Category: News

By Rob Watson

The truth will set you free, but it’s going to cost you. The new wave of smart meters is going to bring openness and transparency to our resource consumption and we’re not going to like what we see.

We are shocked, shocked when we go to the doctor and the scale is 5 to 10 pounds heavier than the one we have at home — the one that is 10 years old, the one we weigh ourselves with on the carpet; the one where the little red line is somewhat to the left of the zero … good Old Faithful.

No longer will we have the luxury of human error to estimate our utility consumption, now we have machine error which is usually — with occasional notable exceptions — resides in the tenth’s column, not in the tens column.

It’s clear that generally we manage better what we measure better. But the devil is often in the details, as we can see from studies of consumer behavior.

For example, New York City law requires restaurants to post calories on their fast food menus. In the two years since the legislation was enacted, the results so far are mixed. The New York City Department of Health shows that on average 100 fewer calories per visit are being consumed, which means that given our propensity for Big Mac attacks, approximately 26,000 fewer calories per year for a typical fast food consumer. This translates into about 7½ pounds of weight. Not surprisingly, parents ordering for children are influenced by the information, while teenagers absolutely are not (no big surprise there, either).

Nature of the information also is very important. It is much less effective to simply show people how much they are consuming, since mostly they have no idea how they are consuming the energy or water. Many of the entries into the energy metering and analytics field, for example the Smarter Buildings software product just released by IBM or SeriousEnergy from Serious Materials, have complex analytics engines that help users benchmark whether their energy consumption is higher or lower than expected. Other tools, such as SCIwatch from Scientific Conservation, use …Read More

The natural gas drilling process known as hydrofracking poses far more danger to the environment and health than previously understood, the New York Times has reported.

The paper said its analysis of more than 30,000 pages of federal, state and company records relating to more than 200 gas wells shows that radioactive wastewater from the process is sometimes discharged into rivers that supply drinking water to millions of people in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states have discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams, the Times said. It said the wastewater is sometimes hauled to sewage plants that are not designed to treat it.

Hydrofracking, also called hydraulic fracturing, uses water, particles and chemicals injected underground at high pressure to break up shale and release natural gas.

The process releases naturally occurring carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements such as radium, the New York Times said, and the hydrofracking fluid itself can also contain carcinogenic materials.

The Times’ criticism of fracking follows closely on the heels of publicity for the documentary Gasland, which was nominated for Sunday’s Academy Awards. It lost to corporate malfeasance exposé Inside Job. But the natural gas industry has been on the defensive against Gasland, with America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) launching a consumer-facing website called The Truth About Gasland.

Read the complete article at Environmental Leader

Why do we burn so much coal for power generation?  Supposedly because it’s cheap. However, the true price of coal is far, far more than what it’s bought and sold for per tonne. The real cost to the USA’s economy through the human health and environmental damage it wreaks has been calculated – and it is mind-boggling.

Greenpeace recently hosted a preview of a soon to be published study by Dr. Paul Epstein, Director of Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment.

The study looks beyond the already very thorny issues such as subsidies and examines human health and environmental impacts of coal throughout its entire life cycle; based on peer-reviewed studies already published.

The result: the impact of coal in the USA costs a third to over half a trillion dollars annually. Not billion, trillion.  Each year!

Breaking that down, based on the 500 billion dollar mark, that amounts to a debt of $1,515 per man, woman and child in the USA, every year in relation to the impacts fossil fuel has on the nation’s bottom line.

Read the complete story at Green Living Tips

Fix a Leak! Being handy around the house doesn’t have to be difficult. Leaky toilet flappers, faucets, and other valves waste millions of gallons of water but are easy to fix.
March 14-20 is “Fix a Leak” week.
http://www.epa.gov/watersense/water_efficiency/fix_a_leak.html

Go Greenscaping! Despite a very snowy winter, March is when we typically begin to think of yards and lawns and being outdoors again. Start with ideas and useful tips for greenscaping – environmentally friendly practices to improve the health and appearance of your lawn and garden.
http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/rrr/greenscapes/owners.htm

By Jennifer C. Kerr, Associated Press
Manufacturing.Net – February 28, 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s something Nikki Johns wishes had been around before her infant son died in a drop-side crib: a centralized federal database of people’s safety complaints about thousands of products, from baby gear to household appliances and more.

Johns, other parents who have tragically lost children, and consumer advocates are eagerly awaiting March 11, the formal launch date for the government database SaferProducts.gov, where people can share complaints of injury or worse from everyday products such as cribs, high chairs, space heaters and toasters.

But the database, overseen by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, isn’t universally popular. Manufacturers and some members of Congress fear such a “crowd-sourced” website will be bloated with bogus, inaccurate or misleading reports. One of those lawmakers, freshman Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., sponsored an amendment approved in the House last week to withhold additional funding for the database, which could bring the project to a halt. Prospects for his amendment in the Democratic-led Senate aren’t clear.

Anyone can submit a “report of harm” to the SaferProducts.gov database. They aren’t required to have first-hand knowledge of the alleged injury or potential defect that could lead to injury. The reports are reviewed by commission staff to make sure basic information is provided — name, contact information, product, injury and approximate date, though personal information will be scrubbed before the report hits the database. The manufacturer is informed of the complaint and has 10 days to respond before the report is made public. CPSC says reports that have missing or clearly untrue information won’t be published.

Plenty of safeguards exist to ensure accuracy, insists CPSC Commissioner Bob Adler, a Democrat and database supporter. Not only will manufacturers be allowed to publish any rebuttal along with the complaint, Adler said the commission will remove or attempt to correct any information that is found to be false.

Read the complete article at Manufacturing Net

The amount of post-consumer non-bottle rigid plastic recovered for recycling increased by a third between 2008 and 2009, according to the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

The ACC’s third annual report (pdf) on this subset of plastic recycling found that at least 479 million pounds were recovered in 2009, a 47 percent increase since 2007.

About 51 percent of the 2009 material was manufactured into new products in the U.S. or Canada, with the rest exported, mostly to China. The primary domestic end uses for these plastics are composite products, such as lumber and railroad ties, and relatively thick-walled injection products such as pots and crates.

Some non-bottle rigid plastics are collected as part of commercial recycling efforts – for example, companies recycle used crates, pallets and e-scrap, the ACC said. But the report said that the growth in recovery of these plastics is mostly due to community efforts.

Read the complete article at Environmental Leader

The Clorox Company has announced it is now disclosing the following additional information about its products through its Ingredients Inside program: Specific identity of preservatives and dyes in all U.S. and Canadian cleaning, disinfecting and laundry products. This information expands upon the listing of active ingredients, which has been provided to consumers over the last two years.  Palette of fragrance ingredients – listed in numerical and alphabetical order – used in all U.S. and Canadian cleaning, disinfecting and laundry products. Clorox is also including a link to a PDF file that includes each fragrance ingredient’s CAS Registry Number, the unique numerical identifier assigned by the Chemical Abstracts Service to every chemical available in open scientific literature, as well as the fragrance chemical names, provided by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).  The Ingredients Inside program is available at: http://www.thecloroxcompany.com/products/ingredients-inside/en-us/clorox/ .