A company is using waste from
coal-burning power plants to
make bricks. The firm hopes
to reduce the amount of coal
ash sent to landfills, and,
at the same time, cut the amount
of energy used to make bricks.
Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
A company is using waste from
coal-burning power plants to
make bricks. The firm hopes
to reduce the amount of coal
ash sent to landfills, and,
at the same time, cut the amount
of energy used to make bricks.
Chuck Quirmbach reports:
The company, Calstar, says it wants to open several U.S. plants which would use fly ash in making bricks for construction and paving. The California firm says its method uses far less energy that traditional clay bricks that have to be heated at high temperatures.
Luke Pustejovsky is a Calstar executive. He insists the quality of fly ash brick meets industry standards.
“We spent 18 months and millions of dollars on durability testing with our own labs, with outside third party labs, and this is a brick that’s built to last.”
But a trade group, the Brick Industry Association, is cool to fly ash brick. The group says the product has not yet met the test of time. The group is concerned any problems that come up could discourage customers from using brick.
So every year, dozens of homes are flooded. That's in part because 28% of the entire watershed in this region around Washington DC is paved over.
(Photo by Sabri Ben-Achour)
With federal Recovery Act money, the town is rebuilding its main street from top to bottom.
(Photo by Sabri Ben-Achour)
One component of the construction are bio-retention tree boxes - native trees grown in gravel and compost to absorb and filter water.
(Photo by Sabri Ben-Achour)
Stormwater runoff can be one
of the main ways that urban
areas create pollution. In
some cases it can dramatically
suffocate marine life. It
can also cause flooding. One
small town in Maryland is on
the receiving end of its region’s
runoff. As Sabri Ben-Achour reports,
it’s trying to set a national
example with its approach to
solving the problem:
Transcript
Stormwater runoff can be one
of the main ways that urban
areas create pollution. In
some cases it can dramatically
suffocate marine life. It
can also cause flooding. One
small town in Maryland is on
the receiving end of its region’s
runoff. As Sabri Ben-Achour reports,
it’s trying to set a national
example with its approach to
solving the problem:
Anytime it rains, the ground in Edmonston, Maryland quickly becomes waterlogged. Here’s Brigitte Pooley and her mother Maggie.
“When the river gets flooded with rainwater, for example, if it continued raining like this, it literally comes up all over, and then all the debris that comes from upstream, municipalities upstream, as the water recedes it just leaves milk cartons and trash, tires everywhere.”
Adam Ortiz is the mayor of this low income, low-lying town of 1400. He says his town is a trap for stormwater runoff from all the paved surfaces in the area.
“At least 30 to 56 homes would be under water at least once a year because of flooding from parking lots, highways, shopping centers and streets.”
So every year, dozens of homes are flooded. That’s in part because 28% of the entire watershed in this region around Washington DC is paved over. But flooding isn’t the whole story.
“If a watershed is more than 10% paved you’re going to have impaired water quality.”
Jim Connolly is Executive Director of the Anacostia Watershed Society. He says stormwater smothers or poisons aquatic life, and causes erosion.
“It’s all the oil or grease that comes out of cars, the trash we throw in the streets, the pesticides we use in our lives. Stormwater is the base cause of all the problems in our urban rivers.”
So the town of Edmonston decided to do something about it. A new pumping station is keeping floods down, but the town wants to be a model for how to prevent stormwater runoff in the first place. So with federal Recovery Act money, the town is rebuilding its main street from top to bottom. Mayor Ortiz sidesteps a bulldozer to show off what’s now a construction site on the roadside.
“This is a bio-retention treebox, so instead of the water going directly into the drains and into the river, it will go directly into this bed.”
In that bed will go native trees grown in gravel and compost – to absorb and filter water. The street itself is going to be repaved with permeable concrete to let some water pass right through.
“The water’s going to filter naturally into the water table, so everything will be taken care of onsite as it was a few hundred years ago.”
85-90% of run off will be trapped by this system. But what about cost? Dominique Lueckenhoff directs the Office of State and Watershed Partnerships for this region at the Environmental Protection Agency.
“It is not more costly with regards to the refurbishing and additional greening of this street.”
But this wouldn’t have happened had this community not organized to fight for it. Allen Hance is with the Chesapeake Bay Trust. He says that to have a major impact, many more communities will have to follow Edmonston’s example.
“We want this to become a matter of course in how people build streets, and how they design streets.”
Edmonston will be putting all of its designs, and experiences online for other communities to use as a blueprint.
One NYC artist recruited arborists and neighbors to record messages about the city's trees. She placed markers in the cement listing numbers to call to hear the recordings. (Photo by Samara Freemark)
Trees along big city streets have a rough
life. Between pollution, development,
and vandalism, street trees die off at
a pretty alarming rate. One New York
artist thinks if people knew more about
street trees, they’d appreciate them more –
and treat them better. Samara Freemark reports from New York’s “Tree
Museum”:
Transcript
Trees along big city streets have a rough
life. Between pollution, development,
and vandalism, street trees die off at
a pretty alarming rate. One New York
artist thinks if people knew more about
street trees, they’d appreciate them more –
and treat them better. Samara Freemark reports from New York’s “Tree
Museum”:
When artist Katie Holten was commissioned to do a piece commemorating Grand Concourse boulevard in the Bronx, the first thing she thought of was trees. The Concourse, after all, is lined with them. The problem was, no one else seemed to notice they were even there.
“I had conversations with people who were sitting under the trees for the shade. And I’d ask them about what they thought of the trees. And they would say, ‘oh, there aren’t any trees on the concourse.’ But they were sitting underneath one.”
And if people did notice the trees, they weren’t always thrilled they were there.
“Kids told me that trees should all be chopped down because they couldn’t see the view. A teacher told me that all trees were the same, that there was only one kind of tree.”
People didn’t pay much attention to the trees. When they did, they often abused them – which is pretty common treatment for the trees that line city streets. People pin street trees with flyers. They spray trees with grafitti. They chain their bikes around trees, stripping their bark. City buses jump curbs and plow into trees. And developers chop them down to put up new buildings.
“You can’t just stick a tree in the ground and hope for the best. It’s a really tough environment.”
In fact, half of all trees planted in New York City die.
Holten figured one way to protect street trees was to get people to understand all the good that trees do.
So she recruited arborists and neighbors to record messages about the Grand Concourse’s trees. She placed markers in the cement listing numbers to call to hear the recordings. And she called the whole thing the Tree Museum.
“There are 100 trees along the 4 miles. And each of the trees gets a small marker. So we can walk up here to 165th street and I’ll show you one. Here’s one of the markers- nice and dirty.”
(sound of dialing in)
We dial and hear…
“I’d like to a moment to say thank you to this tree. This tree is busy cooling the air and helping to keep the river clean. The leaves in the canopy above are pulling water out of the air, reducing humidity, like an AC.”
It’s not really clear how many people are actually calling in to the museum, or whether the recordings are changing anyone’s mind. But it’s a start.
Joyce Hoagy lives further up the Concourse. She recorded a message for tree number 31. And now she feels kind of possessive of it.
“This is my tree. It’s a honey locust and I’m identified by it.”
Hoagy says Bronx trees have been under particular threat lately. This year the city cut down hundreds of mature oaks to make room for the new Yankees stadium.
“One street had these giant oaks, and they formed this canopy. And on the hottest day of the year you could walk down…people didn’t know what they had till it was gone.”
So now Joyce Hoagy’s spreading the word about the Tree Museum too. She hopes it will give her neighbors a hundred reasons to care about trees around them – and watch out for them.
Coal ash is sometimes used as an ingredient in concrete blocks (Photo source: Skepticsteve at Wikimedia Commons)
For decades coal burning power plants have dumped coal ash into landfills or ponds next to the plants. Tamara Keith reports environmental groups say that’s more dangerous that previously known:
Transcript
For decades coal burning power plants have dumped coal ash into landfills or ponds next to the plants. Tamara Keith reports environmental groups say that’s more dangerous that previously known:
A new report from the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice uses data from the US Environmental Protection Agency – including a study that had been kept quiet since 2002.
Among the findings, people who live near coal ash storage ponds that are unlined, and who get their drinking water from a well, have a 1 in 50 chance of getting cancer from arsenic contamination.
Lisa Evans is an attorney with Earthjustice.
“It by far presents the largest risk to human health and the environment and there’s no reason to manage the waste in this way.”
The groups are calling for these storage ponds to be phased out and cleaned up in the next 5 years.
The EPA says new regulations are coming soon.
Power companies are willing to stop using storage ponds – but don’t want the coal ash classified as toxic. That would make disposal more expensive.
Cement kilns produce mercury, which gets into the fish we eat making it unsafe (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
After years of urging, the US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing regulations to cut down on pollution from cement kilns. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
After years of urging the US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing regulations to cut down on pollution from cement kilns. Lester Graham reports:
Cement – the stuff used to make concrete – is made by baking limestone and other ingredients at really high temperatures in huge coal-burning ovens.
Burning the coal and baking the stone both release mercury. The mercury gets into the food chain and contaminates fish.
Mercury is a neuro-toxin, so eating contaminated fish can cause health problems, including IQ loss.
For 20 years Congress and the courts have been telling the EPA to do something about mercury pollution from cement kilns.
Jim Pew is a staff attorney with Earth Justice, an environmental group. It’s sued the EPA over the issue.
“The government response until now has not been to try to get mercury under control, since everybody agrees it’s a problem. The response has been to tell people ‘mercury is out there, so don’t eat the fish.’”
Under the EPA proposal, cement kilns would have to clean up the mercury and other pollution emitted from their smokestacks.
Ray and Irene Zukley of Zion,
Illinois were forced to sell this Lake Michigan
beach cottage to make way for Zion Nuclear Station
back in the late 60s. The Zukley's and other Zion
residents hoped the plant would last for at least
forty years, but after fits and starts, it closed
fifteen years early. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
The Zion nuclear station is a
few hundred yards from the shoreline of Lake Michigan.
Its generators have been off line for more than a decade. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Ray Zukley was a jeweler by trade. He
created pendants with images of the nuclear station's
twin cooling stations and sold them as reminders of Zion's
biggest economic boom. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
America has a new flirtation with
nuclear power. Utility companies are fanning
out across the nation to set up shop. And
they’ve given the government more applications
for new nuclear plants than they have for
decades. Many towns fell under the spell of
nuclear power in the past, but some power plants
stopped running decades earlier than planned,
and towns are stuck with what’s left behind.
Shawn Allee profiles one town’s tarnished
relationship with nuclear power:
Transcript
America has a new flirtation with
nuclear power. Utility companies are fanning
out across the nation to set up shop. And
they’ve given the government more applications
for new nuclear plants than they have for
decades. Many towns fell under the spell of
nuclear power in the past, but some power plants
stopped running decades earlier than planned,
and towns are stuck with what’s left behind.
Shawn Allee profiles one town’s tarnished
relationship with nuclear power:
Irene and Ray Zukley have been together so long, they finish each others sentences.
Especially when I ask how things were in Zion, Illinois back in the 60s.
Zuckley: “The factories were getting downgraded.”
Allee: “What were those?”
Zuckley: “It was the curtain factory, the cookie factory, chocolates and Zion fig
bars.”
But just then, the power company said it would spend hundreds of millions on a nuclear
power plant.
Irene Zukley says most people welcomed it.
“Ray and I never worried about it, you know we just wanted progress is what we
wanted. When you think of having taxes lowered for everybody in Zion, that made
you feel, what else would come in and do that?”
Irene and Ray Zukley were forced to sell their family’s beach cottage to make room for
Zion reactor number one.
Beachfront neighbors did the same.
But, like the Zukleys predicted, taxes and jobs rolled into Zion.
It was supposed to be a forty year windfall.
But it didn’t last.
When you visit the power plant, it’s nearly empty.
“What we’ve got here is what used to be a full-fledged control room.”
Ron Schuster runs what’s left of the Zion nuclear power plant.
Once, it had more than eight hundred employees.
Now, Schuster and about fifty workers help manage the regional power grid.
They also monitor radioactive spent fuel waste.
The generators have been offline since 1997.
“There were large pieces of equipment essential to making electricity that would
have needed total replacement going forward. We’re talking significant dollars so
the economic decision by the board of directors that Zion station would go into safe-
store mode.”
That means the power plant and Zion have been in limbo for ten years.
The radioactive fuel is still on site, but the plant provides no power, few jobs and a
fraction of the property taxes.
Delaine Rogers is Zion’s economic development director. She says the town didn’t plan
on this.
“You’re in a community that has welcomed you. We haven’t had an antagonistic
relationship. They’re not going to close. But they did. And it took 17 million dollars
of our local revenues. We were facing losing all our arts and music and sports in our
schools. How do you fund police the police department. How do you fix potholes? It
was a very scary time.”
Lately, the power company’s gone back and forth about when it will decommission, or
dismantle, the power plant.
It could be done ten years from now or it could take decades more.
But even when most of the buildings are gone, there’s still the radioactive spent fuel.
“They’re just going to leave it. They’re going to put a football-sized concrete pad
filled with 80-90 casks of stored fuel on site, above ground. Tell me how you get a
private developer to think residential or retail. I’m not buying the first condo.”
Dozens of towns are stuck in relationships with dormant nuclear power plants.
Delaine Rogers says the town of Zion is in the same position.
She won’t call it a bad relationship, but says it sure would be nice to know exactly where
it’s going, or when it will be over.
Rick Delisle co-owns two commercial buildings,
one of which is depicted in this photo that dates
from the time of Zion, Illinois' founding. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
The nuclear industry is eager to
build new nuclear power plants, but for
now they’re just far-off plans. The real
growth industry is in containers to hold
radioactive spent fuel. Dozens of closed
nuclear plants need somewhere to put spent
fuel waste, and these containers fit the
bill. Shawn Allee looks at why one town’s
bracing for their arrival:
Transcript
The nuclear industry is eager to
build new nuclear power plants, but for
now they’re just far-off plans. The real
growth industry is in containers to hold
radioactive spent fuel. Dozens of closed
nuclear plants need somewhere to put spent
fuel waste, and these containers fit the
bill. Shawn Allee looks at why one town’s
bracing for their arrival:
Illinois’ Zion nuclear power plant hasn’t produced electricity for eleven years.
It’s so close to Lake Michigan you can smell the beach. But other than that, the empty
parking lots and office space make the place seem dead.
The plant manager says that’s not the case.
“I think a lot of people have a vision of us playing cards or swinging our golf clubs
on the beach. I would say we’ve been extremely busy the entire time.”
Ron Schuster says he and other workers remove hazards from the station, like diesel fuel
and electrical equipment.
But one hazard is still here: the spent nuclear fuel.
And when the power plant is dismantled, that radioactive waste will be put in new
containers.
They’re concrete casks.
Schuster: “A cask is approximately fifteen feet tall. It looks like a small silo and
there is no radiation exposure on the outside of these things.”
Allee: “So from this office window, can we see where the casks might go?”
Schuster: “We’ve got four spots on this site that have been at least looked at. When
it comes time to actually put the fuel in dry-cask storage it will be a huge structure,
about as big as a football field.”
Schuster’s confident this will be a simple and safe solution.
Not everyone in Zion so convinced.
“This cask issue, just sitting on the site was never appealing to me.”
Rick Delisle co-owns two commercial buildings close to the power plant.
In other towns with spent-fuel casks, nuclear power plants sometimes get turned into non-
nuclear power plants or into parks.
But Delisle and the city of Zion are hoping to do more – maybe build new commercial
buildings or even homes.
Delisle says having concrete containers full of radioactive waste left on-site could make
their work harder.
“So, I hope the casks are relocated somewhere else. Having them next to a
population of about 23,000 people is probably not a great place for it to be.”
Other communities are in the same position – they’ll be left with spent fuel casks even if
their dead nuclear plants get torn down.
There’s a simple reason.
“We don’t really have a final resting spot for these casks at the moment.”
Dave Lochbaum is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.
“The federal government is way behind schedule providing a repository for high-
level waste.”
Lochbaum says the government has one storage place in mind.
It’s inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, but that’s still just being studied.
Power companies can sometimes move spent fuel to other plants or facilities.
But Lochbaum says politically, that just won’t fly.
“There’s no revenue from electricity being generated, so it’s a hard sell to go to a
community and say we’d like to have you store spent fuel for decades into the
future. The easiest way out is to leave it where it is, because those communities have
already accepted that fate.”
Well, cities like Zion say they didn’t accept this exact fate.
They bought into nuclear power for jobs and property taxes – they didn’t count on
babysitting spent fuel waste.
But that’s likely to happen, because the government won’t take it. The power companies
won’t dare move it, and the towns can’t move themselves away.
Later this year the Environmental Protection Agency is going to set court-ordered
standards for mercury pollution from cement kilns.
(Source: LinguisticDemographer at Wikimedia Commons)
The Environmental Protection
Agency is late in setting standards
for some smokestack emissions. Lester
Graham reports:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection
Agency is late in setting standards
for some smokestack emissions. Lester
Graham reports:
Maybe you’ve never seen a cement kiln. That’s where limestone and other materials
are baked using coal to make cement, used in concrete.
Later this year the Environmental Protection Agency is going to set court-ordered
standards for mercury pollution from cement kilns.
“It’s about time, isn’t it? I mean, the standards were due more than ten years
ago.”
That’s Eric Scheaffer. He’s with the Environmental Integrity Project.
The EPA had relied on self-reported estimates on mercury pollution from the cement
kilns. Turns out, after the EPA actually checked a few of the kilns, a lot of those
mercury pollution estimates were a little low.
“They’re now saying about 23,000 pounds a year. And that’s double the
previous estimates from EPA. So, the numbers are growing.”
Most states have issued advisories about mercury contamination of fish. Mercury
can cause neurological and developmental problems with fetuses and young
children.
For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.
The new de-icing product, GeoMelt, would use less salt than other methods of de-icing roads. (Photo by Lester Graham)
There’s been rising concern in recent years over the environmental impact of
road salt. The salt helps melt ice on the roads, but it corrodes cars and
damages bridges and concrete. Now, there’s a new way to help de-ice
roadways, and it comes from sugar beets. Dustin Dwyer reports:
Transcript
There’s been rising concern in recent years over the environmental impact of
road salt. The salt helps melt ice on the roads, but it corrodes cars and
damages bridges and concrete. Now, there’s a new way to help de-ice
roadways, and it comes from sugar beets. Dustin Dwyer reports:
The product is called GeoMelt, and it mixes with a salt brine to drop the freezing point
along roads. This method uses less salt than the traditional way of de-icing roads.
Chris Duffy is a GeoMelt salesman. He says it’s essentially de-sugared sugar beet
molasses. And it doesn’t require any new chemical processes:
“It’s considered a co-product of the sugar process. And, you know, what they were using
it for was a cattle feed. And we just have come up with a different use for it.”
GeoMelt also helps cut the amount of salt washing onto farmland where it can ruin crops.
Duffy says thousands of cities in every northern state are now using the sugar beet-based
product.
Prairie plants are being lost to development.(Courtesy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
Many modern medicines come from prairie plants or the fungus that is found beneath them. (Courtesy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
You’ve heard about the ark Noah built to save the world’s animals. Now comes news of another kind of ark – one designed to help save the world’s plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sandy Hausman has that story:
Transcript
You’ve heard about the ark Noah built to save the world’s animals. Now
comes news of another kind of ark – one designed to help save the
world’s plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sandy Hausman
has that story:
(Sound of walking through the prairie up then under)
You might say Pati Vitt is looking for the right stock to fill the ark.
She’s dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, her long brown hair in braids, a field
notebook in hand, and a pencil tied to her pants. For nine months of each
year, she wanders along railroad tracks, through old cemeteries and
nature preserves, filling shopping bags with the seeds of prairie plants.
Vitt is a conservation scientist with the Chicago Botanic Garden. She has
studied these plants since she was a child. She knows their Latin names.
She dreams about them at night. She even knows the intimate details of
their reproductive lives:
“One does it having teeny little flowers and taking small little bees, and
another one does it by having huge flowers and lots of nectar and they
have really big bees or maybe a moth that pollinates them.”
And, she says, prairie plants are hearty. Native to the Upper Midwest,
they can handle icy winters and long, hot droughts, but they can’t fight
plows or bulldozers. Farmers and developers have destroyed almost all
the land where prairie plants once grew. Today, one-tenth of one percent
of the original prairie remains.
“That means that what we’re looking at right here is one-tenth of one
percent of the population that this plant once enjoyed. I’m sorry. Even
though there’s a lot in this prairie, this plant should be endangered,
because there are so few acres of its habitat left and everyday we’re
coming and we’re taking more and more of it. The prairie habitat is more
endangered than tropical rainforest.”
That worries Vitt, not only because she thinks the prairie plants are
beautiful, but because they may have value to people. For example, she
says about half of our modern medicines came – originally – from plants
or the fungus found in the soil beneath them.
“If you think about penicillin… penicillin came from mold. We might be
standing on a treasure trove of antibiotics, which we need, but if we let
the plants go, we let the soil fungi go, we let the potential antibiotics go.”
(Sound of seeds dropping into a jar)
So Vitt is collecting prairie seeds from about 1,500 plants and shipping
them to the English countryside.
(Sound of birds)
Just south of London, the British government has built what it hopes will
be the largest seed bank in the world devoted to wild plants. The
building looks like a series of greenhouses made from concrete, stone,
glass and steel. In the basement, fire and bombproof vaults hold billions of
seeds from 24,000 species:
“That’s the exciting bit. We thought big.”
Michael Way is a scientist at the Millennium Seed Bank. He says it’s
needed now because a lot of wild plants are in danger of
disappearing because of global warming and the pace of human
development. Way believes a third of the world’s plant species could be
gone by 2050.
“You hope that the worst is not going to happen. Of course, from time to
time the worst does happen. If a plant population is destroyed, if a
decision is taken to build houses or factories or roads on a particular area
which was home to some quite special plants, seed banking is one tool
you can use to protect that genetic diversity that might be unique to that
site.”
Each day, seeds arrive from Africa, Australia, Europe, the Middle East
and the Americas. They sit in colorful plastic crates — waiting to be
cleaned, dried and frozen. Way says these seeds could survive for a
century or more.
“Seeds are tough – small but tough, and the whole point of seeds is to be
dormant and allow themselves to be transported around, so unless we do
something really stupid, they will remain viable.”
Back in the U.S., Pati Vitt says seed banks like the one near London
could mean the survival of humanity, since people can’t live without
plants.
“I think fundamentally we all understand that we are a part of nature, but
in our daily lives we get so cut off from it that we forget.”
She sees the Earth as a garden, and she wants people to act like
gardeners. Setting up seed banks is an important first step.
“We will have the tools that we need to bring things back if necessary.”
Fly ash particles at 2,000x magnification.
