot warmer and air dirtier than it already is.
“When I take students on field trips, I make them kiss the limestone, because that limestone is just CO2 that’s just locked up in rocks and how Earth has remained habitable,” Dorn told Scientific American.
With carbon-rich rock already having contributed so much to our environment, the effect of ants speeding up the process could be huge. After all, there’s an estimated 10 trillion of the tiny insects on earth at our disposal. Even better would be if researchers could figure out exactly what the ants do to the rock to make it absorb carbon faster. Then, the solution could be mass-produced.
Until that’s the case, we’ll just have to settle for welcoming ants into our yards and enjoying our little patch of cleaner air.
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Sandy, Summer Standouts: The Top 35 Cleanest Beaches
Summertime and Fourth of July means barbecues, family, friends and beaches for most of us. But as people prepare to hit the sand, there’s nothing worse than taking a dip in polluted water. Have no fear, though, because last week, the Natural Resources Defense Council released its annual report on beach pollution, compiling results on 3,000 beaches to create a comprehensive list of the top 35 cleanest ones.
Contamination and pollution on public beaches across the country is a consistent problem. Most of it can be contributed to rain water, which, through its course over pavement, picks up different contaminants which are then transferred to the ocean water. A further problem is the water treatment facilities that handle storm water and sewage in the same system.
The Natural Resources Defense Council’s report used information on the pollution levels of the beaches surveyed from 2009 to 2013 to rank their cleanliness as well as offer solutions to clean up dirtier waters. In order to be a superstar beach, the location had to meet the water quality standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency. First, it could not exceed the 2009-2012 national water quality level by more than two percent. Second, it could not exceed the 2013 Beach Action Value water quality by more than two percent.
All of this sounds very scientific for most of us, but it can be boiled down simply. Beach Action Value is different from water quality level because it deals solely with beach quality and just acts as a guideline for when beach health warnings should be administered. It is a not a required criteria but can be used as a tool by the states. Therefore, superstar beaches were less than two percent above the EPA’s established safe water quality values.
Of the 35 top beaches, there are some standouts whose numbers were zero percent in every category for every year. Some of those include Long Beach City in New York, Back Bay Beach in Virginia, Dauphin Island Public Beach and Beach at Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina, among others.
So before you grab your towel and sunscreen, be sure to check to see where your favorite beach falls in the rankings. See the full list of superstars and offenders at Next City.
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A Roof That Can Clean the Air?
Now talk about something that smog-filled Southern California could really use.
Students at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering have developed an insanely cheap and simple solution to air pollution.
According to UCR Today, the team created an experimental coating that, when applied to your average clay tile, can remove between 88 to 97 percent of smog-causing nitrogen oxides.
The coating is made of titanium dioxide — a very common product found in paint, sunscreen and even some candy — that breaks down nitrogen oxides found in air pollution. Remarkably (since the product is made of such an ordinary compound) the students say that it would only cost $5 to coat the average residential roof.
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Crunching the numbers, the young researchers figured that if the coating were applied to a single roof, it would gobble up the same amount of nitrogen oxide in one year that’s produced by a car driving 11,000 miles. Apply these tiles to a million homes, and they would eliminate 21 tons of nitrogen oxides every day — about 4 percent of the 500 tons of nitrogen oxide emitted each day in Southern California.
That’s not too shabby of a return on a few bucks.
The coating inventors, who are all set to graduate, hope to see their project taken on by a new team of students for testing in the real world. Besides rooftops, these ambitious college seniors want to see their creation applied on concrete and freeway walls or dividers to curb another big SoCal problem: Traffic pollution.
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Going ‘Round and ‘Round, This Water Wheel Is Ridding Baltimore’s Polluted Harbor of Its Trash
When it comes to cleaning up the polluted Baltimore Harbor, there’s really no need to reinvent the wheel. Literally.
Sitting permanently at the mouth of the Jones Falls stream in Baltimore between Pier 6 and Harbor East, is the Water Wheel Trash Inceptor.
So what does this large, round object do? For starters, this water wheel cleans up the harbor — sucking up to 50,000 pounds of trash a day, or about 750,000 pounds of trash a year, estimates say. At this rate, the organizers at the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore hope that the Harbor might actually be safe for swimmers by 2020.
Impressively, the wheel (which is powered by solar panels and water currents) is also generating 2,500 watts of electricity a day, an amount that could power the average Maryland home, Inhabit reports.
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“I was tired of always hearing tourists say ‘ugh, this harbor’s disgusting’,” Water Wheel co-designer John Kellett told Inhabit. “I thought, there’s got to be a better way than collecting trash on our front doorstep.” In a mere seven months, Kellett and his partner Daniel Chase at Clearwater Mills successfully built their trash-collecting contraption. (To see how it works, watch the videos below.)
Besides those aforementioned benefits (which are downright great), the wheel is also improving the quality of water for the fish and underwater ecosystems. And that’s not all. As WBAL-TV points out, the wheel is helping educate kids and adults about keeping trash off the streets.
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“It’s a thrill to see this new technology being applied to an age-old problem like trash,” Laurie Schwartz, the president of Waterfront Partnership, told the local television station.
Sounds like the wheel — which was originally designed to move items somewhere, but is now being used to remove unwanted things — really has come full circle.
You’ll Never Believe What Those Popular Silicon Bracelets Can Do
Ever since the iconic yellow Livestrong wristbands were introduced as a fundraising item in 2004 —one of the trendiest fashion fads of the past decade — these little silicon bracelets have become ubiquitous with cause marketing. Today, they come in every color of the rainbow, representing hundreds or even thousands of causes. You can even custom-order your own.
But now, researchers have found that these little rings of plastic hold another important purpose. They can detect air pollutants and chemicals that the wearer is exposed to every day. How’s that for awareness?
Researchers from Oregon State University provided 30 volunteers with sanitized, slightly modified silicon bracelets and asked them to wear the accessories for 30 days. At the end of the period, the scientists tested the bracelets for more than 1,200 chemical compounds. The results were shocking. Not only were the wristbands able to detect several dozen pollutants — 49 to be exact — such as pesticides, flame-retardants and pet flea medications, but they also absorbed common compounds, such as caffeine and nicotine. Because silicon is a porous material, it acts similarly to human cells. Once the chemicals come in contact with the wristband — or at large, human cells — they are essentially locked in. “We were surprised at the breadth of chemicals,” Kim Anderson, professor, chemist, and senior author of the study, which was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, told Environmental Health News. “There was definitely some caffeine on mine!”
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Given the results of this initial study, these silicon bracelets may allow scientists to finally be able to quantify tens of thousands of chemicals and pollutants that humans are exposed to on a regular basis, a scientific experiment that has previously been impossible. “This study offers some real possibilities to address the weak link in epidemiological studies — which is the exposure science,” said Ted Schettler, science director at the Science and Environmental Health Network. “[These bracelets] can identify both chemicals and mixtures, and this could easily be applied to larger groups to see which compounds are showing up most commonly.”
To test this, the researchers asked eight roofers to wear the silicon bands for eight hours. At the end of the day, they tested the bracelets specifically for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — chemicals in roofing tar that are thought to cause severe health effects, such as cancer and reproductive problems, after years of exposure. Not surprisingly, all the roofers’ wristbands tested positive for PAHs, as well as 12 other compounds that are on a federal priority list of harmful pollutants. And this after just eight hours of wearing.
While you won’t be able to purchase your own chemical-monitoring bracelets quite yet (more research needs to be done on which pollutants show up and which don’t), the idea that a simple, not to mention cheap, silicon band can track the chemicals we’re exposed to is a major breakthrough for scientists who are working in potentially harmful environments.
Sounds like this fashion trend has a lot of life left in it, after all.
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Got Two Hands and 30 Minutes? You Can Help Clean Up Our World
When it comes to social action, we can accomplish much more together than we ever could alone. That’s the idea behind the Two Hands Project, a worldwide collaborative campaign that seeks to eradicate plastic pollution from the environment, 30 minutes at a time. Two Hands is taking a grassroots approach to cleaning up our world, by asking citizens to complete a simple task: pick up (and ultimately recycle) trash for 30 minutes at a time, anywhere in the world. Originally launched in Australia by Paul Sharp and Silke Stuckenbrock, the Two Hands Project has used successful social media campaigns to inspire people from every continent to get involved and upload pictures of their “hauls” to the organization’s Facebook page, which now boasts more than 40,000 “likes.”
The organization is also working with governments and other industries to promote the development of a global reusable packaging and deposit system to replace disposable packaging — one of the main causes of plastic pollution — and a “cash for butts” program to deal with the overwhelming amount of cigarette butts found in the environment. But they’re not waiting for government intervention to realize their goal of a better world. “The broader idea is, you can take your two hands and apply it to anything in your own community that needs fixing; it can be social, environmental, anything at all,” Sharp says. With more than 7 billion people in the world, just imagine how much we could accomplish if everyone chipped in.
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