Tag: popular

Deodorant Maker Fouls the Air

  • Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) come out of our vehicle tailpipes, out of smokestacks, and they’re in a lot of every day products. (Photo courtesy of NinaHale CC-2.0)

The makers of a popular deodorant body spray have been fined more than a million dollars for polluting the air in California. Julie Grant reports it’s part of an increased effort to reduce air pollution.

Transcript

The makers of a popular deodorant body spray have been fined more than a million dollars for polluting the air in California. Julie Grant reports it’s part of an increased effort to reduce air pollution.

The makers of Axe body spray – popular among teenage boys – have been fined for causing environmental problems in California. Dimitri Stanich is spokesman for the California Air Resouces Board. He says California has specific low limits on how much air pollution can come from consumer products.

And if they get a tip that a product is over the limit – they head to the pharmacy.

“THE AIR RESOURCES BOARD HAS ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS THAT WILL BUY PRODUCTS OFF THE SHELF AND THEN TAKE IT BACK TO THE LAB IN SACRAMENTO. TECHNICIANS THEN WILL PIERCE THE CANISTER AND DETERMINE THE AMOUNT OF VOCS IN THERE.”

VOCs – that’s short for volatile organic compounds. VOCs come out of our vehicle tailpipes, out of smokestacks. And they’re in a lot of every day products: some aerosol sprays, most paints, even some cosmetics. Stanich says there are lots of reasons a manufacturer might use a volatile organic compound. In a product like Axe, he says the VOCs make it spray better.

“MOST OF OFTEN IT IS PART OF THE PROPELLENT USED TO FORCE THE PRODUCT OUT OF THE CANISTER AND INTO THE PRACTICAL PURPOSE THAT THE CONSUMER IS USING IT.”

And once those VOCs hit the air – from deodorants, tailpipes and smokestacks – they mix with the heat of the sun – and create ground level ozone. Pollution.

The multinational corporation, Unilever, owns the Axe brand. Stanich says that between 2006 and 2008, Unilever’s parent company, Conopco, sold more than 2.8 million units of Axe spray that failed to meet California’s clean air standards.

The state has fined Conopco 1.3 million dollars.

It’s all kind of a bummer. At least for some teenage girls.

Katie Schombeck and Julia Rombach say the boys locker room reeks of Axe. And they love it.

“YOU SMELL IT AND YOU’RE LIKE DRAWN TO IT, IT SMELLS SO GOOD.”

“I DO THAT ALL THE TIME. I REMEMBER HANGING OUT WITH GUYS, AND LIKE IF THEY SMELL GOOD I’LL BE LIKE ‘HEY COME HERE FOR A MINUTE’ AND SMELL THEIR SHOULDER AND BE LIKE ‘YOU SMELL GOOD.’”

“I’LL GIVE THEM A BIG HUG, JUST BECAUSE THEY SMELL GOOD.”

But these 16 years olds didn’t realize body spray could be bad for air quality.

“BUT IT NEVER REALLY DAWNED ON ME THAT AXE…I DON’T KNOW, YOU DON’T REALLY THINK ABOUT THAT.”

Compared to all those cars and trucks and smokestacks – it doesn’t seem like a little deodorant spray could cause that much of a problem. But Dimitri Stanich with the California Air Resources Board says all those little bits add up.

“WE SPRAY A LITTLE PERFUME HERE, WE SPRAY A LITTLE DEODORANT THERE, SOME WD-40 ON THE VEHICLES WE’RE WORKING ON. THE LIST GOES ON. EVERYTHING THAT’S A CONSUMER PRODUCT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO CONTRIBUTE TO OZONE.”

Stanich says on peak ozone days, people have a harder time breathing, especially those with asthma.

California has a particularly bad ozone problem in its cities – and also has tougher clean air rules than most of the country.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to tighten federal air quality standards – to reduce ozone pollution everywhere else.

Julian Marshall is professor of environmental engineering at the University of Minnesota.
He says most health officials support tougher air standards.

But there are lots of ways to reduce exposure in your own home:

“BUYING LIMITED QUANTITIES OF PRODUCTS THAT EMIT VOCS, OR BUYING LOW VOC PRODUCTS. WHEN YOU GO TO BUY PAINTS FOR EXAMPLE THERE ARE LOW VOC PAINTS.”

To reduce exposure, Marshall says get rid of old chemicals and those you don’t need.

In the meantime, California officials say Unilever has corrected the problems with Axe – and reduced the emissions from its spray can. Making a lot of teenage boys – and some of their girl – friends happy.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Leaving Something Out on Earth Day?

  • The founder of Earth Day, the late Senator Gaylord Nelson, felt population control is the key to sustainability. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Earth Day has grown from its counterculture roots. Now there’s a lot of green talk on Main Street. But as Mark Brush reports, the founder of Earth Day might think we’re leaving something out:

Transcript

Earth Day has grown from its counter culture roots. Now there’s a lot of green talk on Main Street. But as Mark Brush reports, the founder of Earth Day might think we’re leaving something out:

In the last several decades, concern about the environment has shifted from college campus protests to board room discussions. There’s a lot more awareness about environmental issues. And the administration in Washington D.C. is much more receptive. That has Earth Day organizers pretty excited.

The man credited for founding Earth Day is the late Senator Gaylord Nelson. He probably would’ve liked all this talk about a green future. But in a 2003 speech recorded by C-Span – the Senator said there was an important topic being left out of the conversation:

“The ultimate key to sustainability is population.”

He acknowledged that taking on population control is a tough thing to do for politicians. But if they’re really serious about taking on environmental problems, he said they’re going to have to get up the courage to talk about population.

For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Smaller Fish After Alewife Die-Off

  • Alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus). The fish is not common in Lakes Superior or Erie. (Image courtesy of Wisconsin SeaGrant)

This past year, the size of salmon in some Great Lakes
is getting smaller because their main food source is dying off in some
areas of the lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
reports:

Transcript

This past year, the size of salmon in some Great Lakes is getting smaller because
their main food
source is dying off in some areas of the lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester
Graham reports:


In the 1960’s, fish and game officials introduced Pacific salmon such as chinook,
coho and
steelhead to control the invasive species alewife. That’s a small fish that moved
in from the
Atlantic. The salmon are popular fishing. But since the alewives are not native…
they’re
especially susceptible to quick weather changes. And fisheries managers suspect
competition
with zebra mussels for food also affects alewives. Recently, alewife populations
have crashed in
some places. Jim Dexter is with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources…


“The primary reason that there are not alewives in Lake Huron and you get
fluctuations in Lake
Michigan is related more to the climate. You know, now, zebra mussels are tied into
that, into the
equation at some point but not probably to the affect that the climate is having on
those.”


So, without as many alewives, salmon don’t have as much to eat… and they’re smaller
than usual.
Fisheries managers say the effect is probably temporary.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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Romancing the American Chestnut

  • American chestnuts (left) are smaller than Chinese and European chestnuts. The Chinese and European varieties are also resistant to the blight, making the imports more desirable to growers. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Food is always a big part of the holidays. But one
traditional food has – for the most part – disappeared from American tables. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Food is always a big part of the holidays. But one traditional food has – for the most part – disapeared from American tables. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


(Sound of Nat King Cole singing, “Chestnuts roasing on an open fire…”)


That old chestnut of a song romanticizes roasting chestnuts as a part of the holidays. But a lot of us have never even seen chestnuts, let alone roasted them on an open fire. Chestnuts used to be a major part of the Eastern hardwood forest. There were millions of them. In fact, 25 percent of all the mature trees were chestnuts. But a blight, imported with some Chinese chestnut trees, slowly wiped out the American chestnuts. Now, they’re gone.


Well… almost. Much of the root stock is still alive. Sprouts grow until the blight knocks them back again. A blight only hurts the standing tree where it branches out.


And, in a few isolated pockets in the Midwest, the blight hasn’t reached the trees. A few American chestnuts are alive and growing and some of them are free of the blight. At Nash Nursuries in central Michigan, owner Bill Nash is guiding us through a rare sight… a grove of American chestnuts.


“These are 20 years old and as you can see, they’re fairly good sized. The American chestnut is quite a rapid growing tree. It’s well-suited for our climate, so it doesn’t have any of the problems that some of the hybrids do as far as growing and cultural care you have to take care of them. The Americans, you get them started and they’re pretty much on their own.”


In a few places in Michigan and Wisconsin there are small groves of chestnuts. They’re prized trees. They’re great for shade. The hardwood is rot resistant and makes great furniture and fence posts. And the chestnuts are eaten by humans and wildlife alike. Bill Nash says the tree will be popular again if it ever overcomes the blight that’s hit it so hard.


“The American chestnut will make another big comeback in this country as a yard tree, as a timber tree, as a wildlife tree.”


That part about a wildlife tree is more important than just worrying about the squirrels and bunnies. Chestnuts were an important food source for all kinds of animals.


Andrew Jarosz is a plant biologist at Michigan State University. He says the loss of chestnuts has been hard on wildlife populations.


“Chestnuts shed nuts in a more regular pattern than oaks, which will have what are called mast years – where they’ll have major crops, massive crops one year and very small crops in other years – which means it’s either feast or famine if you’re depending on oaks.”


Since the blight first began hitting American chestnuts about a century ago, researchers have been looking into all kinds of ways to stop it. One way is to cross it with the Chinese chestnut which has a couple of genes that resist the blight. But it takes a long time to breed out the Chinese characteristics from the American chestnuts and still keep the resistant genes.


Another approach is genetic manipulation. Genetically modifying the American chestnut tree to make it disease resistant. Again, work is underway, but it takes a long time. And even after success, it’s likely some people won’t like the idea of releasing a genetically modified organism into the wild.


The final approach worked in Europe when the blight hit there. It seems there’s a naturally occuring virus that kills the blight. It spread naturally in Europe. There are a few groves in Michigan that have naturally acquired the virus and it’s working to keep the blight at bay. Andrew Jarosz is working on the research. He says the trick is figuring out how to get the virus to spread to other trees short of manually spreading it on cankers infected by the blight.


“If we’re literally talking about millions of trees across probably, you know, the eastern third of the country, we obviously can’t treat every canker on every tree. And we need to be able to figure out a way to deploy the virus in a way that it can spread.”


Even with all that hopeful research, it’ll be ten years at least before some practical solutions end up in the forests, and Jarosz believes a couple of centuries before the American chestnut holds the place it once did in the forests.


Bill Nash knows it’ll be a while before there are major changes, but he is optimistic about the American chestnut.


“Oh, I would think the tree has a bright future. There’s enough people working on that, enough programs going on now… So, I would suspect that in the not-too-distant future we should have some of this progress made. You know, Robert Frost in his poem predicted the comeback of the American chestnut, that something would arise to offset that blight. And we’re starting to see that.”


Frost put it this way: “Will the blight end the chestnut? The farmers rather guess not, It keeps smoldering at the roots And sending up new shoots Till another parasite Shall come to end the blight.”


Seems Frost was an optimist too.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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Rolling Out Mainstream Hybrids

  • Like this Honda Insight, the new hybrid Accord will have electricity and gas working in harmony. What's different is that it will have a V6 engine. (photo by Paige Foster)

As gas prices hover around two dollars a gallon, auto manufacturers are starting to roll out more environmentally friendly hybrids that appeal to mainstream buyers. Hybrids conserve fuel by using both electricity and gasoline to power the car. The latest offering comes from Honda. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Halpert filed this report:

Transcript

As gas prices hover around two dollars a gallon, auto manufacturers are starting to roll out
more environmentally friendly hybrids that appeal to mainstream buyers. Hybrids conserve fuel
by using both electricity and gasoline to power the car. The latest offering comes from
Honda. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Halpert filed this report:


Honda is bringing a hybrid engine to its best-selling car, the Accord. Unlike other
hybrids on the market, like Toyota’s Prius, this one will be roomier and higher performing.
Anthony Pratt, with J.D. Power & Associates, says those features may woo buyers who typically
have nixed the tiny hybrids currently on the market.


“What they’re trying to do is break the conception that if you’re going to drive a hybrid,
you have to sacrifice performance. in this case, you don’t. They use a three liter, V6 that
has 240 horsepower, so it’s just as powerful as the non-hybrid V6 and you get the fuel efficiency
of a Civic.”


The hybrid Accord hits dealer showrooms in December and will cost $30,000. It will join the
ranks of another hybrid adopted in a popular model, the Ford Escape. And next year,
Toyota’s Highlander and the Lexus RX400H.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Julie Halpert.

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