The veggies in your garden could have lead in them (Photo courtesy of the USDA)
More Americans have started
planting their own gardens in recent
years. But it turns out a lot of
urban gardens are contaminated with
lead. Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
More Americans have started
planting their own gardens in recent
years. But it turns out a lot of
urban gardens are contaminated with
lead. Julie Grant reports:
Last year 22% of Americans planted a garden.
Wendy Heiger-Bernays is professor of environmental health
at Boston University.
She says if you have an urban garden, she would expect to find heavy metals, especially lead, in the soil. It comes from old garbage, dripping oil, and peeling paint.
“Older homes have been demonstrated to leach lead from the home through the drip line and into the soil.”
Even small amounts of lead in the blood can cause learning disabilities in children.
Heiger-Bernays says you don’t have to throw away this year’s veggies. Just wash them well. And peel root vegetables.
And to get ready for next year, Heiger-Bernays says have your
soil tested. If there’s lead, add a foot of clean compost to the top of the garden bed. Next Spring plant only in that top layer.
Lake Superior's South Shore, Wisconsin (Photo by Dave Hansen, courtesy of the EPA)
Congress might vote this fall
on a plan to triple the amount of money
for cleaning up pollution hot spots
around the Great Lakes. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:
Transcript
Congress might vote this fall
on a plan to triple the amount of money
for cleaning up pollution hot spots
around the Great Lakes. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:
The Great Lakes Legacy Act is supposed to remove contaminated sediment from harbors.
But, clean-up has been slow because there’s not enough money.
Although tens of millions of dollars have been authorized in the past, Congress and the
Bush Administration have not actually spent much of it on clean up projects.
EPA regional administrator Lynn Buhl says despite the history of the Legacy Act, more
money should be authorized.
“First of all, there needs to be an appreciation of how many players are involved in these
projects. They don’t come together overnight. I think we’ve done well to have completed
five already.”
Congress could increase the amount of authorized spending from 54 million dollars a
year to 150 million per year.
The EPA acknowledges a potential tripling of the funds for the Great Lakes Legacy Act
might not sit well with some Congressional budget hawks.
A team at Tufts University is working on sensors that could change color to
tell you if a bag of lettuce has dangerous bacteria in it.
(Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)
Researchers are working on a tool
that could tell you if your food is safe
to eat before you break open the bag.
Rebecca Williams has more:
Transcript
Researchers are working on a tool
that could tell you if your food is safe
to eat before you break open the bag.
Rebecca Williams has more:
A team at Tufts University is working on sensors that could change color to
tell you if a bag of lettuce has dangerous bacteria in it.
The special ingredient is silk. They boiled silkworm cocoons. And made a
thin silk film out of the proteins. The silk film has color changing properties
– like a butterfly’s wing.
Fio Omenetto is the lead researcher. He says it could be possible to activate
the film so it detects the presence of E. coli. Then the film could be put in a
bag of spinach.
“So immediately by looking at color change you will be able to tell whether
the spinach is good to eat or not.”
Omenetto says this is still pretty futuristic at this point. He says it’ll
probably be at least five years before you might see this at the grocery store.
The EPA is looking into storing CO2 emissions underground (Photo by Lester Graham)
The US Environmental Protection
Agency is looking at ways to make sure
carbon dioxide can be stored underground.
The agency is proposing rules that would
keep CO2 from seeping out of the ground or
cause problems for ground water. Chuck
Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
The US Environmental Protection
Agency is looking at ways to make sure
carbon dioxide can be stored underground.
The agency is proposing rules that would
keep CO2 from seeping out of the ground or
cause problems for ground water. Chuck
Quirmbach reports:
Some coal-fired power plants are looking into storing their carbon dioxide emissions
underground.
If the system works, it’d be a way to slow down climate change.
But EPA water administrator Ben Grumbles says injecting large volumes of CO2
to underground storage wells is a concern. So, he says the proposed rule calls for
extensive testing and monitoring.
“So that the CO2 doesn’t migrate. If it did, it could also push other fluids, like
salts, into that underground source of drinking water.”
Grumbles says if there was contamination, companies could be ordered to stop
injecting the gas. He says the rule also aims to make sure the CO2 doesn’t seep
from the ground into the air.
The EPA will take comments on its proposed rule until mid-November.
Apple grower Jim Koan has discovered that baby pigs are best for taking care
of fallen wormy apples in his orchard. He says they have very tender noses.
The adult pigs like to root around in the dirt and tend to tear up the
orchard. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Jim Koan's Berkshire pigs, enjoying the early spring mud. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Berkshire pigs like to investigate visitors. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Some of the guinea fowl that Jim Koan first tried to use to tackle the apple
pest, plum curculio. It was working, until hawks found out the orchard
was full of tasty little birds. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Jim Koan says being an organic grower means thinking ahead. Once you have
an infestation - it's too late. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
There are a lot of insects that love to eat
apples. A harmful insecticide that kills some of
those pests is being phased out. So farmers are
looking for other solutions. Rebecca Williams visits
an apple grower who’s counting on pigs to get some
help with his pest problem:
Transcript
There are a lot of insects that love to eat
apples. A harmful insecticide that kills some of
those pests is being phased out. So farmers are
looking for other solutions. Rebecca Williams visits
an apple grower who’s counting on pigs to get some
help with his pest problem:
(farm animal sounds – turkeys, etc)
The spring rains have started, and at Jim Koan’s pig pen that means mud.
(sound of shoes squishing in mud and piggy snorts)
Of course, these pigs don’t really seem to mind that.
“These Berkshires, you can see, are really friendly, they’re just coming
right up to you.”
Jim Koan really likes his pigs. That’s because he’s hoping the pigs will
take care of one of his worst pests. It’s a beetle called the plum
curculio. In early spring the beetles lay eggs in the little green apples.
The larvae hatch and eat the apples from the inside out.
Then the tree drops the bad wormy apples on the ground. And the worms just
keep on eating.
For a long time, farmers used an insecticide called azinphos-methyl to kill
the beetles. But the Environmental Protection Agency is phasing it out.
That’s because the EPA says the pesticide is very toxic to some wildlife and
it can make farm workers sick.
Jim Koan hasn’t used the pesticide for 10 years, ever since he became an
organic grower. So for years now he’s been trying to find a perfect
predator to stop the beetle larvae.
The chickens were too lazy. Hawks ate the guinea fowl that he tried.
So, finally, Koan says he had a flashback. His grandpa used to have hogs in
the orchard.
“When I would climb up to go up in the tree in the summertime to get a green
apple to eat all the hogs would come running over there and my granddad
always told me you stay away from those hogs they’ll eat you up! I’d be
really scared and be up there for an hour or two until the hogs left again.”
(laughs)
Koan says he knows now that the hogs were just hoping for a snack. So last
year he decided to buy some hogs and see if they would eat the wormy apples
on the ground. He says baby pigs worked best.
“And they’d just go up one row gleaning it, kinda like little vacuum
cleaners (makes sucking sound) and suck up all the apples!”
Koan says the baby pigs ate 98% of the fallen apples with beetle
larvae in them. But he still needed to know that the beetles were actually
gone, so they wouldn’t come back to attack his apples next year.
That job
was up to researchers at Michigan State University. Koan says they fed a
mix of beetle larvae and apples to pigs on campus.
“Then they put diapers on the hogs – truly, diapers!! It was unbelievable.
They took special superglue and velcroed it on their butt so then when they
defecated they caught all that. Then they took these poor students and made
them go through there and wash all that and look for worms.”
Koan says out of 200 worms that were fed to the pigs, they only found one
worm at the other end. That means, so far it looks like pigs are a
pretty good predator.
But the researchers don’t want to let pigs run wild – just yet. David
Epstein is the lead researcher on the project.
“Jim and I are scheming all the time. I have great expectations that this
could be a good management tool in the future but we have to figure out how
to do it properly.”
Epstein says they need to make sure the pigs don’t cause any contamination
problems. Something like E. coli. He says so far there isn’t any
evidence of that, but it’s the kind of thing you have to be sure about.
If this all goes well, the farmer and the scientist will be writing a book
together. It’ll be sort of a self-help book: getting pigs to take care of
what’s bugging you.
The bioswales are planted with species that are hardy and beautiful,
like this snowberry. (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)
Bioswales look like an extension of the homeowners' property, but
they're actually in the public right-of-way.
(Photo by Ann Dornfeld)
Each home's bioswale looks different; the plants were chosen in
conjunction with homeowners.
(Photo by Ann Dornfeld)
Some cities are looking at taking away parking
on residential streets and replacing it with shallow
ditches full of native plants that filter stormwater.
It’s a way to reduce the polluted runoff that flows
into lakes, rivers and the ocean. As Ann Dornfeld
reports, not everyone is thrilled with the idea:
Transcript
Some cities are looking at taking away parking
on residential streets and replacing it with shallow
ditches full of native plants that filter stormwater.
It’s a way to reduce the polluted runoff that flows
into lakes, rivers and the ocean. As Ann Dornfeld
reports, not everyone is thrilled with the idea:
We’re walking down a winding lane lined with maple trees, tall, dry grasses and
evergreens. Bright white snowberries dot the dark branches. It feels like a walk
in the country. But we’re actually admiring a big-city sewer system.
This little valley – a sort of shallow ditch – is called a “bioswale.” Its plants filter
out pollutants that run off the street. And special, thirsty soil helps the water
absorb into the earth. Sections of the street are narrowed to make room for the
bioswales, so some parking along the street is lost. But houses without
driveways get two parking spaces between the swales.
The bioswales have thick layers of native grasses, shrubs and other plants. It’s
kind of a wild, natural look. Debbie Anderson lives on a nearby street. As she
walks by the bioswale she says to her it just looks messy.
“We think it looked nice when it was first built, but it hasn’t continued to
look good, I don’t think. We moved out here because there was no
sidewalks and the streets were wide open and we like that. Lots of parking,
we can have lots of company. This way you can have, what, two people
that can come? That’s it! No. I don’t want it.”
That’s a pretty familiar argument to Bob Spencer. He’s with the City of Seattle’s
Public Utilities office.
“The big thing is the lack of parking. People really get into using these
street right-of-way shoulders as their personal parking spots.”
But not everybody thinks parking spots are more important than doing something
to reduce water pollution. Spencer says the neighbors on this street actually
competed with other blocks to get these bioswales. It’s free landscaping – and
the city even worked with each homeowner to choose plants that would blend
with their existing garden.
Spencer says the city’s traditional method of dealing with stormwater has washed
contaminants into a nearby creek.
“Well, in the surrounding streets around here, we have what’s called ‘gutter
and ditch’ drainage. And what happens is the water runs off the property
and the impervious streets and rooftops. And it enters a ditch and then
goes pell-mell screaming down to our local salmon-bearing creek, Piper’s
Creek.”
It’s not just Seattle’s creeks that are flooded with runoff. Untreated rainwater
flows straight into lakes and the ocean, polluting them. Cities across the country
are looking for ways to deal with toxic runoff like that.
Spencer says Seattle is pioneering
large-scale natural drainage. In other words, the rain is allowed to drain like it
does in the wilderness. The plant roots slow the water so it can absorb into the
earth. That helps prevent flooding. Pollutants like heavy metals, pesticides
and fertilizers are trapped in the soil, and some of them are broken down in these bioswales.
“So we’ve got a little bit more like a forested system in that we have a duff
layer that acts as a sponge.”
Spencer says the city hasn’t tested the water quality of the runoff that eventually
enters the creek. But he says the runoff has been slowed to a trickle.
“It infiltrates and holds and keeps here 99% of that runoff. So that’s a
pretty large flush of water that’s not entering the creek with this system.”
Officials in Seattle’s city government like the green look of the bioswales. And
they help the city meet federal pollution guidelines. City Council President
Richard Conlin says over the course of three bioswale projects, the city has been
able to lower the cost to about the same as conventional stormwater treatment.
Seattle’s newest bioswale system will be at the foot of Capitol Hill. That’s where
seemingly half of the city’s young people live, in blocks full of apartments,
nightclubs and parking lots.
“It’s actually the densest urban neighborhood west of Minneapolis and
north of San Francisco. So it has a lot of impervious surface.”
Stormwater from Capitol Hill rushes off the hard surfaces and down to a lake. So
the city is taking advantage of new development at the bottom of the hill. It’s
planning to filter the runoff through bioswales before it pollutes the lake.
“And once we’ve done that, I think we’re pretty much ready to say this is
the standard from now on.”
Conlin says the city will likely install bioswales in all new developments, and on
streets where the most runoff enters waterways.
He says cities around the country are contacting Seattle to find out how to install
bioswales of their own.
Vegetables in the produce section of a supermarket in VA. (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)
During the past 35 years, people have been getting
sick from contaminated produce more often. That’s according
to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Rebecca Williams reports:
Transcript
During the past 35 years, people have been getting
sick from contaminated produce more often. That’s according
to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Rebecca Williams reports:
After hundreds of people got sick from contaminated spinach and
lettuce, researchers started looking back at three decades of disease
cases. They found that people are getting sick from contaminated produce
more often. Bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella are often the cause.
Michael Lynch is one of the study’s authors. He says Americans are eating
more salads, but that doesn’t totally explain why there are more disease
outbreaks.
“We were a little surprised that that didn’t entirely explain the increase
but what else is contributing to that is not clear.”
Lynch says contamination can happen anywhere between the farm and your salad
plate. He says it’s important to thoroughly wash lettuce before eating it.
But he says that might not be enough to avoid getting sick.
He says stronger controls are needed at every step to try to prevent
contamination.
A river is polluted with one of the highest
concentrations of dioxins in the nation. The area is
downstream from a Dow Chemical plant. Kyle Norris has
more:
Transcript
A river is polluted with one of the highest concentrations of dioxins in the
nation. The area is downstream from a Dow Chemical plant. Kyle Norris has
more:
Scientists found an amount of dioxins 20 times higher than anything
previously found in the river. The hot-spot is 23 miles from a Dow Chemical
plant.
The EPA has required Dow Chemical to clean up sections of the Saginaw
and Tittabawassee Rivers in mid-Michigan. Dioxins have been linked to
cancer, reproductive problems, and heart and liver diseases, among other
things.
Milton Clark is with the Environmental Protection Agency. He says dioxins
do not break down in the environment:
“It’s very long-lived, it doesn’t readily biodegrade. And so if it’s present in
the sediments it can work itself up into the food chain, get into the fish, and
those fish then can be consumed by people, putting them at increased risk.”
The hope is that the dioxins will be cleaned from the rivers in the next
several years.
Public health officials are stepping up their concerns about global warming.
Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
Public health officials are stepping up their concerns about global warming.
Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Some predictions about rising global temperatures look at the potential threat to the environment
and wildlife, but the American Public Health Association says with more scientific evidence of
climate change, it’s time for local health departments to talk to people about the potential threat to
humans.
Environmental Studies Professor Jonathan Patz was a key author of a recent UN paper on
climate change. He says higher temperatures could lead to more heat waves, smog and
infectious diseases:
“…Carried by insects or water-borne diseases, if we’re talking about not only warming
but extremes of the water cycle and potential for contaminating our drinking water systems.”
The Public Health Association will take about six months to develop recommendations
for dealing with the human health impacts of climate change.
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 veggies in your garden could have lead in them (Photo courtesy of the USDA)
