California is seeking to ban Styrofoam carry-out containers (Photo by Renee Comet, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)
This week, one state is voting on a bill that would make it illegal for restaurants to serve takeout food in Styrofoam. Rebecca Williams has more:
Transcript
This week, one state is voting on a bill that would make it illegal for restaurants to serve takeout food in styrofoam. Rebecca Williams has more:
A number of cities have banned Styrofoam food containers – including San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. And now California lawmakers are deciding whether to ban the containers.
The bill says styrofoam is a big litter problem. And animals can choke on pieces of it.
The World Health Organization’s cancer research agency says styrene is a possible human carcinogen. Styrene is the stuff styrofoam’s made out of.
Jerry Hill is the Assembly member who introduced the bill in California. He says the American Chemistry Council and other groups are making it hard for him to get the votes he needs.
“You would think the world was going to come to an end if we were to prohibit and ban Styrofoam. It’s an industry that whether you look at the chemical industry, the restaurant industry that’s opposing it, and they are very vocal and very powerful.”
The opponents say there’s no reason for the ban, and they say it would be bad for the economy.
Most cities discourage you
from throwing your Christmas tree
away. Rebecca Williams takes a look
at what you can do with your tree:
Transcript
Most cities discourage you
from throwing your Christmas tree
away. Rebecca Williams takes a look
at what you can do with your tree:
In a lot of cities you can drop your tree off, or a city truck will come and
pick it up. Then they’ll run it through a big chipper and make mulch. Cities
use the mulch for parks or zoos. And sometimes you can buy some of that
mulch for your own yard.
Bryan Weinert is a solid waste coordinator in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He
says you’ve got to make sure you take all the ornaments and tinsel off the
tree before you put it at the curb.
“You know that compromises the quality of our finished product and in
some cases can actually damage our grinding equipment.”
Other places use the trees to create fish habitat. And this year, when the
Vatican is done with its 108 foot tall Christmas tree, it’ll use it to make
wooden toys.
Jeffrey Langbehn beside one his family's hunting catches. He directs the Lake County Solid Waste Management District. His enthusiasm for the outdoors is one reason he says he supports the idea of finding landfill alternatives. The prospect of lower waste-handling costs is another. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Trash is usually out of sight, out of mind, but occasionally garbage grabs attention – especially when it starts costing a lot. Landfill fees are rising, and with higher costs to ship or truck garbage, a lot of communities are scrounging for alternatives to landfills. Reporter Shawn Allee found one community that hopes a trendy fuel might solve its garbage problem:
Transcript
Trash is usually out of sight, out of mind, but occasionally garbage grabs attention – especially when it starts costing a lot. Landfill fees are rising, and with higher costs to ship or truck garbage, a lot of communities are scrounging for alternatives to landfills. Reporter Shawn Allee found one community that hopes a trendy fuel might solve its garbage problem:
For most of us, there’s nothing less sexy than trash. But in part of Indiana, that’s changing.
“One second.”
“Take your time.”
I’m waiting for Jeff Langbehn. He heads a solid waste district in Northwest Indiana.
Lately, Langbehn’s phone is ringing off the hook – from reporters and colleagues. And why are they calling? Basically, it’s because Langbehn’s county is leaning toward doing something new with garbage – something that intrigues trash bureaucrats, maybe even the one in your town.
You see, Lake County Indiana is this close to letting companies convert most of its garbage into ethanol, you know, to run cars. Langbehn says his landfill costs are rising quickly. In his case, that would be 42 dollars per ton.
“The two garbage to ethanol providers were for $17.50 ton. Those savings alone made our board say, hey, we have to pay attention to this.”
And so Lake County Indiana sat down with the ethanol operators.
“And we asked the hard questions like, ‘are there any of these things operating in the country?’ All the standard questions you would ask.”
Shawn Allee: “Wait a minute, when you asked who else has done this and they said, no one, what did you think?”
“Well, the fact of the matter is that the components are being used, and have been used for a very, very long time.”
Sure, some components of garbage-to-ethanol technology have been around for a while. But, if you ask ethanol producers where they actually turn trash into ethanol, they say they can do it in labs, or in test facilities. That’s got some folks in the trash biz nervous.
“I guess I’d say I’m cautious and wary of using any new technology to process solid waste.”
Jeremy O’Brien researches trash for the Solid Waste Association of North America – a trade group. He’s seen landfill alternatives come and go.
“Early on in the 1970s we tried a number of technologies including composting the waste stream, anaerobic digestion, and then we also tried incineration.”
Of those, only incineration survived, but early incinerators had a nasty habit of spewing toxic pollutants, stuff like dioxin, out their smokestacks. O’Brien says incinerators are now cleaner.
His point, though, is that it takes time to improve technology. He worries some communities bent on turning garbage into ethanol could end up holding the bag.
“The facility could fail early on and they’d be stuck without having a place to put their waste.”
Indiana’s Jeff Langbehn says that won’t happen to his county. He says the ethanol companies will cover their own financing, and the county will have insurance as a backup. But speaking of backups, there already is another landfill alternative, right?
Shawn Allee: “Why can’t we just recycle all this and make it into stuff people buy again?”
“There are a number of people out there that could give a rat’s patoot about recycling. And that’s the waste stream we’re having to deal with. The other reality is, recycling is expensive, so I don’t believe it’s a realistic possibility for us to recycle everything, both from a cost standpoint and a societal standpoint.”
So, Langbehn says recycling helps, but ethanol might do more. He says he kind of wishes someone else would try trash-to-ethanol technology first, but it’s worth testing out.
And he says it might be so cheap he won’t even have to hold his nose.
Russ Allen breeds and grows thousands of shrimp in a
barn in his backyard. The entire process is contained. There's no water
coming in or going out, and there's no waste leaving his farm. (Photo by
Corbin Sullivan)
Russ Allen sells all the fresh shrimp he produces three days
a week at his market in Okemos, Mich. (Photo by Corbin Sullivan)
Russ Allen breeds shrimp in big tanks of water that mimic
an environment off the shore of the ocean, where the water quality and
temperature are stable. (Photo by Corbin Sullivan)
Recently, shrimp surpassed tuna as the most-consumed seafood in the United States. Most of the shrimp Americans eat is produced in Southeast Asia, India, Mexico and Brazil. Russ Allen wants to change that. He’s opened one of the world’s few indoor shrimp farms in the Midwest. Allen says his operation meets an obvious market demand, is good for the environment, and presents a new economic opportunity for the country. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:
Transcript
Recently, shrimp surpassed tuna as the most-consumed seafood in the
United States. Most of the shrimp Americans eat is produced in
Southeast Asia, India, Mexico and Brazil. Russ Allen wants to change
that. He’s opened one of the world’s few indoor shrimp farms in the
Midwest. Allen says his operation meets an obvious market demand, is
good for the environment, and presents a new economic opportunity for
the country. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:
In a big blue barn in Russ Allen’s backyard, there are thousands of
shrimp… beady-eyed, bacteria-munching, bottom-feeders.
Here, the life cycle of the shrimp starts in the breeding center, where
two big tanks of water mimic a place 150 feet deep off the shore of the
ocean where the water quality and temperature are stable. Allen says
it’s the perfect environment for shrimp to mate.
“Like in just about all animals the male chases the female, and they do a
little courtship dance, and then the male will deposit a spermatophore on
the female and when she spawns, the eggs pass through the
spermatophore, are fertilized and then go out into the water.”
A few months later, the shrimp end up in the production room where all
they do is eat, and sometimes, if they get excited or spooked, they jump
right out of their tanks.
“They don’t like light…”
“Oh (laughing)! Do you ever have them hit you as you’re standing
here?”
“Oh yeah, that’s why we have the nets up so they don’t jump.”
Russ Allen has been farming shrimp for three decades. He started in
Ecuador, and then went to Belize, where he started the country’s first
shrimp farms.
Allen and his wife moved back to Michigan in 1990, when he started
designing his indoor shrimp farm. It finally opened for business about a
year ago, and now, he’s selling all the shrimp he produces.
(Sound of shrimp market)
Allen says his indoor shrimp farm is one of the first of its kind in the
world. There’s no waste leaving his farm, so pollution’s not an issue,
and because there’s no water coming in or going out, there’s no danger
of introducing diseases into his system.
Allen says an indoor farm also moves shrimp farming away from fragile
coastal ecosystems. That’s where most of the industry has developed
around the world.
“In a place like the United States with all the development on the
coastline and land costs, you can’t really do it anywhere near the ocean
anyway. So, if you’re going to have a viable shrimp farming system in
the United States, you need to move it away from – you know – these coastal areas.”
But indoor farms haven’t always been a viable option, either.
In the 1980s, a handful of them opened in the U.S., including a big one in
Chicago. They all failed because the technology didn’t work quite right,
and because the cost of production made them unable to compete with
outdoor farms.
Bill More is a shrimp farming consultant and vice president of the
Aquaculture Certification Council. He says now, indoor shrimp farmers
have a better chance of making a go of it.
“Coming from third-world countries, there’s been a lot of issues with
illegal antibiotics being found in shrimp. There’s been environmental
and social issues that environmentalists have come down hard upon. It’s
sort of prompted the opportunity for a good indoor system where
you could manage those and you didn’t challenge the environment.”
But More says creating and maintaining a clean, organic indoor shrimp
farm is still very expensive, and it seems an even bigger problem now
that the price of shrimp is the lowest it’s been in a decade.
Shrimp farmer Russ Allen says he’s invested several million dollars in
his business. He’s the only guy in the game right now, which he
admits is good for business, but he doesn’t want it that way. He says
he’d like to see the industry grow in Michigan, and throughout the
country.
“In order to do that the government has got to be a partner in this, and
that has been the challenge… that when you don’t have an industry, you
don’t have lobbyists and nobody listens to you and you can’t get an
industry until they do listen to you. So, that’s been our real challenge
right now.”
Allen says he wants the government to offer tax breaks and other
financial assistance to the aquaculture industry like it does to other
sectors of the economy, but he says he can’t even get some local elected
officials to come and see his shrimp farm. He says with so many
companies moving jobs and factories overseas, he thinks government
leaders should be looking for ways to help new and perhaps
unconventional industries like his, grow.
The pesticide diazinon is being phazed out by the EPA for being hazardous. Some gardeners are still buying it despite health warnings. (Photo by Scott Schopieray)
A powerful pesticide that’s popular with gardeners
and homeowners will no longer be sold starting in January, but that
hasn’t stopped people from stocking up on the chemical before it’s
pulled from shelves. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris Lehman reports:
Transcript
A powerful pesticide that’s popular with gardners and homeowners will no longer be
sold starting in January. But that hasn’t stopped people from stocking up on the
chemical before it’s pulled from the shelves. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Chris Lehman reports:
Diazinon, at one time, was the most widely used pesticide on lawns. It can
still be sold through the end of the year. But there’s no deadline for homeowners
to use up their supplies. So that’s led some people to stockpile the product. The
decision to ban diazinon was made during the final weeks of the Clinton Administration.
But the Environmental Protection Agency gave diazinon producers four years to phase it out.
Jay Feldman is director of the environmental group Beyond Pesticides. He says the EPA
should have banned diazinon outright instead of phasing it out gradually.
“When the agency identifies a hazard such as this, one that is particularly problematic
to children, it ought to institute a recall, get the product out of commerce, make sure
that people do not continue to use the product unwittngly.”
Officials at the EPA say over-exposure to diazinon can affect the nervous system. They
also say it poses a risk to birds.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chris Lehman.
A little exposure to natural outdoor areas might go a long way toward easing the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactive disorder in kids. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Rogers has more:
Transcript
A little exposure to natural outdoor areas might go a long way toward
easing the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactive disorder in kids.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Rogers has more:
Previous studies linking the outdoors to relaxation prompted University
of Illinois researchers to survey the parents of more than 400 children
diagnosed with ADHD. The researchers asked parents to monitor
their kids’ behavior and performance after play or study periods
indoors, outdoors in an urban setting like a parking lot, and outdoors
in greener areas.
Francis Kuo co-authored the study. She says the natural settings
seemed to improve symptoms.
“This doesn’t have to be something spectacularly natural. Just getting
your kid out in a green, tree-lined street would be good, or in the
backyard, or even the neighborhood park. You don’t have to take them
to Yosemite for these benefits.”
The study didn’t make any conclusions about whether nature could take
the place of medication, but Kuo says there’s a real potential that it
could at least help kids who don’t tolerate drug treatment well. The
study appears in The American Journal of Public Health.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tom Rogers.
California is seeking to ban Styrofoam carry-out containers (Photo by Renee Comet, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)
