A Safer Stain-Resistant Chemical?

Chemists at the University of North Carolina have developed a new material for making stain resistant coatings that they say will not contaminate the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Fred Kight has the story:

Transcript

Chemists at the University of North Carolina have developed a new material for making stain resistant coatings that they say will not contaminate the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Fred Kight has the story:


The problem with many stain resistant coatings on clothing and paper goods is that they gradually breakdown into C8, a compound that an Environmental Protection Agency advisory board terms a “likely carcinogen.”


Chemistry professor Joseph DeSimone and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have come up with something they’re calling “C4 plus.” The new material uses a type of fluorocarbon which is less likely to degrade.


Paul Anastas is director of the Green Chemistry Institute and he says C4 plus is just what the doctor ordered.


“What Joe DeSimone is doing is designing our next generation of substances so that they are not going to be harmful to human health and the environment.”


Anastas says manufacturers could switch to the “greener” ingredient very soon.


For the GLRC, I’m Fred Kight.

Epa to Change Fuel Economy Ratings

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the
way it determines auto fuel economy ratings by the end of the year. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports, consumers have complained that the current ratings don’t reflect the actual gas mileage they’re getting in their vehicles:

Transcript

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the way it determines auto fuel economy ratings by the end of the year. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports, consumers have complained that the current ratings don’t reflect the actual gas mileage they’re getting in their vehicles:


EPA spokesman John Millett says the organization has been reviewing the MPG calculation methods carefully and plans to propose changes to the system by the end of this year. He says the last update to fuel economy measures was in 1985, and many things have changed since then.


“Speed limits are higher, congestion has increased, more vehicles are equipped with air conditioning than before. There are other factors that we need to consider as well: aggressive driving, cold weather, and there are some other regional or local impacts.”


Millett says it’s too early to say how far off the current estimates are, but many experts say there’s a ten to fifteen percent difference between official MPG ratings and real results. Millett says it’s important to remember there’s no perfect test and fuel economy ratings are estimates, not predictions.


For the GLRC, I’m Celeste Headlee.

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Judge Rules Epa Must Revise Lead Standards

A federal judge in Missouri says the EPA’s standards for lead pollution are out of date. And he’s given the agency about two months to figure out how much lead is too much. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Sepic
reports:

Transcript

A federal judge in Missouri says the EPA’s standards for lead pollution are out of date, and he’s given the agency about two months to figure out how much lead is too much. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Sepic reports:


Under federal law, the EPA is supposed to review lead standards every five years, but Judge Richard Webber said the agency “blatantly disregarded Congress’ mandate.”


Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon filed the suit on behalf of a couple from Herculaneum, Missouri, who claim their son was poisoned by a nearby lead smelter. Nixon says the EPA last changed its airborne lead rules fifteen years ago.


“EPA sets what’s allowable as far as lead in the air. We think science has moved forward over the years to show that is very dangerous both for young kids in older housing as well as around smelters and lead operations.”


An EPA spokeswoman says the agency did not ignore the issue, but instead of updating emissions standards, regulators decided instead to focus on specific sources of lead pollution.


For the GLRC, I’m Matt Sepic.

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Mercury Report to Undercut Epa Trading Program?

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules to cut mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Critics called the rules weak. Now, a different federal agency may have data supporting their claims. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee reports:

Transcript

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules to cut mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Critics called the rules weak. Now, a different federal agency may have data supporting their claims. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee reports:


The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration examined where mercury pollution in Lake Michigan is coming from. The data haven’t been publicly released yet, but sources say Midwestern power plants are the biggest culprits.


If true, that could undercut the EPA’s new mercury trading program. That lets dirty power plants buy the right to pollute from cleaner ones. Howard Learner’s with the Environmental Law and Policy Center. He says the program’s wrong because it treats all mercury pollution equally.


“When it comes to mercury pollution, a trading regime essentially doesn’t work very well, because you have concentrated localized hot spots in which the pollution is highly toxic to the people who live in those communities.”


Several state governments are fighting the EPA’s trading program in federal court. They’d like NOAA’s data, but the states and public will have to wait until the EPA reviews it.


For the GLRC, I’m Shawn Allee.

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House to Vote on Esa Reform Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on a bill this week that would change the Endangered Species Act. Critics say if the bill is passed into law, it would severely restrict the government’s ability to protect endangered plants and animals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports:

Transcript

The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on a bill this week that would change the Endangered Species Act. Critics say if the bill is passed into law, it would severely restrict the government’s ability to protect endangered plants and animals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports:


The bill’s sponsors say they’re trying to reduce the amount of conflict that comes up when the Endangered Species Act is enforced. They say developers face too many hurdles when they want to build on, log, or mine private land.


Jamie Rappaport Clark is a former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She says the current law already allows most development projects to go forward.


“The Endangered Species Act has rarely stopped a project. In fact, less than one percent of the hundreds of thousands of projects that have been reviewed by the Fish and Wildlife Service have ever been stopped in their tracks.”


Today, landowners have to go through a permitting process before they’re allowed to develop land that might harm an endangered species. That requirement might change if the current version of the bill is eventually signed into law.


For the GLRC, I’m Mark Brush.

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Environmental Superheroes

  • Super Rachel confronts Chemical Man before they duel. (Photo courtesy of the Shakespeare in the Schools Program at the University of Pittsburgh)

Drama is a unique way to connect children with their textbooks. That’s why a play on the achievements of Rachel Carson might be coming to a classroom near you. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports on how the life of one prominent environmentalist is teaching students about
science:

Transcript

Drama is a unique way to connect children with their textbooks.
That’s why a play on the achievements of Rachel Carson might be coming to
classroom near you. The Great Lake Radio Consortium’s Lisa Ann Pinkerton
reports on how the life of one prominent environmentalist is teaching
students about science:


The office of Professor Buck Favorini is in a tall gothic tower. It was the inspiration for Gotham City in the first Batman movie. Inside his tower at the University of Pittsburgh, Professor Favorini has his own superhero story. His children’s play, Rachel Carson Saves the Day, is a science lesson in the language of children.


“We have used the sort of idiom of superheroes in the play, because it’s a way of teaching kids about science that they can understand simply by looking keenly at the world around them.”


Favorini says if Rachel Carson hadn’t been smart, bold, and risky, pesticides like DDT might still be in wide use. Some people honored her for her book Silent Spring. Others saw her as a reckless, unpredictable scientist threatening their chemical superhero.


“People made some of the worst chemicals in the world launched a very expensive campaign to undermine Rachel Carson’s scientific abilities partly based on the fact that she was a woman.”


Perched on a hill, overlooking another part of Pittsburgh, is Spring Hill Elementary.


LOUDSPEAKER: “Third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers, we’ll call you to the
assembly as soon as the staff sets up in the auditorium. Thanks.”


The staff is actor Elena Block and stage manager Josh Futrell. They hustle to assemble silver pipes of scaffolding and hang two white screens.


“There are two DVD players that do these great images that do these scenes from science and pictures of Rachel Carson. Sort of become this floating back drop.”


While Block is on stage as Rachel Carson, Futrell controls the images, music, and the voice of “Little Rachel’s” Mother.


FICTIONAL MOTHER: “Alice in Wonderland is your breakfast companion again.”


FICTIONAL RACHEL: “Oh Mama, I love this book, and so does Candy when I read it to her.”


(Sound of barking)


The play begins with Rachel as a young girl. She grows up quickly to become a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her scientific observations reveal chemicals like DDT are contaminating waterways and silently creeping up the food chain.


FICTIONAL RACHEL: “This is the bird. The bird that ate the clam, that ate the
plankton, that swam in the ocean, fed by the stream, that carried the
chemical Jack-”


CHILDREN: “Sprayed!”


(Sound of clock ticking)


FICTIONAL RACHEL: “I’m in the late afternoon of my life and I am so angry. The next book I right is going to make a lot of noise.”


(Sound of “Mighty Mouse” theme)


To write Silent Spring, the passionate scientist/writer rips away her dress
to reveal a green superhero suit. Quickly Super Rachel is attacked by a man who’s face is hidden behind a long
pointed gasmask.


(Sound of fighting)


The Chemical industry attacks Rachel for her ideas. Images of nature and chemical compounds flash on the screens behind them. Super Rachel uses cartwheels and karate chops to over power Chemical Man.


(Sound of hip hop battle)


CHEMICAL MAN: “The bugs are buggin’ me.”


FICTIONAL RACHEL: “The chemicals are killin’ me.”


CHEMICAL MAN: “We’re gonna hit ’em from the air.”


FICTIONAL RACHEL: “How can you not care?”


Super Rachel prevails and DDT is officially banned in 1972.


(Sound of applause)


After the play, it’s clear the students of Spring Hill Elementary were paying attention.


GIRL: “She was trying to think of better ways to kill the insects instead of just polluting them.”


BOY: “I think she thought it was really important about the environment, and I think that’s good, because most people don’t.”


Not everyone agrees with the conclusions of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring. Some scientists say Carson misrepresented existing 1950’s data on bird reproduction, and others say the very threat of malaria in developing countries should trump possible environmental threats of DDT. Actress Elena Block thinks despite these criticisms, Rachel Carson’s story has much to offer children.


“If they can sort of come away the idea with the idea that you can exact change being yourself from the place that you’re from. I think that’s pretty good, don’t you?”


Rachel Carson Saves the Day starts its second year of touring this fall, and perhaps it’s fun, multimedia look at environmental protection will inspire America’s next generation of intrepid scientists.


For the GLRC, I’m Lisa Ann Pinkerton.

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Suburbs in the City

  • Victoria Park seems like a neighborhood that one might see in a suburban area. But, in fact, it's located in downtown Detroit. (Photo by Nora Flaherty)

Many cities across the nation are looking to re-imagine themselves—they’re trying to become more like dense, walkable cities like San Francisco or Boston. But some people say that some cities weren’t originally designed to be like that. And people don’t necessarily want them to be. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Nora Flaherty has this report:

Transcript

Many cities across the nation are looking to re-imagine themselves. They’re
trying to become more like dense, walkable cities like San Francisco or
Boston. But some people say that some cities weren’t originally designed to
be like that, and people don’t necessarily want them to be. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Nora Flaherty has this report:


Aside from the cicadas and crickets, it’s a quiet afternoon in Victoria
park. There’s no one out on the tree-lined street, or on the large houses’
beautifully groomed front lawns.


Jerry Herron is an American Studies professor at Wayne State University. He says that this gated community has everything that people associate with suburbia.


“An artificially wind-y street, some kind of neoclassical details on the houses, a cul de sac at each end, plenty of cars in the garages, basketball hoops, all of the things that people would associate with characterstic life in suburbia. Except it’s in the middle of one of the oldest downtown industrial parts of the city of Detroit.”


Herron says that most urban planners wouldn’t expect to see a suburban-style
cul de sac right in the middle of the city.


“I think because it doesn’t look like one of those pre-arranged ideas of the city, cities aren’t supposed to look like suburban McMansions houses. Well, it turns out that that’s where people want to live, and if you build it in the city, they’ll come and buy the houses and be happy.”


That kind of thinking runs counter to what many urban planning experts might say. In fact, the success of Victoria Park might seem to be an oddity in planning circles, because most planners believe that it’s a specifically urban lifestyle that attracts people to cities, one that involves chic apartments, condos and busy streets, not lawn care and attached garages.


But Jerry Herron says that more suburban-style development is in keeping
with this city’s history.


“One of the important things about Detroit is that seventy-five percent of the people who live here – I believe that’s an accurate figure – virtually since the beginning of the city’s history, have lived in private houses, so that there’s really a dedication to this idea of private property, that they have something good, it has to be mine, it has to belong to me, which makes it very difficult then to imagine as desirable living in something I don’t own, that I have to share with other people, that I may just be renting.”


Regardless of whether they choose to live in private houses or high rise buildings, people who choose to live in the city like being able to spend less time in their cars than they would if they lived in the suburbs.


And they like the cultural attractions and diversity of the cities. And even if it might seem suburban compared to life in other cities, life in this city is still very different from life in the suburbs. Olga Savich grew up in Troy, Michigan a north-west suburb of Detroit. She now lives in a high rise building near downtown.


“I moved to the city because I just needed to get out of the suburbs, I lived
there my whole life, there’s nothing there but the mall, I didn’t
necessarily want to structure my whole life around shopping. So I moved to
the city because it seemed like it was exciting, like a new start.”


Although Savich likes the more traditionally urban aspects of the city, she
also likes the fact that there’s big open spaces, including Belle Isle park,
right in the middle of it.


“I used to walk down on a Saturday afternoon with a book and just sit on the rocks by Shane Park and you can put your feet in the water, you know, it’s really pretty. Going to belle isle, it’s almost like having your own Metropark, you know, right in your own back yard, it’s like a five-minute bike ride.”


And while a lot of people see Detroit’s big, empty urban spaces and abandoned and decaying buildings as the city’s big problem, other people are attracted to exactly those things. Jerry Herron lives in the same building as Olga Savich.


“There’s a lot of room in the middle of a city that’s 300 years old, a lot of green space in the city. And I think that people that are attracted to that kind of revitalization and the presence of significant decay find this a really exhilarating and exciting place. That abandonment attracts people, the way ruins attract people. And people who like it think it’s really unusual and unique and only Detroit looks like that really.”


Like a lot of big cities with decaying centers, Detroit is working hard to bring people in. Experts are thinking hard about what kind of cities people are looking to move to. And Herron says that anyone who’s trying to make a city like Detroit appealing to outsiders would do well to work with what the city already has, rather than trying to make it like other cities with different histories.


For the GLRC, I’m Nora Flaherty.

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Defending Against Ash Borer

The Emerald Ash Borer is being found in new places. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jeff Bossert reports officials are emphasizing different way to stop the small metallic-green bug:

Transcript

The Emerald Ash Borer is being found in new places. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jeff Bossert reports officials are emphasizing a different way to stop the small metallic-green bug:


The emerald ash borer is killing ash trees throughout much of Michigan, and it’s spreading. It’s been discovered in parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Ontario.


Michigan State University entomologist David Smitley suggests homeowners work to stop the spread of the insect by treating the ash tree while they’re still healthy.


“That’s really critical. You need to start with a healthy tree, and that’s why we’re trying to get the word out.”


Smitley says homeowners in Michigan should consider applying insecticides
this fall and every subsequent spring, but University of Illinois
entomologist James Appleby says that’s not enough. That’s because too many don’t know about the emerald ash borer, and will fall back on spraying when it’s too late.


“I hate to get that kind of publicity out. I think the main thing
here is that we just be aware that we not bring any firewood from Michigan
into Illinois or Indiana or any other state.”


Appleby says a recent survey in Michigan revealed fifty percent of those
questioned had never heard of the emerald ash borer.


For the GLRC, I’m Jeff Bossert.

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Will Katrina Ease Lumber Trade War?

Hurricane Katrina may be able to do what years of squabbling, negotiations and trade panel rulings have failed to do…lift the duties on imports of Canadian softwood lumber to the U.S. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk explains:

Transcript

Hurricane Katrina may be able to do what years of squabbling, negotiations, and trade panel rulings have failed to do: lift the duties on imports of Canadian softwood lumber to the U.S. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk explains:


There are concerns in the U.S. that the huge job of rebuilding New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane could lead to spikes in the cost of construction materials.


The U.S. Treasury Department says it will monitor the situation, and if it’s in the best public interest, then it could drop the tariffs on Canadian lumber. Jamie Lim is with the Ontario Forest Industries Association. Lim says it would be the best move for all.


“Katrina was a natural disaster, but the illegal tariffs that have been put on lumber over the last twenty years is a man-made disaster, and it’s U.S. consumers who’ve been paying the price.”


Canada provides up to a third of the softwood lumber used in construction in the U.S., but for the past four years, Canadian producers have been paying more than twenty-five percent in tariffs and punitive duties.


That’s estimated to have increased the average cost of a house by about a thousand dollars.


For the GLRC, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.

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Us and Canada Partner to Reduce Fuel Waste

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has joined up with Natural Resources Canada. The two agencies are forming an initiative to help truckers save fuel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jerome Vaughn has
more:

Transcript

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has joined up with Natural
Resources Canada. The two agencies are forming an initiative to help truckers save fuel.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jerome Vaughn has more:


Officials from both sides of the border gathered near the Ambassador
Bridge in Detroit to sign a memorandum of understanding.


The new partnership brings together fuel-saving technologies developed in the EPA’s Smart Way Transport Program with driver education and training programs from Natural Resources Canada.


EPA officials say the voluntary program could save up to 440 million gallons of fuel each year in addition to eliminating 5 million tons of carbon dioxide. Suzanne Rudzinski is with the EPA.


“What we’re really trying to do is something that I think is a
win-win for both business and the environment. By adopting the
programs, we’re trying to reduce fuel usage. Idling alone can
save a billion gallons a year in diesel, just from idling trucks.”


The EPA estimates there are thirteen million truck border crossings between
the U.S. and Canada each year.


For the GLRC, I’m Jerome Vaughn in Detroit.

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