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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
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This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
ecosystem interrelationships  ~ global warming  ~ contamination  ~ climate impacts  ~ economic myopia  ~ governmental idiocy  ~ carbon emissions  ~ capitalist greed  ~ anthropogenic change  ~ water issues  ~ airborne pollutants  



ApocaDocuments (10) matching "contamination" from this week
[see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "contamination"]
Sun, Feb 7, 2010
from NUVO Newsweekly:
The Ohio Valley's toxic kids
Robert Owen would rise up from his grave in righteous indignation if he knew what has happened to the kids in his adopted Indiana home of New Harmony. The 19th-century visionary established a utopian settlement there in 1825, to establish “a model community where education and social equality would flourish,” as the University of Southern Indiana’s Historic New Harmony Web page puts it. But the type of education that has blossomed on the banks of the Wabash can’t possibly be what Owen envisioned. At a disturbingly high rate, students categorized as needing special education services are directly downwind of mercury-emitting, major power plants that have gone essentially uncontrolled for decades. ...


Now it's more like a pew-topian settlement.

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Sun, Feb 7, 2010
from Chicago Daily Herald:
Traffic's the biggest contributor to the region's air pollution
Downtown Chicago has the highest peak levels of nitrogen dioxide in the country, and is the only site in violation of new stricter guidelines against the irritant, which inflames asthma and other lung conditions. That news raised the question of how bad is the Chicago area's overall air quality, 40 years after the Clean Air Act as we know it was created... Forbes magazine recently rated the Chicago metropolitan area as having the second-worst air quality of any big city in the nation, based on a federal 2007 report on the number of days with unhealthy air... Today, the number one cause of air pollution is traffic. ...


Isn't "car" the root word of "carcinogen"?

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Fri, Feb 5, 2010
from Associated Press:
Few remain as 1962 Pa. coal town fire still burns
...After years of delay, state officials are now trying to complete the demolition of Centralia, a borough in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania that all but ceased to exist in the 1980s after the mine fire spread beneath homes and businesses, threatening residents with poisonous gases and dangerous sinkholes. More than 1,000 people moved out, and 500 structures were razed under a $42 million federal relocation program. But dozens of holdouts ... refused to go - even after their houses were seized through eminent domain in the early 1990s...State officials say the fire continues to burn uncontrolled and could for hundreds of years, until it runs out of fuel. One of their biggest concerns is the danger to tourists who often cluster around steam vents on unstable ground. ...


This town should be turned into a museum, an utterly perfect example of coal's destructiveness.

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Fri, Feb 5, 2010
from Science News:
EPA reviews hints of weed killer's fetal risks
Last October, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was reopening what the pesticide industry had hoped was a closed chapter on allegations of a popular herbicide’s toxicity. The agency will be convening meetings of its Science Advisory Panel on pesticides throughout 2010 to probe concerns about the safety of atrazine, a weed killer on which most American corn growers rely. The first meeting of these outside experts started Tuesday. And although a large number of studies have indicated that atrazine can perturb hormones in animals and human cells — and might even pose a possible risk of cancer amongst heavily exposed people, these outcomes were not the focus of EPA’s review Tuesday. Risks to babies were. During the SAP’s morning session, Aaron Niman, an EPA scientist, reviewed five recent studies linking atrazine to birth defects and other risks in newborns. ...


It's all about the babies...

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Wed, Feb 3, 2010
from Associated Press:
Gas drilling in Appalachia runs into resistance: What do you do with the wastewater?
A drilling technique that is beginning to unlock staggering quantities of natural gas underneath Appalachia also yields a troubling byproduct: powerfully briny wastewater that can kill fish and give tap water a foul taste and odor. With fortunes, water quality and cheap energy hanging in the balance, exploration companies, scientists and entrepreneurs are scrambling for an economical way to recycle the wastewater. ...


We could always bottle it.

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Tue, Feb 2, 2010
from Environmental Health News:
Human placenta cells die after BPA exposure.
Exposure to very low concentrations of the plasticizer bisphenol A (BPA) causes cellular damage and death in cultured human placenta cells, researchers report. The doses used for this study are similar to blood levels found in pregnant women. A particularly worrying finding is that effects were most pronounced at the lowest -- rather than the highest -- concentrations of BPA indicating that placental development could be particularly sensitive to BPA exposure. Damage to the placenta can induce a range of adverse pregnancy outcomes including premature birth, preeclampsia or even pregnancy loss. It is not known if exposure to BPA is associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes in humans. ...


Guess I won't be eating placentas anymore.

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Mon, Feb 1, 2010
from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via ScienceDaily:
Emissions of Potent Greenhouse Gas Increase Despite Reduction Efforts
Despite a decade of efforts worldwide to curb its release into the atmosphere, NOAA and university scientists have measured increased emissions of a greenhouse gas that is thousands of times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide and persists in the atmosphere for nearly 300 years. The substance HFC-23, or trifluoromethane, is a byproduct of chlorodifluoromethane, or HCFC-22, a refrigerant in air conditioners and refrigerators and a starting material for producing heat and chemical-resistant products, cables and coatings. ...


Maybe we should stop trying so hard.

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Mon, Feb 1, 2010
from Jacksonville Times-Union:
Jacksonville sealcoat raises home health concern
A material that's spread on parking lots and driveways in Jacksonville and nationally may be causing buildups of cancer-causing dust inside some homes, government researchers say. The finding by scientists who normally investigate water pollution raises questions about a potential health hazard, especially for children. The material, known as sealcoat, is a shiny, black substance made from coal tar, a byproduct of some industrial coal uses. As much as half of coal tar's weight can come from a family of chemical compounds called PAHs -- polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons -- that increase cancer risks for people.... The new study concludes that people walking across those lots are accidentally bringing home small amounts of PAHs. "We track in whatever is outdoors," said Barbara Mahler, a hydrologist who was the lead researcher on a study published last month in Environmental Science & Technology, a professional journal. "When we bring in little bits of that sealcoat inside our homes on the bottoms of our shoes, it ends up in our house dust." ...


Another reason to just stay home!

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Mon, Feb 1, 2010
from Chemical & Engineering News:
Fluorochemicals Go Short
Nearly all humans, and a large proportion of wildlife, are contaminated with environmentally persistent long-chain perfluoroalkyl compounds. That revelation, around for a decade now, has brought dramatic change to the fluorochemicals industry. Spurred on by academic researchers and concerns from environmental and consumer advocacy groups, chemical companies have worked with the Environmental Protection Agency to phase out perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and are in the process of phasing out perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). The companies are replacing PFOS, PFOA, and their associated compounds with shorter perfluoroalkyl chain compounds that impart the same functional properties as the longer chain compounds. Although the alternatives are just as persistent, they aren't as bioaccumulative and appear to have a better toxicity profile -- which is still being confirmed by testing -- and are thus considered sound replacements. ...


If there's no acronym, is this really an improvement?

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Mon, Feb 1, 2010
from Mongabay:
Russian police raid environmental group working to protect Lake Baikal
Russian police have raided the Baikal Environmental Wave organization reports the Moscow Times. Police seized several computers, citing the reason for the raid to uncover the use of unlicensed software. A member of the group, however, linked the raid to its public stance against reopening the Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mills on Lake Baikal, which closed due to pollution concerns two years ago. "All of our programs are licensed. They confiscated the computers without checking the license documents, saying they didn't have experts to look at them," Galina Kulebyakina, a member of Baikal Environmental Wave, told The Moscow Times. The re-opening of the mills was recently announced by Vladimir Putin after he visited the bottom of Lake Baikal in a submarine, claiming he could see no sign of environmental damage. ...


Damage? What damage? It looks exactly the way it looks!

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