America’s Dirty Beaches

Tar balls? A sheen of crude? Oil mousse? Amateur hour. The real villains of America’s beaches are not the scattered and dissipating messes from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but the nationwide and relentless releases of disease-causing pathogens—human and animal feces—that reach the shorelines from storm runoff and sewage overflows. In its 20th annual report on the water quality at America’s beaches, the Natural Resources Defense Council finds that “from stomach-turning pathogens to dangerous oil slicks, America’s beaches continue to suffer from pollution that can make people sick, harm marine life and destroy coastal economies,” said the NRDC’s David Beckman.

Before heading to a beach this weekend—on the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Great Lakes—be sure to check how it fares on measures of bacteria in the water (which come from human and animal waste), on testing that water (some beaches take water samples more frequently than others), and on posting advisories so that people can decide that a day swimming in fecal matter isn’t quite the weekend outing they had in mind. The ratings of popular beaches, arranged by state, are here.

All the data come from government records from 3,000 beaches, including water samples and beach closings or advisories (the latter being issued when bacterial levels in the water are high enough to warn the public about but do not exceed state or federal limits). In 2009, there were 18,682 closing and advisory days. That compares with 2,239 such days in the gulf region from the BP gusher.

The full NRDC report, available here, also includes a five-star rating for 200 of the most popular beaches, based on water quality, monitoring frequency, and public notification of contamination. The best beaches in 2009 were in Minnesota (Lafayette Community Club Beach and Franklin Park at 13th Street on Park Point), New Hampshire (Hampton Beach State Park and Wallis Sands Beach at Wallis Road), California (Bolsa Chica State Beach, Huntington City Beach at the Beach Hut, Newport Beach, Salt Creek Beach at Dana Strands, and portions of Cardiff State Beach and Laguna Beach), and Alabama (Gulf Shores Public Beach). Unfortunately, Gulf Shores has now been closed for 53 days due to the BP spill.

The worst of the popular beaches were in Florida (Ben T. Davis North, Dixie Belle Beach, Monument Beach, Navarre Park, Quietwater Beach, Simmons Park and Treasure Island Beach), Maine (Old Orchard Beach, Long Sands Beach and Short Sands Beach), Mississippi (Courthouse Road Beach, Edgewater Beach and Front Beach), North Carolina (one section of Nags Head), New York (Hamlin Beach State Park, Orchard Beach, Robert Moses State Park Beach, and sections of Rockaway Beach and Coney Island), Rhode Island (Narragansett Town Beach), and South Carolina (Myrtle Beach, South Carolina State Park and Campground, Springmaid Beach and Surfside Beach).

With 7 percent of beachwater samples in violation of health standards for bacterial levels, there was no improvement from 2008 and 2007. The most contaminated beachwater is in the Great Lakes, where 13 percent of water samples violated health standards. The cleanest water is in the Southeast and the Delmarva Peninsula, but there is significant variation state-by-state: the most reported contamination in 2009 was in Louisiana (25 percent of samples exceeding acceptable levels of bacteria), Rhode Island (20 percent), and Illinois (16 percent). Beaches with the least contamination were in New Hampshire (1 percent of samples above allowable contamination levels), Delaware (2 percent), and Oregon (2 percent).

Good news: 2009 saw an 8 percent decrease in closing and advisory days at U.S. beaches (though most of the East Coast and the entire Gulf Coast experienced more closings and advisories). Bad news: much of that can be attributed to the fact that budget cuts have forced beaches in southern California to cut back on water-quality monitoring. What you don’t know about can’t hurt you?

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

For recyclers, one (complicated) word: Plastics
Reducing oil dependency through plastic recycling is not so easy
by Allison Linn

Just as America is addicted to oil, it’s positively hooked on plastic.

Americans rely on plastic made from crude oil and natural gas in virtually every aspect of our lives — from soda bottles to car parts to toys. And yet even as the Gulf Coast oil disaster is causing more Americans to rethink their dependency on petroleum, we’re doing a poor job of reusing the plastic we already have.

Only 7.1 percent of our plastic waste was recycled in 2008, according to the latest data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

By weight, that means that out of 30.05 million tons of plastic waste generated that year, nearly 28 million tons ended up in the trash heap. That’s the equivalent of 366,000 Boeing 737s, according to calculations by Waste Management.

The recycling rate for plastic goods is far lower than many other common household items, such as cardboard or aluminum, and it’s also significantly less than the overall waste recovery rate. In 2008, 33.2 percent of all waste generated was recycled or composted, according to the EPA.

Why are we so bad at recycling plastics?
Many Americans simply don’t have a convenient way do it. About 40 percent of the U.S. population has no access to curbside recycling programs, according to the EPA, and even among those with curbside recycling not all programs accept all types of plastics.

And the very qualities that make plastic so popular — it is light, durable and portable — also mean that it is often used on the go, where it is all too easy to just toss the items in the trash.

“The material’s there. It’s just not being routed into recycling. It’s being routed into landfill,” said Keefe Harrison, director of communications for the Association of Postconsumer Plastics Recyclers, a trade group.

The countless varieties of plastics out there also can cause complications for recyclers and confusion for consumers who want to recycle. Unlike cardboard or aluminum cans, which generally get lumped together for recycling purposes, plastic detergent jugs, water bottles and yogurt containers may need to be sorted and processed separately.

Many plastic items also contain paint, metal or other components that can be difficult to cost-effectively remove for recycling.

“We have to design plastics with recycling in mind,” said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has worked for years to get companies and government groups to step up plastic recycling efforts in order to reduce dependence on oil and natural gas.

Hope for the future
Despite these roadblocks, many in the industry say they are seeing a growing awareness of the economic and environmental value of recycling plastic.

“It’s becoming part of our culture,” said Carl Rush, a senior vice president for organic growth with the refuse hauler Waste Management, which is placing a major focus on plastic recycling as a way to expand its business. “As I tell folks around here, if you don’t believe this, just talk to your kids.”

Improvements have been slow so far. From 2000 to 2008, the recycling rate for plastic inched up from 5.8 percent to 7.1 percent, while the overall waste recycling and composting rate increased from 29 percent to 33.2 percent.

Meanwhile, many expect plastic use to increase. At Waste Management, executives say they have noticed significantly more plastic containers, and fewer glass ones, showing up in the waste stream.

Not all plastic recycled equally
Experts say there is a relatively robust market for recycled plastic resin made from things like soda bottles and detergent or milk jugs, typically numbered 1 and 2, which are recycled at a much higher rate than other plastic items. That type of recycled resin can be reborn as new plastic bottles, carpet fiber, fleece jackets and outdoor decking.

The far thornier problem is what to do with the type of plastics found in things such as medicine bottles, toys and butter tubs, which are typically numbered 3 through 7. These plastics can be more difficult to sort, and the relatively small volumes can makes it hard to compete in price against new plastic.

“There are so many different types, and so much of it really can’t be recovered because either volumes aren’t sufficient or it really doesn’t have a lot of value in terms of the marketplace,” said Rush, of Waste Management.

His company has been trying to encourage companies to focus more on the types of plastic used for soda bottles and jugs in the hope that coalescing around a smaller group of plastics will make the plastic recycling market more efficient.

Improving recycling operations
Meanwhile, some recycling haulers are working to make recycling easier for consumers. Instead of asking people to look at the number on a plastic item to determine whether or where to recycle it, many now offer guidance based on the item itself, such as bags or bottles. Others have moved to a “single-stream” model where consumers can lump all their recycling together and leave the sorting to the hauling company.

There are also moves to put plastic recycling drop boxes in more convenient locations, such as in sports arenas, and to expand the types of plastics drop-off locations will accept. For example, some grocery stores now will accept grocery, dry cleaning and newspaper bags in their bins.

Some consumer companies also have gotten more involved in plastic recycling in recent years. Beverage giant Coca-Cola has invested in bottle-to-bottle recycling facilities and recently won industry accolades for a recyclable bottle that is partly made from plant-based materials. Nestle, whose brands include Arrowhead and Poland Spring, recently introduced bottles made with 25 percent recycled plastic. Some smaller-scale manufacturers are also starting to recycle more of their own product for reuse.

Others are focused more heavily on reducing the amount of oil-based plastic. Hershkowitz, of the NRDC, said he is seeing big companies finding ways to use less plastic in each container, and also is starting to notice a bigger push toward plastics made out of something other than petroleum or natural gas, such as plants.

“The move on plastics is to get out of petroleum,” he said.

While such efforts help, he thinks consumer products companies should be required to help pay for the collection of the plastics they produce.

Bias toward new plastic
Despite the recycling industry’s efforts, it’s still difficult to compete against low cost and readily available new plastic resin, of which the U.S. is a major producer and a net exporter. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that 4.6 percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption, or 331 million barrels of liquid petroleum gases and natural gas liquids, was used to manufacture plastic resin in 2006, the latest data available.

“Many manufacturers still like using virgin,” said Jonathan Levy, director of state and local programs for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade group that includes about 230 members who handle plastics.

In some cases, he said, recycled resin can be less appealing because it is discolored or not as clean as new resin. For example, he said it may work very well on a plastic part that is inside a car door, but a manufacturer may still choose to use virgin resin for a part the consumer will see.

Long-term view
Levy sees a similarity between the state of plastic recycling now and the state of rubber tire recycling 25 years ago, when piles of used tires were strewn throughout the country and there seemed little use for them. These days, he said, improvements in recycling technology have made it cost-effective to reuse a large chunk of those tires for everything from landscape mulch to rubberized asphalt. The recovery rate for rubber tires was 35.4 percent in 2008, up from 12.2 percent in 1990, according to the EPA.

“It is expanding and it is increasing, but I would think that we might have to take a long-term view on this,” Levy said of plastics recycling.

But Hershkowitz, of the NRDC, notes that plastic recycling may be more challenging than something like tires, because plastic bags, containers and toys can be both smaller and more ubiquitous.

He also notes that environmental advocates have been pushing major corporations to get more serious about plastic recycling for decades.

“They’ve had their 25 years,” he said.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Garbage islands threaten Three Gorges Dam
Official: Trash is two feet deep, so compacted people can walk on it

BEIJING — Thousands of tons of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so thick people can stand on it, state media said on Monday.

Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China Daily that more than 3,000 tons of trash was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up.

“The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam,” Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River.

The river is a crucial commercial artery for the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China’s less-developed western interior provinces.

Pictures showed a huge swathe of the waters by the dam crammed full of debris, with cranes brought in to fish out a tangled mess, including shoes, bottles, branches and Styrofoam.

‘Decaying’
Some more than half a million square feet had been covered by trash washed down since the start of the rainy season in July, the report said. The trash is around two feet deep, and in some parts so compacted people can walk on it, the Hubei Daily added.

“Such a large amount of debris could damage the propellers and bottoms of passing boats,” Chen said. “The decaying garbage could also harm the scenery and the water quality.”

The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest hydropower project, and was built partly to tame flooding along the Yangtze, which killed over 4,000 people in 1998 and countless more over the centuries.

Enormously expensive and disruptive, the dam has cost over 254 billion yuan ($37.5 billion) and forced the relocation of 1.3 million people to make way for the reservoir. Towns, fields and historical and archaeological sites have been submerged.

Environmentalists have warned for years that the reservoir could turn into a cesspool of raw sewage and industrial chemicals backing onto nearby Chongqing city, and feared that silt trapped behind the dam could cause erosion downstream.

China has made scant progress on schemes drawn up nearly a decade ago to limit pollution in and around the reservoir.

Chen said about 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) is spent each year clearing floating waste by the dam.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Soap Dioxins Found in Mississippi River Sediments
Written by Dave Dempsey

A University of Minnesota study published today in the scientific journal, Environmental Science & Technology, found that while overall dioxin levels in Mississippi River sediments are decreasing, dioxins associated with triclosan, a common ingredient in hand soaps, are rising significantly. The federal Food and Drug Administration last month said it would review the safety of triclosan.

Dioxins associated with triclosan were found in the sediments of Lake Pepin, a wide area in the Mississippi River downstream from the Twin Cities. The Minnesota study authors note that waste water treatment plants do not fully remove the triclosan pesticide, and that the human health impacts of the contaminants are unclear.

“These four dioxins only come from triclosan. They didn’t exist in Lake Pepin before triclosan was introduced,” University of Minnesota civil engineering professor William Arnold said. “In the most current sediments, these triclosan-derived dioxins account for about 30 percent of the total dioxin mass.”

Lake Pepin faces other pollution problems. The widest naturally occurring part of the Mississippi, it also suffers from algae blooms and turbidity. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is developing a complex cleanup plan that could require significant pollutant reductions from the Minnesota and St. Croix Rivers, which feed the Mississippi upstream from the lake.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

I thought phospate detergents were banned a long time ago…
But I guess not!

Wash., Ore. ban sales of phosphate-laden dishwasher detergent
by Associated Press

BREMERTON, Wash. – Washington and Oregon are banning the sale of phosphate-laden dishwasher detergent starting Thursday.

Familiar brands are still available but they will have lower levels of phosphates.

Experts say phosphates promote plant growth and may degrade water quality in lakes and streams.

“It’s more effective and less expensive to decrease what goes down the drain than it is to treat it at the plant. This way, we’re all part of the solution,” said Washington Rep. Timm Ormsby, D-Spokane, told the Kitsap Sun. Ormbsy sponsored the 2006 bill to limit phosphates in dishwasher detergents.

The ban has already been in place in Spokane and Whatcom counties in Washington state since 2008. The Oregon Legislature passed a law in 2009 that lowered the phosphorous limit for automatic dishwasher detergents from 8.7 percent to 0.5 percent.

Dennis Griesing, vice president of government affairs for the American Cleaning Institute, said low-phosphate formulas available in 2008 did not work as well in hard water, so some shoppers in Spokane, Wash. had been crossing into Idaho to buy dishwasher soap with phosphates.

But there are new detergents on the market, and they’re getting better reviews.

In Western Washington, with softer water, people seem satisfied with the new formulas.

Starting July 1, it will be illegal for retailers in Washington and Oregon to sell dishwasher detergents containing more than 0.5 percent phosphorus by weight. The new phosphate limit does not apply to commercial dishwasher products.

“Phosphorous is like a fertilizer. It increases algae and aquatic weed growth in water bodies,” said Bernie Duffy, natural resource specialist with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

He said too much algae can deplete the oxygen supply necessary for healthy fish and aquatic life.

Since 1994, Washington has limited phosphorus in laundry detergent to 0.5 percent. Detergents for hand-washing dishes generally contain no phosphorus.

Sandy Howard, a spokeswoman for the Washington Department of Ecology, said sewage treatment plants and private septic systems remove phosphate, but a portion still makes its way into lakes and streams.

When the limit went into effect in Spokane, officials reported a 10.7 percent decrease in phosphate coming into the city’s sewage-treatment plant, which discharges into the Spokane River.

The phosphate limit on dishwasher detergents becomes law in 15 states on Thursday, but Griesing said only the new detergents will be sold through U.S. and Canada in a short time.

Other states with a legal limit are Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Chinese coal-mining city is world’s most polluted
By David Feinberg, VBS Correspondent

Editor’s note: The staff at CNN.com has recently been intrigued by the journalism of VICE, an independent media company and website based in Brooklyn, New York. VBS.TV is VICE’s broadband television network. The reports, which are produced solely by VICE, reflect a very transparent approach to journalism, where viewers are taken along on every step of the reporting process. We believe this unique reporting approach is worthy of sharing with our CNN.com readers.

Brooklyn, New York (VBS.TV) — In 2008, the world cast its eyes on Beijing, the sprawling Chinese metropolis that was set to play host to the Summer Olympics.

At VBS.TV, we caught wind of another story that soon had our full attention. As Chinese officials were taking unprecedented and often controversial measures to sanitize the notoriously foul Beijing air, much of the rest of the country was still covered in a thick blanket of noxious smog.

According to a World Bank survey at the time, 16 of the world’s 20 most-polluted cities were in China.

At the top of that list is the city of Linfen, a coal-mining and manufacturing hub in the heart of Shanxi Province. Within weeks, we assembled a film crew and went off to the landlocked province in northern China to find out more.

After touching down in Beijing and making a quick visit to the Olympic countdown clock, we set out to visit the single most polluted place on Earth, hoping to place the dubious ranking into a human context.

Despite the Chinese government’s promise of a marathon-friendly city, the Beijing air at the time was still plenty oppressive. But nothing could have prepared us for the dystopian scenario we encountered during our week in Linfen and the surrounding area.

Before the trip, I had researched thousands of images of the pollution that plagues Linfen and Shanxi province, but to see it in person is, quite simply, devastating.

The sun sets before it is supposed to, disappearing into a curtain of smog above the true horizon. Residents scavenge the roadside for coal that falls from the seemingly endless cavalcade of coal trucks, gathering it with bare hands. Schoolchildren play against the nonstop backdrop of billowing exhaust. Many of the elderly have trouble speaking between gasps of widespread emphysema.

Residents of Linfen are aware of the growing threat the polluted air and water pose, and some of them have left the city. Most, however, have no choice but to stay.

The infamy of a No. 1 ranking in the news media eventually motivated China to focus more attention on cleaning up Linfen, but unfortunately, the scene of overwhelming pollution is still rampant in many parts of the country.

As easy as it is to criticize China’s bold industrial development, our visit was also a clear reminder of the same pattern of manufacturing and consumption that has occurred elsewhere since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

In China, it just happens to be on a much grander scale and on the back of a globalized economy that has rendered China into an assembly line for the world. The most compelling research I came across to this end are recently published studies showing particulate matter from China’s factories and mines reaching across the Pacific Ocean to North America’s West Coast.

China obviously has some cleaning up to do, and more importantly, some major strategizing to achieve a sustainable economy.

Our futures are inextricably linked. Back in New York City, the coal mines of Shanxi Province feel worlds away, but as oil now gushes ceaselessly into our own backyard, we should pay even more attention to Linfen if we don’t want it to be a glimpse into our own future.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Western Washington Company’s Answer to Gulf Clean Up
Written by Cindy Tickle

A company in Western Washington is waiting for a phone call from officials in the Gulf of Mexico. The company, Absorption Corp, is best known for making absorbent bedding for animals, but the Ferndale company also produces another product called Absorbent W.

Absorbent W is made from reclaimed wood pulp and an environmentally friendly drying process. It is designed to contain and control hydrocarbons (oil-based liquids) while repelling water.

In other words, it’s ideal for cleaning up oil spills in water. Hello?!

Absorption Corp. President Doug Ellis has contacted the Coast Guard and the EPA but hasn’t received an order for his product yet. He says…

“One of the challenges has been getting government agencies to green light the idea. The product is 100 percent biodegradable, but convincing others of this has been a challenge. When an emergency is happening, people don’t have time to study (a product like this).”

Call me crazy… but with a disaster of this magnitude, wouldn’t Gulf officials want to try every oil-sucking product available on the market? Isn’t it time to do away with the bureaucracy and red tape?

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Niger Delta becomes a cautionary tale for U.S.
Region has endured equivalent of Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years.

By Adam Nossiter

BODO, Nigeria – Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.

Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab.

Not far away, there is still black crude on Gio Creek from an April spill, and just across the state line in Akwa Ibom the fishermen curse their oil-blackened nets, doubly useless in a barren sea buffeted by a spill from an offshore Exxon Mobil pipe in May that lasted for weeks.

The oil spews from rusted and aging pipes, unchecked by what analysts say is ineffectual or collusive regulation, and abetted by deficient maintenance and sabotage. In the face of this black tide is an infrequent protest — soldiers guarding an Exxon Mobil site beat women who were demonstrating last month, according to witnesses — but mostly resentful resignation.

‘Shell oil on my body’
Small children swim in the polluted estuary here, fishermen take their skiffs out ever farther — “There’s nothing we can catch here,” said Pius Doron, perched anxiously over his boat — and market women trudge through oily streams. “There is Shell oil on my body,” said Hannah Baage, emerging from Gio Creek with a machete to cut the cassava stalks balanced on her head.

That the Gulf of Mexico disaster has transfixed a country and president they so admire is a matter of wonder for people here, living among the palm-fringed estuaries in conditions as abject as any in Nigeria, according to the United Nations. Though their region contributes nearly 80 percent of the government’s revenue, they have hardly benefited from it; life expectancy is the lowest in Nigeria.

“President Obama is worried about that one,” Claytus Kanyie, a local official, said of the gulf spill, standing among dead mangroves in the soft oily muck outside Bodo. “Nobody is worried about this one. The aquatic life of our people is dying off. There used be shrimp. There are no longer any shrimp.”

In the distance, smoke rose from what Mr. Kanyie and environmental activists said was an illegal refining business run by local oil thieves and protected, they said, by Nigerian security forces. The swamp was deserted and quiet, without even bird song; before the spills, Mr. Kanyie said, women from Bodo earned a living gathering mollusks and shellfish among the mangroves.

A cautionary tale for the U.S.
With new estimates that as many as 2.5 million gallons of oil could be spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day, the Niger Delta has suddenly become a cautionary tale for the United States.

As many as 546 million gallons of oil spilled into the Niger Delta over the last five decades, or nearly 11 million gallons a year, a team of experts for the Nigerian government and international and local environmental groups concluded in a 2006 report. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez
spill in 1989 dumped an estimated 10.8 million gallons of oil into the waters off Alaska.

So the people here cast a jaundiced, if sympathetic, eye at the spill in the gulf. “We’re sorry for them, but it’s what’s been happening to us for 50 years,” said Emman Mbong, an official in Eket.

The spills here are all the more devastating because this ecologically sensitive wetlands region, the source of 10 percent of American oil imports, has most of Africa’s mangroves and, like the Louisiana coast, has fed the interior for generations with its abundance of fish, shellfish, wildlife and crops.

Local environmentalists have been denouncing the spoliation for years, with little effect. “It’s a dead environment,” said Patrick Naagbanton of the Center Environment, Human Rights and Development in Port Harcourt, the leading city of the oil region.

Though much here has been destroyed, much remains, with large expanses of vibrant green. Environmentalists say that with intensive restoration, the Niger Delta could again be what it once was.

Nigeria produced more than two million barrels of oil a day last year, and in over 50 years thousands of miles of pipes have been laid through the swamps. Shell, the major player, has operations on thousands of square miles of territory, according to Amnesty International. Aging columns of oil-well valves, known as Christmas trees, pop up improbably in clearings among the palm trees. Oil sometimes shoots out of them, even if the wells are defunct.

“The oil was just shooting up in the air, and it goes up in the sky,” said Amstel M. Gbarakpor, youth president in Kegbara Dere, recalling the spill in April at Gio Creek. “It took them three weeks to secure this well.”

How much of the spillage is due to oil thieves or to sabotage linked to the militant movement active in the Niger Delta and how much stems from poorly maintained and aging pipes, is a matter of fierce dispute among communities, environmentalists and the oil companies.

Caroline Wittgen, a spokeswoman for Shell in Lagos, said, “We don’t discuss individual spills,” but argued that the “vast majority” were caused by sabotage or theft, with only 2 percent due to equipment failure or human error.

“We do not believe that we behave irresponsibly, but we do operate in a unique environment where security and lawlessness are major problems,” Ms. Wittgen said.

Oil companies also contend that they clean up much of what is lost. A spokesman for Exxon Mobil in Lagos, Nigel A. Cookey-Gam, said that the company’s recent offshore spill leaked only about 8,400 gallons and that “this was effectively cleaned up.”

But many experts and local officials say the companies attribute too much to sabotage, to lessen their culpability. Richard Steiner, a consultant on oil spills, concluded in a 2008 report that historically “the pipeline failure rate in Nigeria is many times that found elsewhere in the world,” and he noted that even Shell acknowledged “almost every year” a spill due to a corroded pipeline.

On the beach at Ibeno, the few fishermen were glum. Far out to sea oil had spilled for weeks from the Exxon Mobil pipe. “We can’t see where to fish; oil is in the sea,” Patrick Okoni said.

“We don’t have an international media to cover us, so nobody cares about it,” said Mr. Mbong, in nearby Eket. “Whatever cry we cry is not heard outside of here.”

This story, “Half a World From Gulf, a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old”, first appeared in The New York Times.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Alberta takes environmental hit in quest for oil
By Eddy Moretti, Vice President, VICE Media

Brooklyn, New York (VBS.TV) — We thought that since you were feeling absolutely dejected watching BP’s underwater gusher spoiling the ecology and economy of the Gulf of Mexico, well, we would try to cheer you up by reminding you how the otherwise environmentally conscious Canadians are degrading their own natural splendor and national soul with oil spillage and seepage on purpose.

Bitumen — A.K.A. tar sand — is barely oil. It’s oil-soaked dirt, but in a world that is constantly scraping the bottom of the fossil fuel barrel, tar sand is oil enough to warrant a mad frenzy to extract. And that’s exactly what is happening in the Canadian northwest.

Northern Alberta is rich — very rich — in bitumen. Fort McMurray is the small town at the epicenter of a boom in tar sand extraction, and it’s a messy, ecologically unsound adventure.

Traditionally, the only way to get oil from the dirt has been to cook it. So, every day, massive excavators rip apart the Boreal forest (also known as the lungs of Canada) to get at the soggy oil sand below, and then millions of gallons of pristine Athabascan water are intentionally spoiled in order to boil the oil out of the dirt (or is it the dirt out of the oil?). It’s a very messy, destructive process, which has contaminated rivers and lakes for miles in every direction.

There is a newer method of extraction, called SAGD, in which steam is injected deep underground, cooking the oil out of the dirt and then siphoning the oil out of the boiling mess.

We spent two weeks in and around Fort McMurray, A.K.A. Fort McMoney, documenting what the recent boom has done to the fragile ecology and the local economy. It’s a classic boom town, with classic boom town problems: expensive housing, high food prices, overcrowding, traffic and congestion, and charming little additions like alcoholism, cocaine and meth addiction, and prostitution.

What we learned is that we desperately need a clean energy policy. The Alberta tar sands must be the dirtiest “last chapter” of our century-long fascination with oil. We shouldn’t want to live in a world which tolerates boiling dirt for every last drop of tar.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

53 Megawatt Ice Energy Storage Project Begins In Glendale, California

Written by Susan Kraemer

About 24 municipal buildings in Southern California are about to help ease the strain on the grid created by the peak need for air conditioning on hot California afternoons. Over the next few weeks, a consortium of municipal utilities in California will begin retrofitting government offices and commercial properties with systems that use ice made at night using cheap surplus wind power to replace air-conditioning that they would have required during the afternoon.

The first cheap energy storage cooling units housed at distributed sites on the buildings will be networked, providing utilities with a resource that can be dispatched as needed to help manage demand on the grid.

The 53 MW distributed energy storage project will demonstrate savings, such that if put into general use, would reduce fuel consumption by the nation’s utilities by up to 30%, using efficiency “negawatts”, and by individual building owners by up to 90%.

The units are made by Colorado-based Ice Energy, a recipient of the DOE 30% tax credits for investments in new, expanded or re-equipped clean energy manufacturing projects, for bringing much-needed jobs to upstate New York where it will scale up its manufacturing operations.

Over the next two years, the 11 small participating utilities will install 6,000 of the devices at a total of 1,500 locations, providing 53 megawatts of energy storage to relieve strain on the grid, and coordinated by the Southern California Public Power Authority.

The units make cheap ice overnight, when demand for electricity is low, using a high-efficiency compressor to freeze 450 gallons of water. In the middle of the day, the device shuts off the regular air conditioner for the peak afternoon hours and instead pipes a stream of coolant from the slowly melting block of ice to an evaporator coil installed within the building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning blower system until the entire ice block has melted – which should be sized to take about 6 hours – to cover for the peak afternoon load on the grid.

The utility also saves energy at other points in the grid–for example, cooler power lines at night transmit electricity more efficiently. Although ice storage systems have been used in large commercial buildings – the Bank of America Building in Manhattan is a LEED-Certified example – these tend to be expensive custom-built designs. This project uses mass-produced scalable modular units.

At $5,000 each, these will be within the means of commercial property-owners, and would bring up to 90% reduction in individual building’s fuel use. For California, the implications are huge. Large-scale implementation of Ice Energy’s (already tried and tested) small modular units as energy storage for the grid would put off the need to build new power plants. And not just in the SCCPA utility district.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com