Tag: safety

Whose Grass Is Really Greener?

  • Molly Aubuchon and Stefan Meyer survey their lawn. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Many Americans love full, lush
lawns. Fertilizers and herbicides
might help. But there’s concern
about water pollution from lawn
chemicals. Julie Grant reports
that some experts say you can use
them, just don’t over-use them:

Transcript

Many Americans love full, lush
lawns. Fertilizers and herbicides
might help. But there’s concern
about water pollution from lawn
chemicals. Julie Grant reports
that some experts say you can use
them, just don’t over-use them:

Molly Aubuchon and her husband Stefan Meyer aren’t sure
what they’re going to do. Their two little kids are running
around the yard. Stefan wants a lawn of thick, soft grass for
them to play on. But that’s not what he’s got.

Stefan: “As you can see, there’s no grass here.
I don’t know what some of this stuff is. Some kind of moss.
I think even the moss died, so now we have dead moss
that’s like yellow and brown.”

Molly: “It’s not attractive dead.”

Stefan: “No. I just think, when I’m out here cutting my grass,
I’m like, man, if I lived across the street, I’d be like, ‘hey look,
they’re cutting absolutely nothing again. They’re just running
that lawn mower over bare spots.’”

They see their neighbors, with those thick, green lawns,
spreading chemicals a few times a year. Molly and Stefan
don’t want to do that.

Molly: “Well, the fact that I’ve got kids running around here
all day. And the fact that it seeps into the water supply and
the rivers, that’s a concern to me.”

There are lots of people who are concerned about lawn
pollution. Lawns have gotten a bad wrap in some places –
because of the fertilizers and other chemicals people use on
them. In much of Canada, lawn chemicals have actually
been banned.

Lou DiGeranimo is General Manager of Water in Toronto.
He says lawn chemicals were damaging the water quality.

“People were over-fertilizing, they were using commercial
pesticides. That chemical ended up in the rivers and ended
up in the lake. We passed a bylaw that prohibited that.”

But some experts say the chemical bans in Canada are
extreme.

David Gardner is professor of turf grass at the Ohio State
University. He doesn’t think banning lawn chemical will do
anything to improve the environment.

“Based on the work that I have seen, based on the research
that has been conducted, I believe that if there is a unilateral
ban on the use of pesticides it will make absolutely no
impact on our environmental footprint.”

Gardner says compared to
other sources of pollution, like cars and over-use of
chemicals on farms, the impact of lawn care is miniscule.

Still, Gardner says people like Molly and Stefan can keep
nice lawns – without using a lot of chemicals.

He says you’ve got to cut the grass and water regularly.
He also recommends fertilizing lightly in the spring and more
heavily in the fall.

That’s what Gardner does at his house – and he uses only 6
to 8 ounces of herbicide a year.

“Putting it another way, if I were to go to a store and buy one
of those gallon jugs of ready-made herbicide, that would be
enough to last me for about 16 years.”

Gardner says the herbicide will hit its expiration date before
he has a chance to use it all.

But Molly and Stefan just aren’t sold. They don’t want to use
lawn chemicals just to appease the neighbors.

Stefan: “I just want to feel good about the way my yard
looks for my own satisfaction. I would like to cultivate some
grass that looks good, you know, with my hands.”

Besides, Stefan says, they don’t have the worst looking lawn
on the street and they’d just rather not add unnecessary
chemicals into the environment.

Stefan: “We don’t have the worst lawn on the street. Our
street is not that long. It’s only four blocks, five blocks long –
there’s a house down there and their yard looks worse than
ours.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Salmonella Vaccine Coming Soon?

  • While a salmonella vaccine is in the works, researchers don't think it's suited for countries like the United States (Photo courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control)

Researchers are working on a new vaccine to prevent salmonella poisoning. But, Julie Grant reports, the researchers say it probably won’t help us when we’re faced with salmonella tainted tomatoes or alfalfa sprouts:

Transcript

Researchers are working on a new vaccine to prevent salmonella poisoning. But, Julie Grant reports, the researchers say it probably won’t help us when we’re faced with salmonella tainted tomatoes or alfalfa sprouts:

Salmonella poisoning affects about 20-million people worldwide each year and causes 200,000 deaths. A vaccine might sound like a good idea.

Arthur Thompson has been working on one at the Institute of Food Research in England. His group has found that salmonella relies on glucose for its survival. So they’re designing a vaccine to use that against the bacteria.

But Thompson thinks a salmonella vaccine should not be used to solve a problem that industrialized nations can already prevent.

“I don’t think it would be appropriate really, for something like this. I mean, I think in this case, it’s more a case of preventing the contamination in the first place, really.”

Thompson says the vaccine is better suited for people in developing nations where salmonella causes still causes typhoid fever.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Using Your Phone to Pick Products

  • Good Guide allows you to look up products while you're in the store and see how they're rated in terms of safety, environmental impact, and social concerns (Photo courtesy of Good Guide)

Companies that make things like cosmetics, household cleaners, and toys are not required to list every ingredient that’s in their products. Now, some shoppers are dialing up that information on their cell phones. Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Companies that make things like cosmetics, household cleaners, and toys are not required to list every ingredient that’s in their products. Now, some shoppers are dialing up that information on their cell phones. Mark Brush has more:

There’s a new app for the iPhone that can give you information about products. It’s called Good Guide.

And you basically take a picture of a barcode – on say a bottle of shampoo – and then Good Guide gives you a score.

The guide can rate products on their environmental footprint – how socially responsible the company is – or how safe it is.

Other phones can access the same information using text messages.

Dara O’Rourke is the founder of Good Guide. He says he started the company after he discovered a sunscreen that he put on his daughter contained a potential carcinogen.

“And that really initially, actually kind of upset me, that this product that I’m bringing into my house and putting on my young daughter has chemicals that have been banned in Europe, banned in Australia, banned in many industrialized countries, but still are in products on our store shelves.”

O’Rourke says if consumers are interested, they can access the research and the life-cycle studies behind each product’s overall score.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Keeping Chemicals a Secret

  • Drilling for natural gas includes pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into the ground to force out pockets of gas (Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratories)

The federal law that protects drinking water allows companies drilling for natural gas to inject chemicals into the ground. The exemption for gas drilling operations also allows the companies to keep the chemicals they use a secret. Conrad Wilson reports environmentalists want the exemption removed:

Transcript

The federal law that protects drinking water allows companies drilling for natural gas to inject chemicals into the ground. The exemption for gas drilling operations also allows the companies to keep the chemicals they use a secret. Conrad Wilson reports environmentalists want the exemption removed:

For decades, drilling for natural gas includes pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into the ground to force out pockets of gas.

Environmental groups believe the chemicals are contaminating wells and aquifers here in the western U.S. Now gas drilling is moving east to places closer to cities such as Philadelphia and New York.

Several Democratic Members of Congress have introduced legislation to repeal the exemption in the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Randy Udall is a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA, an environmental group. He says as more gas is found, people in the East can expect more drilling.

“For better or worse, whether you like it or not, as time goes on, were going to be drilling in places where people are living.”

The oil and natural gas industry says the chemicals they force into the ground are “trade secrets.” They say the process is safe.

For The Environment Report, I’m Conrad Wilson.

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Using Rust to Remove Arsenic From Water

  • Scientists have been using tiny particles of rust to draw arsenic out of water (Source: Roger McLassus at Wikimedia Commons)

You might be surprised to hear that a lot of drinking water has arsenic in it. It’s a problem all over the globe, especially when drinking water comes from deep under the ground. Julie Grant reports that some researchers are using tiny particles – at the nano-scale – and plain old rust, to remove arsenic from the water:

Transcript

You might be surprised to hear that a lot of drinking water has arsenic in it. It’s a problem all over the globe, especially when drinking water comes from deep under the ground. Julie Grant reports that some researchers are using tiny particles – at the nano-scale – and plain old rust, to remove arsenic from the water:

You can’t see, smell, or taste arsenic – but prolonged exposure to it can lead to skin discoloration and even cancer.

Vicki Colvin studies chemistry and nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston.

She says arsenic has a chemical bond with rust – and sticks to it. So they’ve been using tiny particles of rust to draw arsenic out of water in the lab.

Now Colvin says they’re working with a city in Mexico. They’re trying to make what they call nano-rust in the field, so the city can cheaply remove arsenic from its water.

“So, we’ve developed procedures and processes that help people make nano-rust not at a major university with a nanotechnology facilty. But you know literally in a restaurant setting, more maybe in a ceramics factory.”

Colvin says they will be experimenting in Mexico over the next two years.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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FDA and Food Safety: Failing Grade

  • Another scare came a few years ago, when spinach was found to be tainted with E. Coli (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

In the wake of this year’s tainted peanut butter scare, Congress is getting ready to approve changes to the Food and Drug Administration. Lawmakers want to give the American public more confidence in the safety of the food supply system. But some people doubt they will be able to
make real change. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

In the wake of this year’s tainted peanut butter scare,
Congress is getting ready to approve changes to the Food
and Drug Administration. Lawmakers want to give the
American public more confidence in the safety of the food
supply system. But some people doubt they will be able to
make real change. Julie Grant reports:

Gwen Rosenberg is a mom. She has four boys to feed. So
she’d like to be able to trust that the food supply is safe.

But when Rosenberg heard that 8 people died after eating
peanut products earlier this year, and hundreds more got
sick, it confirmed her beliefs: that the Food and Drug
Administration isn’t making sure food is safe.

“There shouldn’t be stories that come out that reveal that the
peanut plant hasn’t been inspected for years. Or when it
was inspected, there was rat feces. They’re not doing their
job.”

Rosenberg wants the FDA to crack down on food
manufacturers. She says they need inspect more – and shut
down facilities when they find dangerous conditions. She
was appalled when she realized the FDA has no authority to
recall tainted foods.

“The fact that they don’t have recall authority essentially
neuters the FDA. I mean, how are we supposed to take
anything they say or do seriously if they end result is, ‘well,
we can’t force you to do this?’ Well, thanks for the
community service message not to eat the tainted peanut
butter, but you’re not actually making me any safer.”

In the case of the Peanut Corporation of America, a test
found salmonella in its products. It retested. When the test
came out negative, it went ahead and shipped out the
products.

And the FDA had no recall authority. Congressman Bart
Stupak says that’s just wrong. He’s co-sponsoring a food
safety bill that would give the FDA some authority in cases
like this.

“What the FDA can do, shut ‘er down. Prove to me that you
cleaned it up. Prove to me, where did you destroy this
product. Give me the facts. They can’t give you the facts,
shut ‘er down right now. Let’s not wait ten days.”

But leaders in the FDA don’t think recall authority would
have made much difference in the tainted peanut product
case.

David Acheson is Associate Commissioner for foods at the
FDA. Once people started getting sick, he says most
companies using the Peanut Corporation of America’s
products voluntarily recalled their cookies and crackers.

“There’s no suggestion that having mandatory recall is a
panacea to solving food safety problems. It’s one more tool
that would be used from time to time when the situation
warrants it, but it’s not the answer to modernizing food
safety.”

Acheson says the real problem is that the FDA is so busy
reacting to public health threats – to putting out fires – that it
can’t get ahead of the problems and fix the food safety
system.

He says the food system needs preventive controls.

There are a lot of points in the food supply chain where
hazards can creep in: when the food is being grown,
processed, distributed, or sold in a store. Acheson says the
food industry needs to identify control points for each food –
where they are most at risk at becoming unsafe.

“Is it a wild animal in a field, is it the water supply for the
spinach, is it the temperature in my freezer in a retail store.
And all these things in between where things can go wrong
and food can either become contaminated or if there is a low
level of contamination then bacteria can grow.”

Once those control points are identified, Acheson says the
FDA needs to do more inspections – to make sure food is
being handlled safely from farms fields to grocery stores.

But that’s going to cost money.

So Congress is considering charging companies fees to pay
for those inspections.

Food manufacturers don’t like that idea. We contacted
several companies, but none of them, not even the Grocery
Manufacturers Association, would comment for this story.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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T. Boone Pickens Weighs in on Energy

  • Michigan Gonvenor Jennifer Granholm and T. Boone Pickens, founder and chairman, BP Capital Management, shaire their alternative energy solutions at the Detroit Regional Chamber 2009 Mackinac Policy Conference (Photo courtesy of the Mackinac Policy Conference)

A Texas oil tycoon is trying to get America off of foreign oil. T. Boone Pickens has spent the last year and nearly 60-million dollars promoting his plan to use only US sources of energy. Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

A Texas oil tycoon is trying to get America off of foreign oil. T. Boone Pickens has spent the last year and nearly 60-million dollars promoting his plan to use only US sources of energy. Rebecca Williams reports:

T. Boone Pickens says he’s all for domestic oil drilling, solar, nuclear, coal – especially wind and natural gas. But anything, as long as it comes from the USA.

“I’m for anything that’s American. Anything that’s American. (applause) But we have to get off oil from the enemy.”

And he said he used to be an outspoken critic of ethanol. But not anymore.

“It is American. Is it a good fuel? It’s an ugly baby is what it is. But it’s our ugly baby.” (laughter)

He says Members of Congress tell him, whether it’s a good fuel or not, farm states want it.

He readily admits his plan would help him make some money. But he says he also wants the U.S. to get away from foreign imports for the sake of national security and the health of the economy.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Building Penguin Beach Homes

  • The penguins' natural shelter (their own dung) is being removed from the landscape for fertilizer. So, conservationists are supplying penguins with artificial homes in which to nest. (Photo by Frank Olivier)

Along with lions and elephants, Southern Africa is home to a species of penguin. But the African penguin population is dwindling – and scientists are trying to turn things around for the bird. Ann Dornfeld reports:

Transcript

Along with lions and elephants, Southern Africa is home to a species of penguin. But the African penguin population is dwindling – and scientists are trying to turn things around for the bird. Ann Dornfeld reports:

Dyer Island sits just off the coast of the Western Cape of South Africa. It’s tiny, and pretty much consists of two things. Rocks. And birds.

Along with Cape cormorants, Hartlaub’s gulls and swift terns, Dyer Island is the nesting ground for hundreds of African penguins. Although they’re half the size of the Emperor penguins from that movie you might have seen, the species act a lot alike – waddling, awkwardly hopping, and squawking at each other over territory disputes. But today, these African penguins aren’t doing much of anything. That’s not them you hear. They’re mostly just standing still, trying to catch a breeze in the 90-degree heat.

“If you have a look here, you get an idea of just the heat stress of the birds. See this bird over here who’s just sort of standing, gasping, that’s an indication of heat stress.”

Lauren Waller monitors the penguin colony for Cape Nature. That’s the provincial conservation department. Waller says penguins used to find protection from the heat by burrowing into centuries’ worth of bird guano. That allowed them to keep cool, and lay their eggs out of predators’ reach. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, people dug out the guano between the rocks along the Southern Africa coast and sold it as fertilizer.

“And now what you’ve got if you have a look around the island is just – it’s rock, and the penguins can’t burrow into that. And so it now forces them to breed on the surface.”

When penguins make their nests out in the open, kelp gulls can snatch their eggs and chicks. And because penguins breed during African summers, the heat can be overwhelming. Parents often leave the nest just to cool off at sea, and their eggs or chicks die. It will take decades for the guano to build back up.

Scientists are trying to help the penguins out. They’re building nests for them. Waller says Dyer Island is the main testing ground.

“The nests are made out of fiberglass mold and they sort of mimic natural burrows that the bird would make in the ground. They’re kind of like a really small igloo shape, and big enough that you can fit two adult birds inside and their chicks as well.”

The nests are covered with rocks to prevent a greenhouse effect inside the igloos. Waller says they’re experimenting with different materials and nest arrays to see whether the penguins prefer their igloos in a cul-de-sac pattern, or a secluded ocean view. Some nests never catch on, but others have become prime real estate.

“Here you can see we have a colony of 15 nests, and already nine of them are occupied and it’s not their peak breeding yet. So this specific colony is looking really, really good.”

We peek inside one of the plastic igloos where a mother is guarding two fuzzy brown chicks.

“She’s turning her head from side to side.”

“Yeah, it’s a kind of aggressive, stay-away kind of behavior. But if you look behind her you can see the little heads sticking out!”

Waller says as successful as the artificial nests have been, commercial overfishing of sardines and anchovies also affects chick survival. At one well-protected nest a few yards away, she finds an abandoned egg and a dead chick. She says it may be that the parents couldn’t find enough fish.

“It is hard. Knowing their numbers are just going down every year. And you become quite desperate to do something so that these birds don’t have these breeding failures.”

The South African government has banned fishing around one island with penguin colonies to see whether it makes a difference in the birds’ survival rates. Waller says she’s hopeful that now is the turning point for African penguins.

For the Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

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Zapping Germs Off Your Food

  • Researcher Kevin Keener has been working on a device that turns the air inside food packaging into ozone (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Researchers are working overtime to find ways to kill dangerous bacteria in food such as Salmonella and E. coli. Rebecca Williams reports one researcher has found a new way to kill bacteria:

Transcript

Researchers are working
overtime to find ways to kill dangerous bacteria in food such as Salmonella and E. coli. Rebecca Williams reports one researcher has found a new way to kill bacteria:

Food processors expose produce like lettuce to ozone for a few seconds or minutes to kill bacteria.

Kevin Keener has been working on a device that turns the air inside food packaging into ozone.

Keener is a food process engineer at Purdue University.

He attaches the device to the outside of food packages – like a bag of lettuce – and applies electrodes that send high voltage through the bag.

“Visually it’s very Frankenstein-ish. It’s a safe process, there is a high voltage, but it’s similar to a spark you’d get with an electric fence.”

Keener says the ozone spends more time with the food so it kills more bacteria.

There’s a problem though – in some of their tests the device turned green spinach white.

So there are a few kinks to work out. But food companies are interested and we might see this commercialized in a year or two.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Coal: Dirty Past, Hazy Future (Part 1)

  • (Photo courtesy of This Is Reality campaign)

You are being targeted by lobbyists. The coal industry and environmentalists are both trying to influence what you think. In the first part of our series on the future of coal, Lester Graham looks at the campaigns for-and-against coal:

Transcript

You are being targeted by lobbyists. The coal industry and environmentalists are both trying to influence what you think. In the first part of our series on the future of coal, Lester Graham looks at the campaigns for-and-against coal:

You probably don’t buy coal directly. But you do0 pay for it when you pay your power bill. 50% of the nation’s electricity comes from coal-burning power plants.

The problem with that is, coal pollutes.

Not as much as it used to. Some traditional pollutants have been reduced by 77% since the 1970 Clean Air Act.

Although the government forced it to reduce some some of the pollution, the coal industry brags about the progress and encouarges you to believe in the future of “clean coal.”

American Coalition for Clean Coal advertisement:

“I believe. I believe. We can be energy independent. We can continue to use our most abundant fuel cleanly and responsibly. We can and we will. Clean coal: America’s power”

Joe Lucas is the man behind that ad. He’s with the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Lucas says the meaning of the phrase “clean coal” is always evolving.

“Ah, the use of the term ‘clean coal,’ it is a term of art. Up until now it has been technology that has reduced traditional pollution emissions and increased the efficiency of power plants and going forward we’re rapidly approaching the point to where it will be technologies for capture and storage of carbon.”

But right now, no power plant captures carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas contributing to climate change.

That’s why environmentalists scoff at the coal industry’s use of ‘clean coal.’

Cohen brothers advertisement:

“Clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word ‘clean’ to make it sound like the cleanest clean there is!” (coughing)

The guy behind that ad is Brian Hardwick. He’s the spokesman for the “This is Reality” campaign.

“In reality today there is no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ There is no commercial coal plant that captures its carbon pollution not to mention the other environmental impacts that the coal industry has – from burning coal and the runoff and the extraction of coal. So, we launched an effort to try to bring out the truth about coal in response to the marketing campaign that the coal industry had so that people could come to their own conclusions about whether or not they thought coal was indeed clean.”

Clean or not, we have a lot of coal here in the U.S. It’s relatively cheap. And when pushed, a lot of environmentalists concede we’ll need to rely on coal for electricity generation for some time to come.

During last year’s Presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama aknowledged that to people at a rally in Virginia, but indicated we need to find a way to really get to ‘clean coal.’

“Why aren’t we figuring how to sequester the carbons from coal? Clean coal technology is something that can make America energy independent.” (applause)

And President Obama has followed up on that. In the stimulus plan, 3.4 billion dollars was set aside to find ways to make coal clean.

There’s more to clean up. Sulfur dioxide, or SOx, contributes to acid rain. Nitrogen Oxides, or NOx, helps cause smog. Those have been reduced, but not eliminated. And then there’s toxic mercury and particulate matter – or soot. All of it harms the environment and public health.

President Obama’s Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, is a big proponent of cleaner energy sources such as wind and solar. But he says we do need to find a way to use coal.

“Right now as we’re using coal it’s not clean. But, I firmly believe that we should invest very heavily on strategies that can take a large fraction of the carbon dioxide out of coal as well as the SOx the NOx, the mercury, particulate matter.”

But until that technology is in place, ‘clean coal’ is no more than what the coal industry calls an “evolving term of art.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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