The Energy Star Program is "a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy helping us all save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices" (Photo courtesy of Energy Star)
The federal government’s Energy
Star program is supposed to highlight
products that save you energy and money.
Rebecca Williams reports some independent
testers found Energy Star might be falling
a bit short:
Transcript
The federal government’s Energy
Star program is supposed to highlight
products that save you energy and money.
Rebecca Williams reports some independent
testers found Energy Star might be falling
a bit short:
The magazine Consumer Reports tests all kinds of products to see how they
stack up. They were testing refrigerators when they stumbled on something
odd.
Steven Saltzman is a Deputy Editor with Consumer Reports. He says the
Energy Star program relies on government standards that are outdated in some
cases. For example, one standard is to test a refrigerator’s energy use with the
icemaker off.
“But we found that when you turn the icemaker on – the refrigerator actually
used twice as much energy as it would with the icemaker off.”
Saltzman is not saying you can’t trust the Energy Star label. But he says the
tests need updating. And there’s a dark Energy Star secret, manufacturers get
to do their own testing in most cases – so there’s not a whole lot of third party
checking going on.
Colin Horwitz is a researcher at Carnegie Mellon. He's working on a chemical that will break down pollution released by pulp and paper mills.
(Photo by Reid Frazier)
Green chemistry looks a lot like the kind of chemistry most of us learned in high school. This is an experiment on a pollution-eating catalyst being conducted by a grad student at Carnegie Mellon’s Green Oxidation Lab.
(Photo by Reid Frazier)
Modern chemistry is everywhere – the paint on our walls, the ink on the morning newspaper, and the plastics in our computers.
Problem is – the chemicals are also in our air, water, and food. Reid Frazier visited a chemist who is trying to re-think how chemicals are made:
Transcript
Modern chemistry is everywhere: the paint on our walls, the ink on the
morning newspaper, and the plastics in our computers. Problem is – the
chemicals are also in our air, water, and food. The Environment
Report’s Reid Frazier visited a chemist who is trying to re-think how
chemicals are made:
This room looks and sounds like a chemical lab anywhere in the world.
Trays full of vials sit atop machines with blinking lights. Notebooks
filled with hand-written numbers sit next to computer screens. But this
isn’t a typical chemistry lab.
Evan Beach is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. He works at the Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry, or
Green Ox. Beach is analyzing wastewater from a pulp and paper mill:
“We try and work with as close to the real pollution as we can. We
actually have the paper mill ship the stuff to us.”
Beach is working on a chemical that he hopes will clean up the
wastewater before it hits rivers and streams.
The Green Ox lab is run by Terry Collins. His career as a green chemist
started as a college student in his native New Zealand. He worked
during summers at a plant that made refrigerators. One summer, he
discovered that workers using a cleaning agent were all getting sick.
“Just in lunch with them I’d hear about their headaches and their blood
noses and I realized, my goodness, they’re using an awful lot of these
organic solvents, and if there’s any benzene there, these are signature
benzene intoxication conditions, early stage.”
Collins calculated the workers were getting slowly poisoned by benzene,
a chemical that’s known to cause cancer. He told company officials
about it and they promised to replace it.
“So I went a way, nine months later, I felt an obligation I went back
and checked they had made no change so I went and I got every paper I
could and I took it and dropped it on the chief chemist and I can still
remember his jaw hitting the floor when I opened the door and gave it
to him, I then tried to get the institute of chemistry to help and they
told me not to even bother going to the health department, that they
wouldn’t help, and they were probably right, and I just felt immensely
frustrated by the situation.”
After this experience, Collins decided to focus his research on
reducing the harm caused by modern chemicals. He started designing a
chemical catalyst in the 1980s. When combined with hydrogen peroxide,
the catalyst eats through long chains of harmful chemicals. It could
potentially clean up the paper, textile, and plastics industries. It
could also curb pollution found in almost every home in America: The
water coming out of your tap.
“If you have a glass of water in most American cities you get some
Prozac and you get many other things as well that come from the
pharmaceutical industry.”
The drugs can be found in trace amounts in tapwater. Their effect on
human health is still unknown. But these drugs are being flushed into
the environment and they don’t break down easily. Once they enter
rivers and streams, these chemicals can last for decades. Scientists
believe they might be affecting fertility in some animals. Collins and
his colleagues believe the catalyst they’re developing could break down
these drugs once they hit the environment.
Some believe all chemists should take a more holistic look at the
compounds they make. Sasha Ryabov is a physical chemist who works in
Collins’ lab. He worked as a traditional chemist at Moscow State
University in his native Russia. Ryabov converted to green chemistry
when he came to Green Ox. Since he’s made the switch, he thinks that
all chemists should consider themselves green:
“It’s not the future field… It’s a natural part that cannot be
separated. The green chemistry we are thinking should be part of
chemistry as a whole.”
While academics like Collins are forging new grounds in their field,
some big companies have started to follow suit by using more
environmentally-friendly products. One hitch is that the federal
government provides little funding for research in the field. A bill
before congress could boost funding for green chemistry. Regardless of
funding, Collins says all chemists must do their part to address some
of the problems their discipline has helped create:
“If you’re a chemist, and you have this information, it’s a burden to
carry. But we have to deal with it, we have no choice; we have to look
after the children of future generations.”
For the sake of those future generations, Collins hopes more chemists
see the value of taking the long view when they’re in the laboratory.
Residents in many states find that large appliances are not allowed in
landfills. It's hard to get anyone to pick up things like tires, old
washers, dryers, and refrigerators.
If a resident can transport the
appliance, some salvage yards will accept it for a fee. The salvage
yards are supposed to recover refrigerant gases from refrigerators,
freezers, and air conditioners, because those gases damage the ozone
layer.
People have been secretly dumping old appliances almost as long as companies have made them. Too often, clean-up crews find old stoves, water heaters, and even refrigerators that people have thrown away improperly. Even the threat of big fines has not stopped the practice. So now, some Great Lakes states are beginning to set up programs to accept the old appliances. They’ve found it’s more effective than having to pick them up out of roadside ditches. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
People have been secretly dumping old appliances almost as long as companies have made them. Too often, clean-up crews find old stoves, water heaters, and even refrigerators that people have thrown away improperly. Even the threat of big fines has not stopped the practice. So now, some Great Lakes states are beginning to set up programs to accept the old appliances. They’ve found it’s more effective than having to pick them up out of roadside ditches. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.
It might be against the law to dump an old refrigerator or washing machine, but that doesn’t stop thousands of people each year from doing just that. And the reasons are simple, it’s hard to find a place that will take them, and those that do take them often charge a fee.
It got to be more of a problem in the 1980’s. Several states banned large appliances from landfills because they took up too much space. So, homeowners were left to their own devices to get rid of them. Then at about the same time, an increase in cheap imported steel forced down the price being paid for scrap metal. So anymore, fewer scavengers are making fewer rounds to pick up old appliances. That’s because much of the time, it just doesn’t pay. But, the few times when prices do get high enough, some of the scavengers will even pull appliances out of illegal dumping grounds to cart off and sell to steel recyclers. Greg Crawford is with the Steel Recycling Institute. He says the scrap metal market can have a great affect on where old appliances end up.
“That happens routinely year in and year out as the prices cyclically go up and down. And it is money. It is the scrap value of the iron and steel in the appliances that encourages the peddler trade to make these collection runs and then bring the appliances back into the scrap dealers.”
Besides looking horrible, dumping can also damage the environment. Many old appliances such as refrigerators, deep freezes and air conditioners contain coolant gases such as CFC’s that damage the ozone layer. If those gases aren’t captured, they’ll eventually leak out of the appliances. That’s why some governments are trying to come up with new ways to the problem of appliance disposal. Arley Owens is with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. He says Ohio is helping to lead an effort to make sure unwanted appliances are disposed of properly.
“We basically had to ask the question ‘Do you want to collect the appliances that people may illegally dump?’ Because in some cases when you don’t have enough money in your budget to buy food or to make ends meet for that particular month, there’s no way you’re going to take an appliance half-way across the county and then be charged a fee for the drop off and then the evacuation of the CFCs, which could run as much as anywhere from 30 to 40 to 75 dollars depending on the location.”
In Ohio, Owens says, each year the state gives each county’s solid waste management district a thousand dollars to publicize a drop-off period in the spring. Then, working with steel recyclers, they remove the CFC’s and send those old appliances to Ohio’s steel mills to be melted down for new products. But, most states don’t have such a program. In some cases, appliance stores will dispose of the old equipment for little or no cost when they deliver a new replacement. But, many of the large retail chains don’t. So those customers are on their own.
Some solid waste experts say that should change. Dana Duxbury-Fox has been a consultant on solid waste issues. She says someone should be responsible for making sure every big appliance will be recycled properly.
“And in my ideal world the manufacturer has that responsibility. If they made it –and particularly with products that have hazardous constituents– if they put those into the marketplace, they should be responsible for keeping it out of it.”
She suggests there should be a deposit on appliances, or a fixed cost included in the price that would pay for recycling services at the end of the life of the appliance. But those kinds of programs are hard to sell to lawmakers. That’s because despite the very real problem o illegal dumping. Big appliances are already being recycled at a higher rate than most steel products. In fact, according to the steel recycling institute, the recycling rate for big appliances increased from forty-one percent in 1990 to eighty-four percent last year. But still that leaves the question of where sixteen out of every hundred appliances end up. Greg Crawford with the Steel Recycling Institute says adding a fee or deposit probably wouldn’t be helpful.
“It would have the effect, really, of being a very expensive add on system that would perhaps get the incremental appliances, but it would be at a very high cost. It would not be the same efficient system that’s already in place, not withstanding the exception of improper dumping that some people erroneously choose to do.”
But, for many areas, especially rural areas’ dumping remains a problem because no one has offered a practical and inexpensive alternative. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
The Energy Star Program is "a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy helping us all save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices" (Photo courtesy of Energy Star)
