There’s a new generation of washing machines that use charged particles
of silver to kill bacteria. Rebecca Williams reports the Environmental
Protection Agency says it’s going to regulate the machines as
pesticides:
Transcript
There’s a new generation of washing machines that use charged particles
of silver to kill bacteria. Rebecca Williams reports the Environmental
Protection Agency says it’s going to regulate the machines as
pesticides:
The Samsung Silver Ion machine generates tiny charged particles of
silver that kill bacteria on contact.
The EPA has decided any kind of machine that generates ions to kill
pests has to be regulated as a pesticide.
Andrew Maynard is a scientist with the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars. He says there are worries that these kinds of
machines could kill helpful bacteria:
“What’s causing concern is the release of these charged silver atoms
into the environment which can kill bacteria but also might end up
killing bacteria we don’t want them to.”
Maynard says there are about 130 products on the market now that use
tiny silver particles to kill bacteria. They’re in everything from kitchen
countertops to food containers.
But he says EPA hasn’t decided whether to regulate those products as
pesticides.
There’s growing concern about the spinach and lettuce in your crisper. There have been
several recalls of bags of salad produce after they hit the grocery stores. The federal
government recently noted that food safety has become one of the biggest ongoing
problems facing agencies responsible for inspecting food. The result is a debate among
growers, food processors and conservation groups over how to better protect the food
supply. But environmental groups say some of the safeguards can harm wildlife. Chuck
Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
There’s growing concern about the spinach and lettuce in your crisper. There have been
several recalls of bags of salad produce after they hit the grocery stores. The federal
government recently noted that food safety has become one of the biggest ongoing
problems facing agencies responsible for inspecting food. The result is a debate among
growers, food processors and conservation groups over how to better protect the food
supply. But environmental groups say some of the safeguards can harm wildlife. Chuck
Quirmbach reports:
During the last year, people have died and hundreds of people have gotten sick because
of E. coli bacteria contamination of some produce. Farmers and food processors are
fighting in court over what officially caused the contamination. But in the Salinas Valley
of California, an area known as the nation’s Salad Bowl, the food processing industry is
trying to show consumers they can be confident about the safety of commercially-
produced leafy greens. Even processors who were not linked to last year’s E. coli scare
suffered a drop in sales. They’re anxious to show off their facilities and the safety
precautions they’ve taken.
Inside this large processing plant a million pounds of lettuce come through every day.
It’s washed in chlorinated water, some of it is mixed in with other raw vegetables and
packed into bags that are sent to grocery stores across the U.S. This plant is operated by
Fresh Express, a company owned by Chiquita Brands. Plant manager Phil Bradway says
the plant is sanitized daily:
“You generate organic material buildup and its extremely important on a regular and
consistent basis to remove that organic material before you continue to process a food
safe product and that’s why we’re rigorous about the seven-day-a-week sanitation activities in
our facilities.”
Fresh Express vice president Bill Clyburn says this salad bagging plant ships out a
product that is better protected than vegetables that are sent unbagged to the grocery
stores:
“We’re taking the precautions to wash the lettuce and make it clean. You take commodity
produce of any type, go into a grocery store and watch how many people pick it up,
breathe on it, put it back down and take another head of lettuce and how many people still
don’t wash that. You never hear about people getting sick on commodity lettuce ’cause
there’s no label to go back at.”
And Fresh Express says it’s not just conditions at the plant that they and other processors
are trying to control. In the last year, California growers came up with a voluntary
program to try to develop better agricultural practices. Things such as protecting farm
fields from contamination from animals. Fresh Express insists that its growers exceed the
standards so that no wildlife urine or fecal matter come into contact with the produce, but some farmers say the food processors have some unrealistic ideas.
(Sound of sprinkler)
A sprinkler waters crops at an organic farm. Grower Andrew Griffin says some food
industry giants want more fences around farms to help keep wildlife out of the fields. But
he says those won’t make a difference:
“Absolutely not. It’s ridiculous. You can’t fence out the birds. You can’t fence out the
sky… I mean I don’t know what they’re thinking.”
Griffin says a better solution would be reduce the growing concentration of agri-business
and not send so much of the Salad Bowl’s leafy greens through just a few processing
plants:
“So, if there’s a contamination of say the blade on the cutting machine, you have an
opportunity to contaminate salad that’s gonna feed a whole nation. Whereas if it was
diffuse, if we had a diffuse system and you had small farms in different places, you
wouldn’t have that same broad spectrum problem.”
And the skeptical farmers have allies in groups such as The Nature Conservancy.
Spokeswoman Chris Fischer says the new restrictions in the farm fields are affecting
wildlife habitat along streams and river. She says people across the nation who eat salads
should care about what happens to the environment of the Salinas valley:
“As both a consumer and a conservationist the sustainability of our farming and
watershed health and ultimately our water quality and public health is all wrapped up
together and unsustainable, unhealthy farm practices ultimately aren’t going to serve us
well.”
Fischer says some of the new restrictions on growers are based on the best available
research, but she’s concerned food processors are adding extra requirements that aren’t
based on good science. Recently news reports added to the debate about safety of leafy
greens that end up on your table. The Associated Press reported federal inspections of
both growers and processors of salad greens only happen about once every four years.
The federal government is deciding whether to regulate products of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the process of manufacturing particles to a very small size. They can be as small as one-millionth the width of a head of a pin. Rebecca Williams reports some people worry these tiny particles could harm people and wildlife:
Transcript
The federal government is deciding whether to regulate products of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the process of manufacturing particles to a very small size. They can be as small as one-millionth the width of a head of a pin. Rebecca Williams reports some people worry these tiny particles could harm people and wildlife:
Nano particles are already in products on the market… in things like sunscreens, food containers, and clothing.
Andrew Maynard is the chief science advisor to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. He says there are about 350 products made with nanotechnology. Maynard says nano particles can make products better, but there might also be risks to people and the environment that researchers don’t yet understand.
“If you’re beginning to make materials at this very very small scale, there’s a possibility they’ll get into places you don’t really want them to be, and they’ll start behaving in unusual ways.”
Maynard says the Environmental Protection Agency might be taking a step toward regulating nanotechnology.
Some companies sell products that use tiny particles of silver to kill germs. The EPA wants those companies to provide evidence the particles won’t harm waterways or public health.
A windmill blade nearly 150 feet long is slung gently onto a flatbed at the Duluth port. A modified trailer is needed to transport the blade. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
The three blades will be bolted into the three openings in the rotor assembly. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
A cone projects from the front of each windmill when it's assembled. It protects the rotor assembly. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
Windmill propellers are stacked in a holding area in the Duluth port until they're needed at the windmill farm. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
Each tower consists of three sections which will be bolted together. When assembled, the towers will be either 60 or 80 meters high (about 200 feet or 260 feet). (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
A nacelle, or generator assembly, heads out for Mower County, Minnesota. The arms extending over the truck bed distribute the eighty-six tons of the nacelle. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
U.S. demand for clean energy is growing fast. In fact, wind energy developers are ordering so many windmills, they’re running into a supply problem. Windmill manufacturers overseas have been shipping their products to the booming U.S. market. That’s already created some jobs, and now there are plans to build factories to produce windmills here. It’s all happening in spite of inconsistent federal support. Stephanie Hemphill reports:
Transcript
U.S. demand for clean energy is growing fast. In fact, wind energy developers are ordering so many windmills, they’re running into a supply problem. Windmill manufacturers overseas have been shipping their products to the booming U.S. market. That’s already created some jobs, and now there are plans to build factories to produce windmills here. It’s all happening in spite of inconsistent federal support. Stephanie Hemphill reports:
At the Duluth Port Terminal, the BBC India is tied up to the dock. Two giant cranes slowly lower a silvery propeller onto a waiting truck. The blade is half as long as a football field. The extended bed of the eighteen-wheeler isn’t long enough to hold the entire length. A padded steel structure cradles the narrow end above the ground. There are 66 blades on the ship, three blades for each of twenty-two towers.
“The three blades will bolt into a hub, and then the hub attaches to the nacelle, the generator package, that’s the actual turbine, and the nacelle sits on top of the tower.”
Andrew Holdrup is the port captain for the shipping company. He was here in Duluth a year and a half ago, when the port handled its first ever shipment of windmills.
Holdrup says the demand for windmills is huge in the U.S.
“We have four ships; all they do is run from Denmark to Houston with Siemens windmills. We discharge them in Houston, the ship sails back empty to go pick up the next lot. Multiply that by all the other ports, and all the other windmill manufacturers, and it’s a huge business.”
It’s great business for Duluth’s port. Unloading the windmills requires iron workers to cut the steel where the pieces have been welded to the ship, and crane operators, and longshoremen. And truckers are staying in town waiting to pick up their loads. They’ll haul the windmills to wind farms being built in Mower County, Minnesota, and Oliver County, North Dakota. The port has also handled equipment for wind farms in Manitoba.
The boom in wind was primed in the early 1990s, when Congress set up a production tax credit for wind power. It allows a 1.9 cent-per-kilowatt-hour tax credit over ten years, for electricity produced by wind.
But the tax credit only runs for two years at a time. Ron Johnson is in charge of marketing for the Duluth Port Authority. He says that on-again, off-again approach has made it hard for businesses involved in wind energy to plan and grow.
“It’s kind of start up again, stop, start up again, stop. If you’re a trucking company with these specialized trailers, you don’t want to go out and buy fifty more of them if there’s a chance your whole fleet’s going to sit until Congress decides what to do.”
Johnson says there’s a lot of support in Congress for the tax credits, and he expects them to be renewed.
Steve Stengel works for FPL Energy, the company building the wind farms where these windmills are headed.
“It is part of the business, we understand that. And it does cause kind of starts & stops, if you will.”
But he says it’s possible to work around the periodic breaks in the tax credit because it takes a long time to plan a wind project anyway.
“Permitting issues, land lease issues, transmission issues. We have to plan as if the tax credit is going to be there.”
In fact, wind is growing dramatically in spite of the iffy nature of federal support. Several states now require utilities to invest in renewable energy, or offer incentives for wind power development. And as the cost of fossil fuels goes up, the relative cost of wind goes down.
It all adds up to a lot of demand, and recently, tight supplies.
The American Wind Energy Association’s Susan Sloan says orders are already in place for 2008 and beyond.
“Because of this boom and bust cycle but also because of this new acceptance of wind, we are seeing a tighter supply, and we need to have the manufacturing capabilities catch up.”
And that’s what’s happening.
It took two weeks for the Siemens windmills to sail from Denmark to Duluth. Now the company is building a factory in Fort Madison, Iowa. Siemens says it will employ 250 people, and start producing in the first half of 2007.
And in Pipestone, Minnesota, Suzlon, a company based in India, is about to start producing three blades a day, and the nosecones to go with them. The company plans to manufacture the electronic controls, and eventually employ up to 300 people. Suzlon says it has orders for the next two to three years.
For the Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
A windmill blade nearly 150 long is slung gently onto a flatbed at the Duluth port. A modified trailer is needed to transport the blade. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
The three blades will be bolted into the three openings in the rotor assembly. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
A cone projects from the front of each windmill when it's assembled. It protects the rotor assembly. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
Windmill propellers are stacked in a holding area in the Duluth port until they're needed at the windmill farm. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
Each tower consists of three sections which will be bolted together. When assembled, the towers will be either 60 or 80 meters high (about 200 feet or 260 feet). (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
A nacelle, or generator assembly, heads out for Mower County, Minnesota. The arms extending over the truck bed distribute the eighty-six tons of the nacelle. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)
US demand for clean energy is growing so fast, supplies of generating systems are getting tight. Stephanie Hemphill reports on a challenge that could lead to more jobs in the US:
Transcript
US demand for clean energy is growing so fast, supplies of generating systems are getting tight. Stephanie Hemphill reports on a challenge that could lead to more jobs in the US:
Overseas manufacturers of wind generating systems are shipping them here as fast as they can. Now, several companies are building wind generator factories in the US.
Siemens is building a plant in Iowa. Suzlon is about to start production in Minnesota. Plants in Texas produce blades and towers.
It’s all happening in spite of inconsistent federal support. A production tax credit is in place, but it expires every two years.
Ron Johnson is with the port of Duluth, which handles windmill imports. He says the on-again, off-again support makes it hard for companies to plan and grow.
“Well, the deadline’s coming at the end of next year, and people are planning their projects, so we’re all anxious to see what Congress does.”
The American Wind Energy Association says producers are installing enough wind power this year to power the entire state of Rhode Island.
For the Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
Settlers dug ditches and straightened rivers to drain the fields they needed for planting. (photo by Mark Brush)
Today, we wrap up our series on pollution in the heartland.
To farm in the nation’s heartland, people first had to drain the water from the land. In a lot of places, that meant dredging rivers to get them to move along faster and carry water off the fields. But straight, fast rivers aren’t healthy rivers. And the rushing water carries pesticides and fertilizers off of fields and deposits them downstream. But in some places, farmers are starting to repair rivers. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams has the final story in our week-long series:
Transcript
Today, we wrap up our series on pollution in the heartland. To farm in the nation’s
heartland, people first had to drain the water from the land. In a lot of places, that meant
dredging rivers to get them to move along faster and carry water off the fields. But
straight, fast rivers aren’t healthy rivers. And the rushing water carries pesticides and
fertilizers off of fields and deposits them downstream. But in some places, farmers are
starting to repair rivers. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams has the final story in our week-long series:
From an airplane, the land below it looks like it was drawn in geometry class. Fields
of corn and soybeans look almost like perfect squares. Rivers seem as straight as a ruler’s
edge.
When rivers have their way, they’re unruly. They have lots of twists and bends, but people have straightened a lot of rivers and streams to make it easier to grow crops
and raise animals. European settlers forging their way West got stuck in huge swamps.
The mosquitoes were terrible. But the settlers’ chances of raising food in the swampland
were even worse.
“In order to reclaim that land, muckland, for raising vegetable crops, they had to drain it.”
Barb Cook owns a farm here in fertile southwest Michigan. Her grandfather farmed here
in the early 1900s, back when the rivers were being straightened.
(sound of river)
Cook’s standing on the bank of the Dowagiac River. Right now it’s as straight as a canal
and it’s moving fast. But it’s about to get some of its curves back.
Barb Cook says she was skeptical when she heard about the plan to coax the river back to
its original path.
“Well, they want to put the wiggles back. Well, why? Were they trying to hoodwink
anyone or were their objectives pure? And I got involved and felt they were really truly
trying to improve things.”
Cook’s now the vice president of the group. It calls itself MEANDRS. It’s made up of
farmers and biologists and fishermen. People who all have a stake in what happens to the
river.
They’re carving out one of the curves the river used to follow.
Jay Wesley is a biologist with the Department of Natural Resources. He says even
though this new meander isn’t connected to the river yet, little springs are bubbling up.
“We’ve actually even seen trout in here since this first part of the project’s been done.
They’ve come up through the culvert from the river and have found their way up here.
So it’s pretty cold, high quality water.”
That’s exciting news for fishermen. A river fed by cold groundwater can be a mecca for
trout. The pools and riffles sculpted into the new meander will give fish places to hide.
These small signs of hope are a pretty big deal. This project is a very long labor of
love 12 years in the making.
That’s because there are lots of hurdles. For one thing, meander restorations are
expensive. Half a million dollars at the low end.
There are piles of paperwork.
And some farmers worry that restoring meanders will flood their fields.
In this project, the MEANDRS group surveyed nearby farmers early on about their
concerns and included them in the planning process. Bill Westraight is the President of
MEANDRS. He’s also a farmer who owns land along the river.
“I think what I say holds more weight with farmers than if somebody had come down and
was mandating that they participate in some way.”
Westraight says they had some major critics in the beginning. But he says they’ve gotten
almost all the neighbors on board. He says it was crucial that they gave everyone a say.
They also commissioned feasibility studies to make sure upstream farmers wouldn’t be
flooded.
All these hurdles mean that projects like these aren’t very common.
Andrew Fahlund is with the nonprofit group American Rivers. He says big projects like
meander restorations almost always need government funding. And that funding’s been
cut dramatically over the past few years. Fahlund says those cuts are short-sighted
because healthier rivers can actually save money in the long run.
“One of the reasons you get such an economic benefit from river restoration is that you
reduce the costs of having to treat water, filter
that water and clean it up for human consumption.”
(river sound up under)
The MEANDRS group says there’s no way they can restore the entire river. But they
hope mending just this small section will help revive the river a bit.
The group points out that this type of restoration won’t work everywhere. They say in
many places, channelized rivers are still crucial for keeping fields drained.
Farmer Barb Cook says even now, she sees this project as an experiment. In a few
months, she’ll get to see whether all her hard work will pan out, when they’ll try to force
water from the straight channel into the new meander.
“As you look at the stream behind us, it’s quite a volume of water. Water has its own
way. Mother Nature has something to say about this too. She may say no.”
Cook says nothing ever runs smoothly. But she says they’ll just be flexible and this time
around, let the river choose its course.
