Styrene is one component in styrofoam containers (Photo by Renee Comet, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)
The styrene industry is suing to stop environmental officials from saying styrene could cause cancer and birth defects. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
The styrene industry is suing to stop environmental officials from saying styrene could cause cancer and birth defects. Lester Graham reports:
Styrene is used in all kinds of products – containers like coffee cups, egg cartons, in construction, in cars.
The state of California wants to add it to a list of cancer-causing materials. The International Agency for Research on Cancer found styrene is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”
Joe Walker is a spokesman for the Styrene Information and Research Center.
“Styrene is not a carginogen. Any listing that would categorize it as such basically would be illegal and would be erroneous and would have the potential of alarming the public unnecessarily about products that are made from styrene.”
If the court does allow California to put styrene on its cancer list, the styrene industry has a year to prove it doesn’t belong on that list.
Choctaw Chief Albert Naquin has watched his tribe's island - the Isle de Jean Charles - go from four miles across to a quarter mile across. (Photo by Samara Freemark)
Naquin's Choctaw tribe has lived on the island since the 19th century. (Photo by Samara Freemark)
Twenty-five families still live on the Isle de Jean Charles. (Photo by Samara Freemark)
Over the next century, rising
sea levels will change coastlines
all over the world. But the impact
might be most dramatic in South
Louisiana. A study out last month
predicts the state will lose up to
5000 square miles in the next
century – a chunk of land the size
of Connecticut. If the report’s
authors are right, that means a
lot of people in Louisiana are
going to have to relocate – become
climate refugees. Samara Freemark has the story of one of
the first communities to be displaced:
Transcript
Over the next century, rising sea levels will change coastlines all over the world. But the impact might be most dramatic in South Louisiana. A study out last month predicts the state will lose up to 5000 square miles in the next century – a chunk of land the size of Connecticut. If the report’s authors are right, that means a lot of people in Louisiana are going to have to relocate – become climate refugees. Samara Freemark has the story of one of the first communities to be displaced:
It was sometime in the mid-1970s that Albert Naquin first realized that Isle de Jean Charles was sinking. Naquin had grown up on the island. He’s the chief of a group of Choctaws who have lived there since the 19th century – and when he was a kid, it was a pretty good community: it had stores, a couple of churches, horse pastures and fields. But those are all gone now.
“Salt water kept coming in, faster and faster, and now it’s basically just beach.”
Isle de Jean Charles is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.
The list of reasons why is long. There’s subsidence- that’s the natural phenomenon where delta regions kind of settle down on themselves. There are the dams that block the sediment that used to wash down and build the land back up. There are oil company canals that slice through the wetlands, hurricanes that tear up the island’s coastline, and, of course, there’s rising sea levels.
All together they explain why Isle de Jean Charles used to be about 4 miles across and now has shrunk to a quarter mile.
“Now, we see the disaster that is Isle de Jean.”
We’re in Naquin’s pickup truck, and he’s driving me out to the island.
“See this little house moved across the way, this house. These 1, 2, 3 are deserted.”
Naquin himself moved off the island awhile ago. But for years he was happy to support families who chose to stay. In fact, when the US government came to him in 2002 and offered to pay to help people move off the island, he resisted.
“So, I said, ‘what they gonna do, tell us they’re gonna move us there and then next thing send us a bill for the house?’ You know, so I said, ‘no, that’s just a modern day Trail of Tears. We’re not moving.’”
But lately Naquin has just gotten tired. Tired of evacuating people before storms, tired of helping them rebuild after, tired of watching the sea nibble away at the island.
And so he decided – enough. For the past year he’s been on a mission to convince the 25 families still living on the island to abandon it.
“They’re not going to save the island. It’s going to be gone. Either we move now or we move later, ‘cause we will move.”
But not everyone is ready to leave.
(sound of greeting and talking)
Naquin pulls over to talk to Dominique Dardar.
Dardar’s house was leveled by Hurricane Gustav last summer. He’s rebuilding it with pieces of other houses he’s found blowing around the island- bits of roof and siding. Dardar says he’s not moving.
“I ain’t never gonna move. I’m gonna stay over here. That’s my territory.”
Across the street Wenselas Billiot lives in a house raised 13 feet in the air.
Billiot is Naquin’s brother in law. He’s in his 80s and has lived on the island his whole life. I ask him what he’ll do if the island shrinks any more.
“That’s going to be rough. But, as long as I can stay, I’ll stay. I was born and raised on the island. As long as I can stay here I’m going to stay.”
Albert Naquin hasn’t given up. He thinks if he can get everyone to agree, the government will help the tribe get a big piece of land where they can all relocate as a group. He’s already thinking of names for the new town.
“We could say, Island Number Two, or Isle de Jean Charles New Beginning, or something like that. But I think we just name it Isle de Jean Charles 2. I think that has a good sound to it.”
In short, Naquin is trying to figure out how to keep the idea of Isle de Jean Charles alive, even when the island itself no longer exists.
It’s a challenge many Louisiana communities could soon face.
One research team recovered polyvinyl alcohol from the computer screens, which can be used in medicine (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)
Some researchers want to recycle
a chemical in computer screens to
use it for a medical treatment.
Shawn Allee reports:
Transcript
Some researchers want to recycle
a chemical in computer screens to
use it for a medical treatment.
Shawn Allee reports:
Most LCD computer screens contain toxic mercury. The European Union will soon mandate those screens be recycled rather than thrown away.
There are other metals and chemicals in the LCD screens that are not dangerous.
Dr. Avtar Matharu is with Britain’s University of York.
His research team recovered polyvinyl alcohol from the computer screens.
It’s used in spongy pads that deliver medicine.
“We can take out Polyvinyl alcohol from the front and back of an LCD screen. We can take what effectively would be a waste resource and potentially use it in a medical application.”
Matharu says getting polyvinyl alcohol out of LCD screens is expensive compared to making it from crude oil, but he says it could be another reason to recycle rather than throw them into a landfill.
Now that surrogate moms raise the otters, the goal is for
the pups to never see or hear a human. To get up close to the pup, Ann had to put on a
Darth Vader costume of sorts. (Photo by Angela Hains)
An aquarium exhibit otter bonds with a pup, behind-the-scenes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (Photo courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation)
A sea otter mother and pup pair. Animals that can rejoin the breeding population get top priority in the aquarium stranding program. (Photo by Doc White, courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation)
For animals in most zoos and
aquariums, the door from freedom
to captivity only swings one way.
But at the Monterey Bay Aquarium,
sea otters from its exhibits teach
wild sea otter orphans how to
survive in the ocean. Ann Dornfeld
has the story:
Transcript
For animals in most zoos and aquariums, the door from
freedom to captivity only swings one way. But at the
Monterey Bay Aquarium, sea otters from its exhibits teach
wild sea otter orphans how to survive in the ocean. Ann
Dornfeld has the story:
Rosa has her baby in a headlock. That’s actually how
southern sea otters hold their young.
“The pup is essentially unconscious – it’s very much
asleep, and Rosa is holding it as a female would in the
wild: she’s got it sort of teed off to her side with a paw
around its neck.”
Andy Johnson is the director of the Monterey Bay
Aquarium’s Sea Otter Research and Conservation
program.
By the end of the19th century, sea otters had been hunted
to extinction in some parts of the Pacific.
Lilian Carswell is with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She says these days, pollution and disease are sea otters’
biggest threats. And she says a lot of other species
depend on otters’ survival.
“Sea otters are important for a number of reasons. One is
that they’re a top predator in the nearshore marine
ecosystem and they play an important role in structuring
what that ecosystem looks like.”
Hungry sea otters keep sea urchin populations in check.
When urchins overpopulate an area, they can mow down
entire kelp forests that provide food and shelter for
hundreds of species.
So to help conserve the otter population, Andy Johnson
and his team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium pair orphaned
pups from the wild with the female exhibit otters. The goal
is for the surrogate mother to not only care for the pup, but
also to teach it all the skills it will need to be released back
into the wild at about six months old.
A volunteer has just tossed some food into the pool where
Rosa and the orphaned pup are swimming. Rosa grabs
the live crab as the pup watches.
“Rosa’s quite skilled with those, so she’ll pretty much take
that apart in a few minutes. We’ll have to watch the pup
and see if the pup approaches the crab without getting
pinched. I have to admit it’s quite amusing to see these
young animals confronting these crabs ’cause these crabs
are pretty formidable on their own.”
Rosa ends up breaking off a leg for her adopted pup, who
decides the shell is too much work. Before long, though,
the pup will learn some of the same impressive skills that
adult sea otters have – like how to use tools to open clams
and sea urchins.
Before the surrogate program began, workers and
volunteers used to hand-rear these pups. They’d even
take the pups swimming in Monterey Bay to acclimate
them to their future home.
But that made the released otters expect food from
boaters and other people they encountered in the bay.
Now that surrogate moms raise the otters, the goal is for
the pups to never see or hear a human. We’ve been
watching the sea otters interact from a TV monitor near
the pool. To get up close to the pup, I have to put on a
Darth Vader costume of sorts – starting with a huge black
nylon poncho.
(sound of the poncho)
Ann: “This is a welding mask?”
Andy Johnson: “A very cheap welding mask.”
Rosa isn’t fooled. As I approach the pool, she shoots over
to see whether I have food.
(sound of the otter sniffing around)
Rosa was a rescued pup. She was hand-reared before the
surrogate program began. After she was released into
Monterey Bay, she had to be recaptured because she was
jumping on kayaks and divers.
“We found that with the sea otters, putting them with an
adult female in a fairly shallow pool for six months far
outweighs whatever we were doing trying to raise these
pups.”
Sea otter populations are recovering at a slow pace in
California. But this program is contributing to the
population.
Johnson says the apparent survival rate of the re-released
pups is now about as good as that of newly-weaned pups
in the wild. Some have even successfully raised their own
pups, using skills they picked up from an exhibit otter at
the aquarium.
A one day snapshot of wastewater from 96 cities and towns in Oregon shows that meth was found in many samples - not just larger urban areas (Photo courtesy of the journal Addiction)
A new report tracks illegal drug use by looking at wastewater. Rebecca Williams has more:
Transcript
A new report tracks illegal drug use by looking at wastewater. Rebecca Williams has more:
A lot of studies have found prescription drugs people take end up in wastewater, and now researchers are also tracking illegal drugs that way.
Caleb Banta-Green is the lead author of the report in the journal Addiction.
He studied a one day snapshot of wastewater from 96 cities and towns in Oregon.
He says cocaine and ecstasy were much more likely to be used in larger urban areas. But they found meth everywhere, even after a crackdown to make it harder to get the ingredients to make it.
“That sort of appetite or interest for methamphetamine has been built up in those rural areas and it looks like that use is continuing and it’s also being found in urban areas.”
He says it’s not clear if trace amounts of these drugs might eventually end up in drinking water. But previous studies indicate other kinds of legal drugs can be detected in sources of drinking water.
(Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
Whenever solar power is mentioned,
critics are quick to note – when there’s
no sun, there’s no power. Lester Graham
talked with the author of a report who
says one type of solar power can store
energy:
Transcript
Whenever solar power is mentioned,
critics are quick to note – when there’s
no sun, there’s no power. Lester Graham
talked with the author of a report who
says one type of solar power can store
energy:
Lester Graham: Concentrating solar thermal, or CST, can store power. Basically, mirrors are used to concentrate solar rays, heat up water, generate power. The heated water can be stored as heat in tanks – like coffee in a thermos – and produce electricity when needed. Britt Staley is with the World Resources Institute. She’s the lead author of a new report on concentrating solar thermal. So, you found, if it’s done right, CST could be built instead of coal-burning power plants. How practical is that?
Britt Childs Staley: We think that concentrating solar thermal is a very exciting renewable energy technology precisely because of this potential for storage. If you incorporate thermal energy storage, or fossil fuel backup, with your concentrating solar thermal, you can actually use the power of the sun around the clock.
Graham: Now, the CST plants are expensive – they’re more expensive than building a coal-burning power plant. So, why build them if that’s the case?
Staley: With climate change as a major concern in the US and around the world, we are going to need to reduce our dependency on coal in the power sector. And currently, as you said, concentrating solar thermal power is more expensive than coal, but in this report we’ve identified several policy interventions that could help reduce costs. For example, a price on carbon such as the cap-and-trade mechanism in the current Waxman-Markey Bill, and then some solar-specific policy interventions would help as well.
Graham: Now, when you say ‘policy interventions’, really you’re talking about government subsidies, right?
Staley: Yes. Support for R-and-D, for deployment such as the investment tax credit that’s currently in place.
Graham: Obviously, the most sunny places would be the best location for a concentrating solar thermal plant.
Staley: Mm-hmm.
Graham: And the most sunny places are often in arid places, such as the US Southwest. So, they’re the driest places, and CST relies heavily on water. So, in the long term, what’s the solution?
Staley: There are several alternative cooling technologies that are available and that can cut water by up to 95% to 98% in places where that is a concern.
Graham: Is this completely experimental, or have we seen this done anywhere in the world successfully?
Staley: It’s absolutely been done successfully. Here in the US, we have some of the longest operating CST plants. And Spain is another good example of where CST deployment has been particularly successful to date.
Graham: How long would it take to build one of these, and how soon could they contribute, and how likely is it to happen, given the cost?
Staley: A lot of the plants that we see on the drawing board right now are expected to be in operation in the next 2 to 5 years. With climate change concerns, with climate change legislation working its way through the House and Senate, coal plant investments are not particularly attractive right now. And investors are very wary of putting their money into something that’s going to be significantly more expensive in the coming years. Concentrating solar thermal, on the other hand, is a zero-emissions power resource. Also, it has zero fuel costs.
Graham: Britt Staley is the lead author of a report on concentrating solar thermal power plants. She’s an associate researcher with the World Resources Institute’s Climate Policy Team. Thanks very much for talking with us.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signs mandatory composting into law (Photo courtesy of the Press Office of Mayor Newsom)
San Francisco already leads the
nation in recycling. Now, that
city has the first mandatory
composting law in the country.
Emily Wilson reports that’s got
some people worried about “garbage
cops”:
Transcript
San Francisco already leads the
nation in recycling. Now, that
city has the first mandatory
composting law in the country.
Emily Wilson reports that’s got
some people worried about “garbage
cops”:
Putting recyclables into the blue bin is second nature for people in San Francisco.
But this new law now means also putting coffee grounds and eggshells into a green bin.
There are some people who are concerned about Big Brother looking through their garbage. And then there’s the $100 fine.
Mark Westlund at the Department of the Environment says ‘no worries.’ Not much is going to change.
“Well, we get a lot of calls from people who are worried about garbage cops and that frankly is not going to happen. For years now we’ve been looking in peoples recycling to make sure they’re doing it correctly and if not, they get a tag and if they continue misusing it, they get a letter and a follow up call and then a visit.”
So there are warnings before the fine.
Cities across the country will be watching San Francisco’s mandatory composting law to see how it goes.
Michigan Waste Energy Chief Engineer Brad Laesser checks the cameras and emissions data at Detroit's incinerator. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)
The Michigan Waste Energy facility shreds and burns hundreds of tons of trash each day. The plant makes enough electricity to power about half the homes in Detroit. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)
Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:
Transcript
Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:
About 300 garbage trucks dump their loads each day at the nation’s biggest
municipal incinerator.
“You see the conveyor house going across, that’s conveying the fuel to the
boilers.”
That’s Brad Laesser. He’s the chief engineer at the Michigan Waste Energy
facility in Detroit.
The “fuel” he’s talking about is shredded-up trash.
And he says that’s the beauty of facilities like this. They produce electricity.
“So right now we’re putting out about 50 megawatts. But we can go to
here.”
Laesser points to 70 on the output gauge. That’s enough electricity to power
about half the homes in Detroit. And the leftover steam is used to heat and
cool more than 200 buildings downtown.
Sounds great, right?
Well, Brad Van Guilder of the Ecology Center says not so much.
“Be wary of people coming and talking to you about large, expensive magic
machines that are going to dispose of your waste for you.”
Van Guilder says municipal waste incinerators are major contributors to
smog, and spew dangerous pollutants like dioxin, lead and mercury.
And he says huge furnaces like Detroit’s make it nearly impossible to get
viable recycling efforts off the ground.
“Think about what’s in the trash that you throw out every day. One of the
most important components is paper and plastic.”
Both can be recycled. But Detroit has not had a curbside recycling program
for the past 20 years. That’s because the contract with the incinerator
required that all trash picked up at the curb be used to keep the furnaces
burning.
That changed this summer, though – when the contract expired. Now about
30,000 households are part of a curbside recycling pilot project. And there
are drop-off sites where people can take their recyclables.
(sound of recycling center)
Matthew Naimi heads an organization that runs several drop-off sites, and –
maybe surprisingly – he’s okay with the incinerator. Naimi says he sees
trash disposal and recycling as two separate industries.
“I realized that if we shut the incinerator down before we got a good
established recycling program running, we’d be burying our recyclables
instead of burning them.”
And officials with Covanta – which runs the Detroit incinerator – agree that
recycling and incineration can work together.
Paul Gilman is the chief sustainability officer for Covanta. He says landfills
are the problem – not recycling.
“Landfills and energy-from-waste facilities, that’s where the competition is.
It isn’t at the upper step of recycling.”
He says cheap landfill space makes the economics of incineration difficult.
But he’s hoping that could change with the passage of a climate change bill
in Washington. Gilman says in Europe and Asia, trash incinerators like
Detroit’s don’t get treated the same way as power plants fueled with coal or
natural gas.
“So in Asia, under the Kyoto protocols, a facility like this actually generates
what are called greenhouse gas credits. They’re reducing greenhouse gasses
by the act of processing solid waste and keeping it from going to a landfill.”
Where trash produces methane – a potent greenhouse gas.
But the people who want the incinerator shut down say they don’t believe
burning trash is the greener way to go. They want the city to landfill its
waste while it builds an aggressive recycling program.
So far, they’re not getting what they want from city leaders.
The board that oversees how Detroit handles its trash recently voted to go
with incineration for at least the next year.
Arctic ice builds up in the winter, but when the sun shines on it, some of the ice melts (Photo by Jeremy Harbeck, courtesy of NASA)
A NASA study finds that Arctic ice is melting
faster than expected. Mark Brush reports:
Transcript
A NASA study finds that Arctic ice is melting faster than expected. Mark Brush reports:
In the winter – Arctic ice builds up. But when the sun starts to shine on the pole – like it is now – some of that ice melts. But there’s a thicker ice sheet that can usually survive through the summer. On average it’s nine feet thick.
NASA recently published a new study on that thick ice in the in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans. They measured the ice from 2004 to 2008. In that time – 42% of this thick ice melted.
Ron Kwok headed up the study for NASA. He says when you lose this thick ice – it changes things:
“There’s a lot of heat going into the ocean. Whereas if you had an ice cover, a lot of that radiation is reflected back into space.”
Kwok says a warmer ocean in the arctic speeds up melting. And warmer arctic waters can drive all kinds of big changes in climate patterns around the world.
Polar bears on sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. (Photo courtesy of Jessica K Robertson, USGS)
Studies from NASA and many other U.S. agencies report the Arctic ice is melting at a rapid rate. Scientists say it’s the most visible and dramatic
evidence of global warming. One of the symbols of climate change in the Arctic is the polar bear. Lester Graham talked with the senior polar bear
scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Steven
Amstrup, about the future of the bear:
Transcript
Studies from NASA and many other U.S. agencies report the Arctic ice is melting at a rapid rate. Scientists say it’s the most visible and dramatic
evidence of global warming. One of the symbols of climate change in the Arctic is the polar bear. Lester Graham talked with the senior polar bear
scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Steven
Amstrup, about the future of the bear:
Steven Amstrup: Well, we believe that in the long term, polar bears are in trouble because of the projected changes in the sea ice resulting from global warming. Polar bears are entirely dependant on the surface of the sea ice to capture their prey – which are principally ringed seals and bearded seals. And, as the sea ice area declines, and as it is gone for longer periods of time, that, in essence, is a decline in the caring capacity of the environment for polar bears.
Lester Graham: Now, how much have polar bear populations declined?
Amstrup: We only have really good information on the trend in numbers for just a couple of populations. The best known are the ones in the Southern Beaufort Sea of Alaska and the Western Hudson Bay of Canada. And there we’ve documented that the populations are apparently declining now, and suggest that they will be continuing to decline in the future.
Graham: I’m wondering, can we – regular, everyday folks – do anything to help the polar bears?
Amstrup: Well, our studies were pretty conclusive that greenhouse gas contributions were the principle threat to polar bears. This was recently reaffirmed by the latest meeting of the polar bear specialists that met in Copenhagen. And so, if you take that to heart, you can say, ‘what is my responsibility, as an individual, to do what I can to reduce my greenhouse gas footprint?’ And I think that’s where it really starts – people taking individual responsibility for the way that they live. And, of course, it goes beyond greenhouse gasses. It’s, you know, ‘what is our total footprint on the environment, in terms of the amount of pollutants, the amount of waste that we create’ – whatever. Each individual has a certain amount of responsibility to monitor their impact on the environment in that way.
Graham: You know, down here, in the lower 48, I’ve only seen polar bears in a zoo, animated ones in Coca Cola commercials – there’s a little bit of a disconnect. You have written dozens and dozens of scientific papers about the polar bear, I’m wondering – why you think we should care about them, and why do you care about polar bears?
Amstrup: Yeah, I’ve been studying polar bears for 28 years and the studies involve going out over the sea ice with a helicopter, searching for bears. And, after doing that for 28 years, I can still say that every field season, the first polar bear we see, it’s this, ‘(gasp) wow, there’s a real, wild polar bear.’ They’re just magic creatures. And I don’t know that I can put my finger on exactly why I’m so impressed with polar bears. Technically, it’s their ability to survive in this harsh environment, and their great beauty as they move across that harsh environment. And, as a scientist, my role is to try and collect the information, the technical information that will allow managers and policy makers to make the best decisions possible regarding the future of the polar bear.
Graham: Steven Amstrup is the senior polar bear scientist with the US Geological Survey. Thanks very much for talking with us.
Styrene is one component in styrofoam containers (Photo by Renee Comet, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)
