Unintended Consequences of Recycling
Plastics are used in almost everything that touches us every day. For years chemicals called PBDEs were added to various items as flame retardants.The problem was that PBDEs bioaccumulate and can impact children’s long term health. PBDE use was discontinued, but thanks to recycling PBDEs are still with us. Plastics sent to recycling often contain other chemicals that remain in the reused plastics where they enter back into use without control or warning.
Environmental and children’s health advocates breathed a sigh of relief when, over a decade ago, U.S. manufacturers began to phase out a number of flame retardant chemicals from furniture, electronics, textiles and other everyday items. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, were facing increasing scrutiny (and some had already been banned in parts of Europe) for impacts on children’s brain development, hormone disruption, reduced fertility, and other adverse health effects, as well as for their ubiquity in the environment and persistence in the food chain.
Today, though, these chemicals — which include tetra-, penta-, hexa-, hepta- and decaBDE; named according to the number of bromine atoms attached, but all are structurally similar and all tend to bioaccumulate — continue to turn up in people’s lives in everyday plastics, from kitchen utensils to children’s toys, but not because they’re still being used intentionally. Rather, they are inadvertently making their way into our lives as hitchhikers in products made from recycled plastics that contain them.
“There’s not some sort of magic hole where they disappear,” says Andrew Turner, associate professor of marine geochemistry and pollution science at the University of Plymouth in England who published a paper last year on chemicals found in recycled black plastic. PBDEs and other substances are still with us, he says. “They’re just being incidentally put into all sorts of new products.”
Bears and Cars
In Northern California’s Humboldt County, a bear appeared from nowhere and landed on top of a sheriff’s patrol car. Neither the officer nor the bear were seriously injured, but the patrol car was totaled. Humboldt County was once the center of marijuana cultivation in California. Just saying.
A patrol car was struck by a falling bear in northern California last weekend, causing the vehicle to crash and explode.
Authorities said a Humboldt county sheriff’s deputy was driving on State Route 96 on 3 August, answering a report of a drug overdose in the community of Orleans, when the bear fell or jumped onto the car, apparently from a steep embankment.
The bear smashed the hood and windshield. The patrol car hit an embankment, rolled onto its side and burst into flames.
In Durango Colorado a bear broke into a car and after crashing it abandoned the vehicle and escaped. This happened just after Colorado legalized recreational marijuana. Just saying.
Durango resident Ron Cornelius awoke to find a Subaru SUV crashed at the bottom of the hill at the end of his driveway.
"Usually, I don't get up at 5 o'clock unless there is a bear driving a car down the street," he joked to the Durango Herald newspaper.
Two or three bears get stuck in cars each week in the area, officials say.
Aquacalypse
Eating fish has been considered as an environmentally friendly behaviour. After all the ocean is filled with fish. For the health conscious fish (despite their loads of mercury) have been a building block of a healthy diet. Guess what, just another stop on the way to the end of the world. Read Vanishing Fish Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries before you order your orange roughy, which was more commonly called a slimehead prior to a marketing makeover.
The world’s fisheries are in crisis. Their catches are declining, and the stocks of key species, such as cod and bluefin tuna, are but a small fraction of their previous abundance, while others have been overfished almost to extinction. The oceans are depleted and the commercial fishing industry increasingly depends on subsidies to remain afloat.
Make the Meat Eaters Pay
Most Germans do not like being confronted with graphic, sometimes shocking, images showing the treatment of the animals they eat. However, in the supermarket, if they believe no one is watching, most still tend to choose cheaper meat over the more animal and environmentally friendly organic products that tend to cost more than four times that of the conventional meats. Would that change if meat became more expensive?
Politicians, as well as environmentalists and animal rights activists, have floated the idea of increasing the value-added tax (VAT) rate for meat and animal products from 7% to 19%. And while there is some agreement on the possibility of changing the tax rate, groups on the left and right disagree on how to spend the potential tax income. While some want to earmark the money to improve animal welfare, others want farmers and workers to see an increase in benefits.
Trumped Again
Every day the media concentrates on the latest Trump Tweet. Every day most of the media misses the big picture. Trump and his Republican cronies are destroying environmental protections at a incredible pace.U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed a proposal Thursday night to change Clean Water Act rules and streamline the federal permit approval process for infrastructure projects like pipelines.
The change would limit the ability of states to cite the Clean Water Act to block or delay projects from companies with incomplete permits, which has been a frequent tool used by groups in New York and other states fighting new natural gas pipelines. Signing the proposal opened a 60-day comment period, and Wheeler plans to formally announce this change at a National Association of Manufacturers event Friday.
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