Via The Atlantic, the National Archives has released 15,000 different images from an EPA project in 1971 to document how we interacted with the environment and how it affects our every day life. The project, called DOCUMERICA, allows us to see how bad the environment had gotten in the 1960′s, and The Atlantic combed through [...]
The EPA has released their most recent Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data (for 2010) and the data shows that the overall release of pollutants into our environment increased 16% from 2009. The TRI provides information each year on toxic chemical disposals and releases into the air, land and water, and during 2010 approximately 3.93 billion [...]
Smoking rates have declined steadily here in the United States, due to high taxes and the availability of health information, but the fact remains that 20.6% of our adult population still smokes cigarettes. That’s an estimated 46 million people discarding cigarette butts every day, and many of them are still throwing them out the window [...]
Q: What’s the latest in regard to putting limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.? Is there any hope that Obama can get something done? Our best hope to date was 2009’s American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), a bill that called for the implementation of a “cap-and-trade” system to limit carbon dioxide [...]
I remember that medical waste, washing up in New Jersey, I believe, was a big issue in the late 1980s. Is it still today? Medical waste washing up on New Jersey beaches was a big problem in the late 1980s, closing beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the New Jersey shore. Officials scrambled for months [...]
Pharmaceuticals were in the news again recently, how they are polluting water and raising a host of health issues because we dispose of them both unused and used through body waste elimination. What can be done? Pharmaceutical drug contamination in our groundwater, rivers, lakes, estuaries and bays is a growing problem. Millions of us are [...]
What is “nonpoint source pollution?” How much of a problem is it and how can it be controlled? Unlike pollution that comes from specific industrial factories, sewage treatment plants and other easily discernible ‘points’, nonpoint source pollution comes from many diffuse sources, but in the aggregate creates a formidable challenge for municipal, state and federal [...]
