With 7 billion on earth, a huge task before us
By Jeffrey D. Sachs, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Jeffrey D. Sachs is director of The Earth Institute, Columbia University. He and colleagues will discuss the 7 billion mark in a free live webcast Monday, October 17. He is the author of “The Price of Civilization,” published this month.

(CNN) — Just 12 years after the arrival of the 6 billionth individual on the planet in 1999, humanity will greet the 7 billionth arrival this month. The world population continues its rapid ascent, with roughly 75 million more births than deaths each year. The consequences of a world crowded with 7 billion people are enormous. And unless the world population stabilizes during the 21st century, the consequences for humanity could be grim.

A rising population puts enormous pressures on a planet already plunging into environmental catastrophe. Providing food, clothing, shelter, and energy for 7 billion people is a task of startling complexity.

The world’s agricultural systems are already dangerously overstretched. Rainforests are being cut down to make way for new farms; groundwater used for irrigation is being depleted; greenhouse gases emitted from agricultural activities are a major factor in global climate change; fertilizers are poisoning estuaries; and countless species are threatened with extinction as we grab their land and water and destroy their habitats.

The economic challenges are equally huge. Population is growing most rapidly in the world’s poorest countries — often the places with the most fragile ecological conditions. Poor people tend to have many more children, for several reasons. Many live on farms, where children can be engaged in farm chores.

Poor societies generally suffer from high rates of child mortality, leading parents to have more children as “insurance” against the possible deaths of children. Girls rarely make it to high school, and are often married at a very young age, leading to early childbearing. And modern methods of contraception may be unavailable or unaffordable.

When poor families have six or eight children, many or most of them are virtually condemned to a lifetime of poverty. Too often, parents lack the wherewithal to provide decent nutrition, health care and education to most of them. Illiteracy and ill health end up being passed from generation to generation. Governments in poor countries are unable to keep up, their budgets overmatched by the need for new schools, roads and other infrastructure.

So the arrival of the 7 billionth person is cause for profound global concern. It carries a challenge: What will it take to maintain a planet in which each person has a chance for a full, productive and prosperous life, and in which the planet’s resources are sustained for future generations? How, in short, can we enjoy “sustainable development” on a very crowded planet?

The answer has two parts, and each portends a difficult journey over several decades. The first part requires a change of technologies — in farming, energy, industry, transport and building — so that each of us on average is putting less environmental stress on the planet. We will have to make a worldwide transition, for example, from today’s fossil-fuel era, dependent on coal, oil and gas, to an era powered by low-carbon energies such as the sun and wind. That will require an unprecedented degree of global cooperation.

The second key to sustainable development is the stabilization of the global population. This is already occurring in high-income and even some middle-income countries, as families choose to have one or two children on average. The reduction of fertility rates should be encouraged in the poorer countries as well. Rapid and wholly voluntary reductions of fertility have been and can be achieved in poor countries. Success at reducing high fertility rates depends on keeping girls in school, ensuring that children survive, and providing access to modern family planning and contraceptives.

Two centuries ago, the British thinker Thomas Robert Malthus famously warned that excessive population growth would cut short economic progress. That is a threat still with us today, but it is a warning, not an inevitable outcome.

We face an urgent task: to adopt more sustainable technologies and lifestyles, and work harder to achieve a stable population of some 8 billion or so by mid-century, rather than the current path, which could easily carry the world to more than 10 billion people by 2100.

Rebecca
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Recycling, not reefs, in store for old aircraft carriers
Environmental group worried about sea pollutants welcomes choice
By Miguel Llanos

It’s a heave-ho, U.S. Navy style. After several years during which turning old warships into artificial reefs was fashionable, four decommissioned aircraft carriers will instead be dismantled, and recycled, at shipyards.

An environmental group that’s been championing the shift said it makes sense: creating shipyard jobs in the U.S., instead of a potential toxic mess at sea.

“The Obama administration’s new plan to recycle these four aircraft carriers appears to be a signal that the administration may be correcting long-standing misguided policies that not only squander resources, but American jobs as well,” stated Colby Self of the Basel Action Network, a group that monitors global toxic issues and that last December issued a report critical of the artificial reefs.

The four decommissioned carriers are:

•USS Constellation
•USS Forrestal
•USS Independence
•USS Saratoga

The Navy would not comment but Navy records show that bids are being accepted to dismantle the veteran ships.

Self said the Forrestal alone has some 40,000 tons of recyclable steel, copper and aluminum.

“With a strong metal market, these recoverable metals could bring a return of up to $30 million,” Self told msnbc.com. “After accounting for the ship purchase price by competitive bid, towing, environmental remediation of toxic materials and labor rates, the recycling of this vessel should be a profitable venture for the domestic ship recycling industry and should give the local economy a great boost.”

Dozens of other warships have previously been dumped at sea or turned into reefs after efforts were made to remove toxic material.

BAN said that the environmental work on two recent aircraft carriers to meet that fate — the America and the Oriskany — cost more than $20 million each and that not all contaminants were removed.

The Oriskany was sunk off Pensacola, Fla., in May 2006 at a depth of 210 feet with the purpose of becoming an artificial reef.

The America was used for live-fire tests and scuttled in May 2005 at a depth of nearly 17,000 feet about 250 miles off the coast of North Carolina.

BAN estimates that recycling the Forrestal will save millions of taxpayer dollars and sustain about 1,900 jobs for one year.

BAN said it was still concerned that plans might still be in place to sink the decommissioned destroyer USS Arthur W. Radford next month in waters off Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland.

Rebecca
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Key device in busted Gulf well got U.S. OK in just 90 minutes
Commission report warns disaster ‘might well recur’ without significant reform

A request by BP to set an “unusually deep cement plug” on the Gulf oil well that subsequently exploded killing 11 people was approved by the then-Minerals Management Service in just 90 minutes, according to a presidential commission report on the disaster.

That decision was one of the nine technical and engineering calls that the commission says — in a 48-page excerpt of its final report obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press — increased the risk of a blowout.

The oil spill commission said a string of poor decisions led to technical problems that contributed to the deadly April 20 accident, which led to more than 200 million gallons of oil spewing from BP’s well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

“The blowout was not the product of a series of abberational decisions made by a rogue industry or government officials that could not have been anticipated or expected to occur again,” the commission concluded.

“Rather, the root causes are systemic, and absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur,” it added.

BP hired the firm Halliburton to seal the Gulf well with a temporary cement plug after the exploratory rig found oil. A number of tests on the cement were carried out in the weeks running up to the disaster.

In October, a government panel said Halliburton had used flawed material to cement the well and knew that it was unstable.

In response to that finding, Halliburton vigorously defended its actions and said BP was responsible for the disaster because it did not perform a key test to determine the integrity of the cement work.

However, Halliburton later acknowledged that it had skipped doing a test on the final formulation of cement.

Four out of 13 preliminary conclusions released by the commission in November noted problems relating to the cement plug. Cement is an essential barrier to preventing blowouts.

The disaster prompted the Obama administration to introduce a moratorium on deepwater drilling.

In mile-deep seas, work is done in total darkness and near-freezing temperatures . The water pressure is enough to crush a submarine and the explosive methane gas that likely ignited on the Deepwater Horizon can be much more damaging if not properly controlled.

In the intense pressure and cold of the deep, methane hydrates exist in a slushy, crystalline form. But as methane rockets upward in a blowout, passing into lower-pressure zones, it converts to a gaseous state and gains tremendous force.

The use of heat in cementing, or sealing a well, which was under way prior to the blast, can destabilize methane hydrates at extreme depths.

Halliburton acknowledged as much in an industry presentation in 2009, calling the risks “a challenge to the safety and economics.”

Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said the presidential commission’s report focused on areas in which the agency in charge of offshore drilling has already made improvements.

“The agency has taken unprecedented steps and will continue to make the changes necessary to restore the American people’s confidence in the safety and environmental soundness of oil and gas drilling and production on the Outer Continental Shelf, while balancing our nation’s important energy needs,” Barkoff said in a statement.

Share prices rise
The report already has the companies involved with the blown-out well and Deepwater Horizon rig pointing fingers at each other again.

However, it did not appear to be affecting their market value with London-listed shares in BP trading up 1.3 percent at 506 pence at 3:07 a.m. ET Thursday and those in Swiss-based Transocean up 2.3 percent.

BP, in a statement issued Wednesday, said the report, like its own investigation, found the accident was the result of multiple causes, involving multiple companies.

It said the company was working with regulators “to ensure the lessons learned from Macondo lead to improvements in operations and contractor services in deepwater drilling.”

Transocean Ltd., which owned the rig being leased by BP to perform the drilling, said in response to the commission’s findings that “the procedures being conducted in the final hours were crafted and directed by BP engineers and approved in advance by federal regulators.”

And Halliburton also said it acted at the direction of BP and was “fully indemnified by BP.”

The commission underscores its central conclusion with a quote from an e-mail written by BP engineer Brett Cocales on April 16, just days before the disaster.

The e-mail was first unearthed in an investigation conducted by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who at the time led the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

“But, who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine and we’ll get a good cement job,” Cocales wrote, after he disagreed with BP’s decision to use fewer centralizers than recommended.

Centralizers are used to center the pipe to ensure a good cement job. The cement failed at the bottom of the Macondo well, allowing oil and gas to enter it, according to investigations.

The full report is due to the president Jan. 11.

Key questions
But key questions will remain, namely: Why didn’t a hulking piece of equipment that sat at the wellhead and was supposed to choke off the flow of oil in the event of a blowout do its job?

Federal investigators analyzing the blowout preventer at a NASA facility in New Orleans aren’t expected to finish until February.

The Justice Department continues its own investigation, as does a joint U.S. Coast Guard-Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement panel.

BP, Halliburton and Transocean, the three key companies involved with the well and the rig that exploded, each made individual decisions that increased risks of a blowout but saved significant time or money.

But ultimately, the Deepwater Horizon disaster came down to a single failure, the panel says: management. When decisions were made, no one was considering the risk they were taking.

The suggestion that the BP disaster may not be an isolated incident runs counter to assurances by the oil industry, which has worked hard to portray the accident as a rare occurrence.

“This clearly was a rare incident,” the president of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, said Tuesday when his organization published a new report urging Congress and the Obama administration to open more areas to oil and gas drilling.

Outside experts in technological disasters were split by the report’s excerpt.

They lauded the commission’s focus on organizational and managerial failures instead of blaming the rig workers. But they were divided whether the panel went far enough in criticizing the companies for taking time- and money-saving shortcuts.

University of California at Berkeley engineering professor Bob Bea, who has studied and worked on offshore oil rigs for decades and is an international expert on technological disasters, lauded the panel for “articulating the hows and whys.”

“This was a preventable disaster,” Bea, who ran a Berkeley investigation into the accident, said.

Rebecca
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Beach garbage recycled as vacuum cleaners
Company hopes to stimulate discussion of plastic pollution

By AUDREY McAVOY / AP

HONOLULU — There’s a story behind the blue, white and green plastic covering the surface of the Pacific Ocean vacuum cleaner. They’re tiny bits of plastic collected from one of Hawaii’s dirtiest beaches, Kahuku, where waves dump trash from the Pacific all day long.

The machine made by Electrolux AB is fully functional and can suck up dirt from a rug like any other vacuum. But the company said it wants the device to serve as an object that provokes a conversation about the large volumes of plastic trash that are polluting the world’s oceans.

The Stockholm-based company has also made four other vacuums, each from plastic trash collected in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, North and Baltic seas. None of the five are for commercial sale.

Cecilia Nord, vice president for sustainability and environmental affairs at Electrolux’s floor care and small appliances division, said many groups are doing their best to clean the ocean and beaches of plastic.

But the problem keeps growing because people continue to consume more plastic without recycling it afterward, she said.

“We — as a big manufacturer with a global reach — can start a debate and hopefully can contribute to addressing the root cause,” Nord said.

Electrolux received its Pacific Ocean plastic from a Hawaii-based volunteer group that cleans up Kahuku beach once a week. The remote shoreline is one of Oahu’s dirtiest, in part because current flows tend to deposit trash on that side of the island.

“We can be there on any day and see it coming in on each wave,” said Suzanne Frazer, president and co-founder of Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii.

Garbage also quickly accumulates at Kahuku because the beach is behind two private properties and can’t be easily visited by beachgoers who pick up trash on Hawaii’s more populated shorelines every day.

Plastic breaks down into smaller pieces slowly over time but doesn’t ever completely disappear. In the ocean, currents carry the small bits to areas where massive gyres of plastic garbage have formed.

One spot between Hawaii and California the size of Texas has been dubbed the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Researchers recently found a similar plastic trash gyre in the Atlantic between Bermuda and Portugal’s Azores islands.

Seabirds eat the plastic bits — particularly ones that are a bright red or orange — thinking they’re squid, fish eggs or other food.

Some Laysan albatross, a seabird that nests at Midway atoll northwest of the main Hawaiian islands, die of starvation with their stomachs full of plastic.

Electrolux’s Pacific vacuum has only a few red or orange pieces because marine animals have eaten most of the brightly colored plastic trash pieces before they wash ashore.

Carey Morishige, outreach coordinator for the marine debris program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said people should use less plastic and reuse and recycle what they do use.

“If it’s still going in, we’re still going to have to clean it up,” Morishige said. “The ultimate solution is going to be in stopping this stuff from getting into the ocean in the first place.”

Rebecca
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Whopper of a wind farm opens off Britain
World’s largest offshore project has 100 turbines — so far

LONDON — The world’s largest offshore wind farm had its grand opening Thursday — and its location on the estuary of the Thames River makes it a showcase for Britain’s push to move beyond fossil fuels.

So far, 100 wind turbines have been planted in waters up to 80 feet deep across the estuary in southern England. The idea is to produce enough electricity, 300 megawatts, to power the equivalent of 200,000 homes.

Each turbine is nearly as tall as a 40-story building and the blades are at least 65 feet above the water for clearance with vessels. No turbine is closer than 1,600 feet to another and the entire “farm” covers an area of 22 square miles.

Up to 341 turbines will be installed over the next four years.

With Thursday’s opening, which tops a 91-turbine farm off Denmark, Britain now has more offshore wind capacity than the rest of the world combined.

“We are in a unique position to become a world leader in this industry,” British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said in a statement before he attended the grand opening. “We are an island nation and I firmly believe we should be harnessing our wind, wave and tidal resources to the maximum.”

Britain now gets three percent of its electricity from renewables but aims to get 15 percent by 2020. As part of that, the government this year awarded licenses to wind farm developers in a program that could deliver up to 32 gigawatts of generation capacity and require investment of more than $117 billion.

Critics of the $1.4 billion wind farm include some nearby residents who object to the sight of the giant towers, some visible from shore. The farm starts about seven miles from shore.

Environmental groups tend to back wind power as long as projects are not in areas of significant bird flight paths.

The new wind farm met that standard. It’s an “important stride forward,” said Craig Bennett of the British chapter of Friends of the Earth.

But the group also wants Britain to guarantee funding of at least $3 billion a year for the recently created and government-funded Green Investment Bank, which aims to boost private-sector spending on low-carbon technology.

“I know that there is still more to do to bring forward the large sums of investment we want to see in low-carbon energy in the U.K.,” Huhne said, “and we as government are committed to playing our part.”

One embarrassment to the government is that only 20 percent of the investment in the new wind farm has gone to British firms. The farm is owned and operated by Swedish energy company Vattenfall, and the largest chunk of expenditure has been to Denmark’s Vestas for the wind turbines.

Global interest
The promised vast expansion of Britain’s offshore wind resources is proving to be a powerful lure for companies not normally associated with renewables but keen to generate eco-friendly and reliable sources of revenue.

Engineers, consultants and oil rig makers around the world are setting up new divisions and partnerships in order to get a foothold in the market, which offers secure returns to those building and running the turbines.

“It’s attractive for a lot of companies that are looking for contracts,” said Ian Simm, chief executive of green fund firm Impax Asset Management, which has holdings in companies such as Vestas.

“The fundamental point that makes it attractive is scale and government commitment, and the fact that industrial companies can learn the facts of success in one offshore environment and be able to transfer the majority, if not all, of those skills to other countries,” he said.

However, clearer statements from the government on renewables incentives are still needed to support wind farm developers and really kick-start the market, according to Sarwjit Sambhi, managing director of power generation at Centrica, which has won the rights to develop up to 4.2 gigawatts of offshore windpower in the Irish Sea.

“There is a general theme across this in that we haven’t passed the tipping point yet where the industry is confident enough that there is a long-term pipeline of projects.”

Britain’s potential
The Offshore Valuation Group, made up of government and industry organizations, estimates if Britain were to develop just 29 percent of its potential offshore resource, this could deliver 169 gigawatts of capacity by 2050 and turn Britain into a net exporter of electricity.

This would involve installing 7.2 gigawatts a year — roughly equivalent to 1,000 7.5 megawatt turbines — with fixed offshore wind accounting for 5.4 gigawatts of the average annual build rate needed.

The supply chain needed for this would have annual revenues of nearly $100 billion in 2050 and employ around 145,000 people directly, according to the Offshore Valuation report.

As a result shipbuilders and companies that specialize in making oil rigs are also entering the wind market.

SeaEnergy Executive Chairman Steve Remp, who has worked in the offshore oil and gas market for 30 years, expects the market for equipment vessels to take off at the beginning of 2012.

“I foresee a sizeable industry evolving that calls on the engineering expertise in working offshore in deep water,” he said.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Rebecca
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Scientist: ‘Human-induced global warming’ killing corals

Coral reefs are dying around the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia at rates that may be the worst ever recorded, scientists said this week.

Death rates as high as 80 percent have been recorded for some species, according to the study performed by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

“It is certainly the worst coral die-off we have seen since 1998. It may prove to be the worst such event known to science,” said Andrew Baird, a principal research fellow for James Cook University in Australia.

The coral bleaching extends from the Seychelles in the middle of the Indian Ocean to the Philippines in Southeast Asia and encompasses much of the Coral Triangle, an area scientists refer to as the “Amazon rainforest of the seas” or the most diverse marine ecosystem on Earth.

A mass of abnormally hot water which moved into the Indian Ocean several months ago is behind the bleaching, according to the ARC report. The hot water caused the corals to shed microscopic algae which help nourish them. The algae also give color to the corals, so when the algae are gone, the corals starve and appear white or bleached.

Dive operators reported water temperatures were 4 degrees Centigrade higher than average during the die-off, according to the ARC report.

The scientists said coral coverage in the affected areas could drop from 50 percent to 10 percent, hurting fishing and tourist industries over the long term as dead reefs support less marine life than live ones. And with that loss of diversity, they attract fewer fishermen and fewer divers.

“While it may take up to two years for some fish species to be affected by the loss of coral habitat, fisheries yields will decline and this combined with a drop in the number of scuba divers visiting could have major long-term effects on the local economy,” Baird said in a statement.

Baird blamed “human-induced global warming” for the decline of the corals and said action must be taken to reduce carbon emissions that help retain heat in the atmosphere.

“This is not just about warmer temperatures: it is also threatening the livelihoods of tens of millions of people and potentially the stability of our region,” Baird said in a statement.

Rebecca
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I know it’s not Thursday but remember what I said last week…..
Blogging will be sporadic and out of normal order for the rest of the year!

‘Ecological catastrophe’: Toxic sludge kills 3
State of emergency declared after red wave sweeps through Hungarian towns

BUDAPEST — The Hungarian government declared a state of emergency on Tuesday after a toxic sludge spill killed at least three people, news agency MTI reported.

The state of emergency affected Veszprem, Gyor-Moson-Sopron and Vas counties. Six people were missing on Tuesday and 120 injured in what officials said was an ecological disaster.

The contaminated mud poured through Kolontar and two other villages on Monday after bursting out of an open containment pond at the nearby Ajkai Timfoldgyar Zrt plant, owned by MAL Zrt.

The sludge, a waste product in aluminum production, contains heavy metals and is toxic if ingested. Many of the injured sustained burns as the sludge seeped through their clothes. Two of the injured were in life threatening condition. An elderly woman, a young man and a 3-year-old child were killed in the flooding.

The chemical burns caused by the sludge could take days to reveal themselves and what may seem like superficial injuries could later cause damage to deeper tissue, Peter Jakabos, a doctor on duty at a hospital in Gyor where several of the injured were taken, said on state television.

Several hundred tons of plaster were being poured into the Marcal river to bind the toxic sludge and prevent it from flowing on, the National Disaster Management Directorate said.

So far, about 35.3 million cubic feet of sludge has leaked from the reservoir and affected an estimated area of 15.4 square miles, Environmental Affairs State Secretary Zoltan Illes told MTI.

Illes said the incident was an “ecological catastrophe” and it was feared that the sludge could reach the Raba and Danube rivers.

Seven towns, including Kolontal, Devecser and Somlovasarhely, were affected near the Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant in the town of Ajka, 100 miles southwest of Budapest, the capital.

‘Burned him to the bone’
On Tuesday morning, the sludge in Tunde Erdelyi’s house in Devecser was still five feet high and rescue workers used an ax to cut through her living room door to let the red liquid flow out.

“When I heard the rumble of the flood, all the time I had was to jump out the window and run to higher ground,” said a tearful Erdelyi, still shocked by the events but grateful that she had been able to save a family rabbit and that her cat was found wet and shivering in the attic.

Robert Kis, Erdelyi’s husband, said his uncle had been taken to Budapest, the capital, by helicopter after the sludge “burned him to the bone.”

The flood overturned Erdelyi’s car and pushed it some 30 yards to the back of the garden while her husband’s van was lifted on to a fence.

“We still have some copper in the garage that we could sell to make a living for a while,” Kis said as he attempted to appraise the damage to his house and belongings. Erdelyi, a seamstress, was hoping the flood has spared the shop in town where she worked, her family’s main source of income.

The disaster agency said 390 residents had to be temporarily relocated and 110 were rescued from the flooded towns, where firefighters and soldiers were carrying out cleanup tasks.

Local environmentalists said that for years they had been calling the government’s attention to the risks of red sludge, which in a 2003 report they estimated at 30 million tons.

“Accumulated during decades … red sludge is, by volume, the largest amount of toxic waste in Hungary,” the Clear Air Action Group said.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Rebecca
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First National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day Sept. 25

Over-prescribed and under-consumed, prescription drugs are generating both environmental and law enforcement problems. A national take-back day September 25 is intended to heighten awareness of this important issue.

The growing national volume of unused prescription drugs is prompting the nation’s first drug take-back day September 25. When flushed down toilets — the usual management choice for many health care facilities and households — the drugs can pollute drinking water and may affect fish and other aquatic life. But national drug policies and regulations have thwarted many community take-back efforts.

The U.S. EPA and Fish and Wildlife Service oppose the flushing of prescription medication based on studies showing many of the nation’s waters are contaminated by personal care products, including prescription drugs. Endocrine disruptors in some medicines have been associated with altering the sex characteristics of fish. But both the Food and Drug Administration and the Office of National Drug Control Policy recommend flushing some drugs.

“Odds are that many of us have half empty bottles of medicine lying around our houses. Some of us may have thought we were doing the right thing by flushing them down the toilet, or throwing them away with our trash. But these disposal methods can have a damaging effect on our environment,” said U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging Chairman Herb Kohl (D-WI), who is calling for a new federal guideline on prescription drug disposal, at a July 1 Congressional hearing.

Tough Drug Enforcement Administration guidelines require law enforcement personnel be present at take-back events and drop-off facilities. The returned drugs are frequently incinerated at high temperatures.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has introduced a proposed Secure and Responsible Drug Disposal Act that would facilitate unused drug take back programs. Although primarily intended to keep potent drugs like Vicodin out of the hands of young people, the measure would also have environmental benefits.

Take-back programs are popular with many communities. Almost 180 pounds of pills have been dropped off at the Longview, Washington Police Department disposal site since the program began last September. In Chisago County, Minnesota, the sheriff’s office collects an average of five pounds of medicines every day.

More information on plans for the drug take-back event, supported by the National Association of Attorneys General, is here.

Rebecca
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Companies, hospitals move away from toxic material
By David S. Martin, CNN Senior Medical Producer

(CNN) — Worried about toxic waste and chemical exposure, more and more companies and hospitals are moving away from polyvinyl chloride.

PVC is used in everything from home siding, pipes and flooring to school supplies, car interiors and packaging, electrical cords and medical tubing. But making or burning PVC waste produces dioxins, cancer-causing chemicals that are among the most toxic substances known.

“Our concerns about the ways in which PVC can be disposed of, burned for example … caused us to begin eliminating PVC from our products,” Hewlett-Packard’s Tony Prophet said. The computer giant launched its first PVC-free notebook computer last year.

Microsoft, Honda, Wal-Mart, Target and Nike are among other large corporations moving away from polyvinyl chloride, said Mike Schade, the PVC campaign coordinator for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice.

“There’s been a major market shift away from PVC in just about every major sector of the economy,” Schade said.

Allen Blakey of the Vinyl Institute, an industry trade group, said the move to other plastics is misguided.

“Some of them may feel they can find a better material than PVC. What we find is, they often don’t go very far before coming back and finding PVC was the best material after all,” Blakey said.

More than 12 billion pounds of PVC are produced in the United States annually, according to Blakey.

The Center for Health, Environment and Justice and other environmental groups are trying to persuade companies to find alternatives to PVC because of dioxins.

Dioxins are a family of chemicals now thought to be toxic at parts per trillion, which is less than a single drop in a backyard pool.

The risks of dioxin became known after Vietnam, where dioxin was an unwanted impurity in the chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange. In the decades after the war, soldiers who handled Agent Orange were more likely to develop a range of cancers and, possibly, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

Blakey of the Vinyl Institute said dioxin emissions in PVC production are way down.

“You know, dioxin is actually a great success story. Dioxin emissions in this country have gone down since the ’60s. They’re at very low levels. Even since the late ’80s, they’re down 90 percent or so,” Blakey said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began requiring companies to report dioxin emissions only in 2000. Since then, EPA figures show dioxin emissions have declined 66 percent, from 218 pounds to 74 pounds in 2008, the most recent figures available.

Worries about the health effects of phthalates, a chemical additive that makes PVC flexible, prompted Kaiser Permanente hospitals to begin working with suppliers to find alternatives more than 10 years ago, said Kathy Gerwig, senior vice president and environmental stewardship officer.

“The first place we looked to get rid of PVC was in the neonatal unit. And that’s because PVC medical products often contain a plasticizer called DEHP, and that can disrupt hormones,” Gerwig said.

DEHP is in the phthalate family. Some research has found that phthalates mimic the hormone estrogen and could disrupt reproductive development and cause other health problems.

A study of 54 newborns in neonatal intensive care units found a connection between the use of flexible tubing and other medical products containing phthalates and exposure to DEHP. The study did not show that the exposure caused any ill health effects.

Last year, the United States banned or restricted the sale of children toys and children’s products containing DEHP and five other phthalates.

On its website, the American Chemistry Council says phthalates “have a long history of safe use.”

But Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit health plan with 35 medical facility and more than 14,000 doctors, has replaced phthalate-containing PVC in intravenous tubing, catheters and other medical equipment.

The hospital has also replaced PVC in flooring, baseboards, wall guards — even the plastic backing on carpets.

“Typically, the products that we’ve replaced, it does not cost more. We found that the majority are cost-neutral. In many cases, they cost less,” Gerwig said.

Despite the move away from polyvinyl chloride, Schade said, there’s still plenty of vinyl waste. About 500 million to 600 million pounds of PVC are burned each year, he said.

Schade said the Center for Health, Environment and Justice is focused on getting schools to stop using PVC in construction.

“Phthalates are banned in toys, but phthalates are widespread in schools,” Schade said.

Rebecca
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Las Vegas Bars Recycle Glass Bottles Into Building Material
by Trey Granger

Have you ever ordered a drink at a bar or restaurant and wondered what happened to the bottle it came in?

On the Las Vegas Strip, these bottles may end up as the facade for buildings when mixed with recycled cement, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The material is known as Green Stone, and currently 200,000 pounds of it are being applied to the headquarters of Realm of Design, which manufactures Green Stone.

The other key players are Luxor and Mandalay Bay, which provide glass bottles from their bars and restaurants, and Evergreen Recycling, which collects and transports the glass.

While Green Stone actually costs more to manufacture than raw building materials, it provides a reuse for glass bottles that would otherwise need to be landfilled or shipped to recycling centers in other states.

According to the Review-Journal, Evergreen Recycling hopes that finding a local demand for the material would increase the likelihood that a glass processing plant is built in the area.

One of the other advantages of this process is that the glass bottles are essentially downcycled into sand, so there’s not as much of a concern about the condition of the glass. While glass bottles can be recycled into new bottles in about a month, this process requires color separation and removal of any broken pieces, since you can’t make new clear glass bottles with brown or green glass. That places more responsibility on recyclers and collectors of the material.

It’s estimated that only 25 percent of glass is recycled in the U.S., and of that material 60 percent is downcycled instead of recycled into new glass bottles. A main obstacle toward increasing the amount of recycled glass is the availability of processing plants that will purchase the material from recycling programs.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com