Article Date: May 29, 2009

Source: New York Times

Chapter: 22- Solid and Hazardous Waste, 21- Water Pollution

Region: National

Summary: Lawmakers in some areas are considering imposing even more taxes on cigarettes to fund the cleanup of cigarette butts that has become inevitable anywhere that smoking is allowed. Most smokers behave under the misconception that cigarette butts are biodegradable, and thus will just discard them on sidewalks or wherever they happen to stomp them out. This causes serious environmental issues because not only do cigarette butts compose a large portion of litter in general, they also leak dangerous chemicals into the environment- a process that is especially harmful to aquatic ecosystems. Programs to decrease this problem other than extra taxes include banning smoking in heavily littered areas and extra funding for ash trays to go on top of garbage cans. 

My Position: First, I think smoking is disgusting. Second, I think littering is disgusting. So littering the remnants of a smoked cigarette is about as disgusting as you can get to me. I think an important step, besides the ones already being taken to reduce cigarette litter, is education. People are going to smoke, whether it's healthy or not, so long as it's legal, so I think educating people about proper cigarette disposal is crucial. Many people just don't know that cigarette butts are NOT biodegradable, and they do not think there is anything wrong with tossing them on the ground. Putting some sort of label on the box that tells people this fact could go a long way in reducing the amount of cigarette butt litter that we see in public places.

Vocabulary: benzene: a colorless, volatile, flammable, toxic, slightly water-soluble, liquid, aromatic compound, C₆H₆, obtained chiefly from coal tar: used in the manufacture of commercial and medicinal chemicals, dyes, and as a solvent for resins, fats, or the like. *Benzene is extremely toxic*

Cigarette Butts: Tiny Trash That Piles Up

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Andrea Scott says she would never throw a candy wrapper on the ground.

“Littering is one of my pet peeves, and I always told my kids they’d be in big trouble if I catch them doing it,” said Ms. Scott, a 43-year-old financial executive, as she sat outside an office tower on Michigan Avenue in Chicago on a recent sunny afternoon. “I see people throw stuff out their car windows, and I cringe.”

Yet she confesses that she routinely discards cigarette butts on the sidewalk.

For her and countless other American smokers, cigarette butts are an exception to the no-littering rule. “Aren’t cigarettes biodegradable?” volunteered Libby Moustakas, a co-worker who was enjoying a smoking break with Ms. Scott.

But dozens of municipalities across the nation have had enough. Weary of the butts’ unsightliness and the costs of sweeping them up, cities have passed bans on smoking on beaches and playgrounds. In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom said last week that he would go a step further, seeking a 33-cents-a-pack tax to cover the $11 million that the city spends annually to remove cigarette litter.

Nationally, cigarette butts account for one-quarter or more of the items tossed onto streets and other roadways, San Francisco and other cities report.

Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom, described this as a predictable outcome of poor product design. “There is no good practical way of dealing with cigarettes,” he said. “You have a fiery object in your hand and so you have to throw it down and crush it under your heel. And then we have to clean it up.”

In her defense, Ms. Scott, the Chicago executive, pointed out that her city does not provide enough receptacles, like concrete planters filled with sand. And she fears that throwing them in a trash can could ignite a fire.

Still other smokers see butts as a more natural kind of trash than, say, a plastic bottle. But they are not biodegradable: they contain plastic filters that enter sewers and storm drains, and get swept into rivers and then out to sea, where they can release toxic chemicals including nicotine, benzene and cadmium.

For years, campaigns for heavy per-pack taxes and smoking bans in office buildings, restaurants and bars were driven mainly by health concerns about secondhand smoke, which can lead to lung cancer, emphysema and other diseases. In moving on to butt litter, municipalities are reckoning with the broader environmental consequences of the country’s most vilified personal habit.

Cigarette companies acknowledge the problem. The Cigarette Litter Prevention Program, created by the nonprofit group Keep America Beautiful, is financed by Philip Morris, the cigarette giant. The prevention program’s statistics show that butts constitute 28 percent to 33 percent of all litter nationwide — measured by item number, not volume. Similarly, the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, which also receives money from Philip Morris, has found that butts account for 28 percent of littered items washing up on beaches worldwide.

The manufacturers say they are working on making their product more environmentally friendly. Frank Lester, a spokesman for Reynolds American Inc., the nation’s second-largest cigarette maker, said the industry viewed the development of a biodegradable cigarette to be its “holy grail,” but that challenges persisted. Cigarette company documents indicate that consumers have not liked the taste or the draw of alternative filters.

William R. Phelps, a spokesman for Philip Morris, said his company favored programs that hold smokers and cities responsible for reducing the trash. For example, the Keep America Beautiful campaign promotes solutions like portable ashtrays, more receptacles in public areas and better enforcement of littering laws, he said. Last year, the program had 178 cities or urban districts enlisted — the university district in Philadelphia and the arts district in Dallas, for example — that reduced cigarette littering by an average of 46 percent, officials said.

That approach is favored by Analynn LaChica, 34, who works for AT&T in San Francisco. Ms. LaChica estimates that of the 5 to 10 cigarettes she smokes each day, at least three butts end up on the ground.

“People who smoke use it as a stress reliever,” she explained. “It is satisfying to just toss it down when you are done.”

Nonetheless, she said, she would change her behavior if San Francisco installed ashtrays on top of trash receptacles. Putting it out that way would be more “ladylike,” she said.

For many environmentalists, the problem is not just the litter, but the toxicity. Thomas Novotny, a professor of global health at San Diego State University who supports the San Francisco proposal and beach bans elsewhere, said recent experiments had shown that one butt has enough poisons to kill half the minnows in a liter of water — a standard laboratory test for toxins — in 96 hours.

“Butts are full of poisonous substances, including nicotine, which is a pesticide,” Professor Novotny said.

Some smokers are getting the message. Alex Ceruti, 32, a business owner in the South Beach section of Miami Beach, said he had always discarded his butt in an ashtray or other receptacle after finishing a cigarette. “That’s the only part of the cigarette that is not biodegradable,” he said.

“I think it’s nasty the way people throw them on the ground,” Mr. Ceruti added, observing a young tattooed woman who cast her cigarette on the sidewalk before entering a coffee shop.

Mr. Ceruti and his friend Marcos van Dulken, 26, who also smokes, say they even patrol their favorite beach once in a while to pick up filters.

“I’m not going to lie,” said Mr. van Dulken, an actor who owns a small production company. “Sometimes I throw them on the ground. But I really try not to do that.”

LED Lights

Article Date: May 29, 2009

Source: New York Times

Chapter: 17- Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Region: Global

Summary: LED (light emitting diode) lighting fixtures are becoming increasingly popular as the "green" way to provide light where traditional incandescent or newer compact fluorescent technologies would have otherwise been used. LEDs are several times more efficient than compact fluorescent bulbs, and have a longer life-span. Also, they do not have mercury in them, making disposal less of an issue. They are expected to continue to rise in popularity because of new incentives created by the Obama administration for towns and cities that improve their infrastructres with "green" technology. Barriers for widespread use of LEDs do exist (such as cost, production, and lighting characteristics), however with research and continued improvements, there is hope that they might one day be used entirely to light our homes, our cities, and our businesses. 

My Position: I think it's great that Obama's policies are already expected to be having an effect on the way our country treats environmental initiatives. Although I do not know much about LEDs, they sound like a promising technology that could become extremely practical with a little more research and development. I hope that one day they will become practical for use in all types of venues, instead of just downward-facing streetlights and ceiling lights. 

Vocabulary: diode: a device, as a two-element electron tube or a semiconductor, through which current can pass freely in only one direction.

Green Promise Seen in Switch to LED Lighting

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL and FELICITY BARRINGER

To change the bulbs in the 60-foot-high ceiling lights of Buckingham Palace’s grand stairwell, workers had to erect scaffolding and cover precious portraits of royal forebears.

So when a lighting designer two years ago proposed installing light emitting diodes or LEDs, an emerging lighting technology, the royal family readily assented. The new lights, the designer said, would last more than 22 years and enormously reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions — a big plus for Prince Charles, an ardent environmentalist. Since then, the palace has installed the lighting in chandeliers and on the exterior, where illuminating the entire facade uses less electricity than running an electric teakettle.

In shifting to LED lighting, the palace is part of a small but fast-growing trend that is redefining the century-old conception of lighting, replacing energy-wasting disposable bulbs with efficient fixtures that are often semi-permanent, like those used in plumbing.

Studies suggest that a complete conversion to the lights could decrease carbon dioxide emissions from electric power use for lighting by up to 50 percent in just over 20 years; in the United States, lighting accounts for about 6 percent of all energy use. A recent report by McKinsey & Company cited conversion to LED lighting as potentially the most cost effective of a number of simple approaches to tackling global warming using existing technology.

LED lighting was once relegated to basketball scoreboards, cellphone consoles, traffic lights and colored Christmas lights. But as a result of rapid developments in the technology, it is now poised to become common on streets and in buildings, as well as in homes and offices. Some American cities, including Ann Arbor, Mich., and Raleigh, N.C., are using the lights to illuminate streets and parking garages, and dozens more are exploring the technology. And the lighting now adorns the conference rooms and bars of some Renaissance hotels, a corridor in the Pentagon and a new green building at Stanford.

LEDs are more than twice as efficient as compact fluorescent bulbs, currently the standard for greener lighting. Unlike compact fluorescents, LEDs turn on quickly and are compatible with dimmer switches. And while fluorescent bulbs contain mercury, which requires special disposal, LED bulbs contain no toxic elements, and last so long that disposal is not much of an issue.

“It is fit-and-forget-lighting that is essentially there for as long as you live,” said Colin Humphreys, a researcher at Cambridge University who works on gallium nitride LED lights, which now adorn structures in Britain.

The switch to LEDs is proceeding far more rapidly than experts had predicted just two years ago. President Obama’s stimulus package, which offers money for “green” infrastructure investment, will accelerate that pace, experts say. San Jose, Calif., plans to use $2 million in energy-efficiency grants to install 1,500 LED streetlights.

Thanks in part to the injection of federal cash, sales of the lights in new “solid state” fixtures — a $297 million industry in 2007 — are likely to become a near-billion-dollar industry by 2013, said Stephen Montgomery, director of LED research projects at Electronicast, a California consultancy. And after years of resisting what they had dismissed as a fringe technology, giants like General Electric and Philips have begun making LEDs.

Though the United States Department of Energy calls LED “a pivotal emerging technology,” there remain significant barriers. Homeowners may balk at the high initial cost, which lighting experts say currently will take 5 to 10 years to recoup in electricity savings. An outdoor LED spotlight today costs $100, as opposed to $7 for a regular bulb.

Another issue is that current LEDs generally provide only “directional light” rather than a 360-degree glow, meaning they are better suited to downward facing streetlights and ceiling lights than to many lamp-type settings.

And in the rush to make cheaper LED lights, poorly made products could erase the technology’s natural advantage, experts warn. LEDs are tiny sandwiches of two different materials that release light as electrons jump from one to the other. The lights must be carefully designed so heat does not damage them, reducing their lifespan to months from decades. And technological advances that receive rave reviews in a university laboratory may not perform as well when mass produced for the real world.

Britain’s Low Carbon Trust, an environmental nonprofit group, has replaced the 12 LED fixtures bought three years ago for its offices with conventional bulbs, because the LED lights were not bright enough, said Mischa Hewitt, a program manager at the trust. But he says he still thinks the technology is important.

Brian Owen, a contributor to the trade magazine LEDs, said that while it is good that cities are exploring LED lighting: “They have to do their due diligence. Rash decisions can result in disappointment or disaster.”

At the same time, nearly monthly scientific advances are addressing many of the problems, decreasing the high price of the bulbs somewhat and improving their ability to provide normal white light bright enough to illuminate rooms and streets.

For example, many LEDs are currently made on precious materials like sapphire. But scientists at a government-financed laboratory at Cambridge University have figured out how to grow them on silicon wafers, potentially making the lights far cheaper. While the original LEDs gave off only glowing red or green light, newer versions produce a blue light that, increasingly, can be manipulated to simulate incandescent bulbs. And researchers at dozens of universities are working to make the bulbs more usable.

“This is a technology on a very fast learning curve,” said Jon Creyts, an author of the McKinsey report, who predicted that the technology could be in widespread use within five years.

So far, the use of LEDs has been predominantly in outdoor settings. Toronto, Raleigh, Ann Arbor and Anchorage — not to mention Tianjin, China, and Torraca, Italy — have adopted LEDs for street and parking garage lighting, forsaking the yellow glow of traditional high-pressure sodium lamps. Three major California cities — Los Angeles (140,000 streetlights), San Jose (62,000) and San Francisco (30,000) — have embarked on some LED conversions.

Ann Arbor adopted the technology early, working with Relume Technologies, of Oxford, Mich., to design LEDs that would fit the globes of downtown fixtures. The $515 cost of installing each light will be paid back in reduced maintenance and electrical costs in four years and four months, said Mike Bergren, the city’s field-operations manager.

Because the light from LEDs can be modulated, in Ann Arbor they have been programmed to perform various useful tricks — to become brighter when someone walks under a light or to flicker outside of a home to guide paramedics to an emergency. And because they do not emit ultraviolet light, they attract no bugs.

People who live around Carolina Pines Park in Raleigh say they are pleased with the park’s new LED lights because they can be directed downward, away from home windows.

The lights are also rapidly moving indoors, where they could have an enormous effect on climate change. About 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions associated with buildings in the United States and the United Kingdom are related to indoor lighting; in some houses the number is as high as 40 percent.

This month, LED lights were for the first time the centerpiece at two of the world’s major trade shows for lighting, Lightfare International in New York and EuroLuce in Milan. A growing number of builders are starting to fit them into public buildings, offices and homes.

Ted Van Hyning, director of event technology at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland, said the new LED lights in the hotel’s conference rooms use 10 percent of the electricity of the fluorescent lights they replaced. And maintenance costs are far lower: A fluorescent bulb might last 3,000 hours while an LED fixture lasts more than 100,000 hours, Mr. Van Hyning said, adding: “We have six-figure energy costs a year, and these lights could represent a huge saving. Besides, they’re cool and sexy and fun.”

Buoyed by the improvements in the technology, Peter Byrne, a lighting designer and energy consultant for Buckingham Palace, installed the 32,000 custom LEDs in the ceiling of the grand stairwell when older fixtures wore out.

Mr. Byrne recognizes that Buckingham Palace is not the average home. “They need high-quality light — they have a lot of gold,” he said, “and gold tends to look silver if you light it poorly.”

Still he has started using the technology in other projects, for their light and their environmental benefit. He estimates that half of lights in homes, and particularly those in offices and stores can already be replaced by LEDs.

“At this point, LEDs can’t be used in all lights but that’s changing every month,” Mr. Byrne said. “If you go into Wal-Mart, and look at all those twin 8-foot fluorescents above every aisle, you realize that the potential is enormous.”

Big Cats in Brazil

Article Date: April 3rd, 2009

Source: Time

Chapter: 5- Climate and Terrestrial Biodiversity, 9- Human Population

Region: Local (in Brazil)

Summary: A growing human population in Brazilian wetlands is putting pressure on important animals and ecosystems found in this region. Especially affected are large predators such as the South American Jaguar, which is experiencing a dramatic population decline from its already endangered numbers. Farmers in this region will often shoot the jaguars to prevent the loss of livestock, much like American farmers out west kill coyotes and wolves to protect their herds. Recognizing the fact that it is impossible to separate the habitats used by people and cats, organizations are focusing more on ways of helping the large cats and the people to coexist in their environment. One group, Panthera, is offering medical services and building schools for communities that reside in big cat habitats, and in turn hopes to help locals learn the importance of these large predators, and hopefully learn ways of preventing the deaths of their livestock without killing the cats. This approach is unique because it is trying to encourage both human health AND the wellbeing of cat populations in the ecosystem.

My Position: I think this is a wonderful program, and hope to see more like it in the future. I like that instead of just passing laws to prevent the killings, this organization is trying to help educate local farmers to the plight of the jaguars, and in this way I think they can be more successful than previous conservation efforts. Because the people have something to gain from peacefully coexisting with the jaguars, it is more likely that they will be able to ammend their lifestyles in order to acchieve this, and hopefully the results will also last long into the future.

Vocabulary: pathogen: any disease-producing agent, esp. a virus, bacterium, or other microorganism.



Getting People to Coexist with Cats
By Bryan Walsh
As the human population has grown in the Pantanal, the vast wetland in central Brazil, people and big cats — namely the South American jaguar — are encroaching increasingly on each other's territory. When conflict occurs, as it inevitably does, the cats are usually the ones who lose.
From the distance of a magazine story or a National Geographic special, it can be hard to understand why anyone would want to kill the very beautiful, very endangered jaguar. But if you're a Brazilian cattle farmer whose cows keep getting eaten by jaguars, the killing makes a little more sense. (See pictures of 10 species on the brink.)
This is the kind of situation to which conservationists might have responded by cordoning off protected habitats and reserves — building a fence, in effect, between the wild animals and the people. But in the Pantanal, and in much of the rest of our once wild, once underpopulated world, total separation is simply not a sustainable option. That's especially true for jaguars and other big cats, which need a lot of room to roam, far more than could be fenced off. "The big cats' territory is crossing over to the human landscape," says Alan Rabinowitz, a renowned conservationist and the president of the new wildlife group Panthera. "At its root, we have to get people to be able to live with the big cats."
That's why Panthera, whose conservation efforts focus exclusively on endangered cats like jaguars and tigers, will be launching an innovative program in the Brazilian Pantanal this summer. The program will be carried out jointly with New York City's Mt. Sinai Medical School, and will involve a unique exchange of services that includes conservation, health care and disease research. Mt. Sinai's medical students and researchers will come to Panthera's 270-sq.-mi. (700-sq.-km) Pantanal ranch (which includes a jaguar habitat), where they will give free medical care to locals. That care, along with a free school that will be built for local children, will come under Panthera's banner, and the hope is that Brazilians will learn to appreciate both the medical care and the conservation work for jaguars. "People are given better schools and better health care, and the connection between the two is made," says Rabinowitz. (See TIME's special report on extinction.)
For Mt. Sinai, which has made global health a priority for its medical students, the Panthera project presents an opportunity to explore another consequence of the increasing proximity of animals and people: zoonotic diseases, which can pass back and forth between wildlife and human beings. Several major human diseases have originated in animals, including Ebola (which began among primates in Africa) and avian influenza (which started in wild and domestic birds in Southeast Asia, but has also infected big cats).
As human beings, wild animals and domestic animals begin to live in closer and closer to one another, the chance of pathogens jumping — and amplifying — between species will only increase. Sinai's researchers will be able to monitor the population in the Pantanal for zoonotic diseases, providing a needed early warning system for new and emerging pathogens. It will also be a valuable learning experience for Mt. Sinai's students. "We see a really close interface between the health of human populations and conservation efforts," says Paul Klotman, chairman of the department of medicine at Mt. Sinai. "This will allow us to do surveillance to look for potential pathogens that could be important for both wildlife and people."
The Panthera-Mt. Sinai collaboration is atypical, but not for long; it is the shape of things to come for conservation work around the world. Critics who accuse environmentalists like Rabinowitz of protecting animals at the expense of human well-being have got it wrong. Wildlife experts are aware that in a world of 6.7 billion people and counting, the only conservation efforts that have potential — and the only plans that will be truly sustainable — are those that benefit people as much as lions, tigers and bears. "Big cats won't survive unless people want to live with them," says Rabinowitz. "You have to show how they can benefit." In the 58,000-sq.-mi. (150,000-sq.-km) Brazilian Pantanal, there should be room enough for both.

Hello!

Hi Mrs. Platt!

Hudson River Dredging- PCBs!

Article Date: May 16, 2009

Source: NY Times

Chapter: 22- Solid and Hazardous Waste, 25- Politics, Environment, and Sustainability

Region: Local

Summary: Long awaited by environmentalists and concerned residents alike, the dredging project in the Hudson River has finally begun, an operation initiated by concerns over high PCB levels from old GE factories. Based on the laws set by Superfund and similar legislations, GE will have to fund this cleanup because it is the company responsible for the pollution. The PCBs are present in the river and its fish populations at levels high enough to make it so that fisherman cannot keep anything that they catch in certain stretches of the Hudson, out of fear that fish in these areas contain potentially damaging amounts of PCBs due to biomagnification and bioaccumulation. 

My Position: I am happy to hear that cleanup has finally started on the Hudson, and that GE is being held accountable for its chemical dumping, even though the dumping was legal when it occurred. I hope that their lawsuits do not let them weasel out of paying for this because that would completely ruin the purpose of the Superfund laws, and set a precedent for other companies in similar situations to do the same. This article brings to mind  the precautionary principle- specifically that we should not be dumping things if we do not know how they will affect the ecosystems, because situations like that all too often end up as incredibly big "oops" moments such as what is now happening on the Hudson. On that note, I hope that this cleanup is successful and that people and animals living in the contaminated areas will no longer have to suffer through the ailments caused by the presence of PCBs in the ecosystem.

Vocabulary: unfettered: free from restrictions or bonds 

Dredging of Pollutants Begins in Hudson

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

MOREAU, N.Y. — Twenty-five years after the federal government declared a long stretch of the Hudson River to be a contaminated Superfund site, the cleanup of its chief remaining source of pollution began here Friday with a single scoop of mud extracted by a computer-guided dredge.

Twelve dredges are to work round the clock, six days a week, into October, removing sediment laced with the chemicals known as PCBs. Mile-long freight trains running every several days will carry the dried mud to a hazardous-waste landfill in Texas.

An estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, flowed into the upper Hudson from two General Electric factories for three decades before they were banned, in 1977, as a health threat to people and wildlife. In high doses, they have been shown to cause cancer in animals and are listed by federal agencies as a probable human carcinogen.

“Today, the healing of the Hudson begins,” George Pavlou, the Environmental Protection Agency’s acting regional administrator, said under bright skies in a riverbank ceremony here as federal, state and local officials, G.E. representatives and environmental campaigners looked on.

Those gathered scrambled from a white tent to get a good view as a blue clamshell bucket rose slowly from the riverbed holding the first five cubic yards of mud. A lone duck paddled downriver along the far bank.

The dredging operation is the first phase of an operation that, if it continues as projected through 2015, could largely eliminate the Hudson’s last significant toxic legacy from an era of unfettered industrial activity and dumping.

While the Superfund site itself is 197 miles long, stretching from Hudson Falls, N.Y., to the southern tip of Manhattan, the initial phase involves spots along a six-mile segment south of Fort Edward, the hamlet across the river from this industrial site.

G.E. is supervising and paying for the cleanup, which federal officials have estimated could cost more than $750 million. Industry experts say the ultimate cost could be many times than that, however. (G.E. declines to give an estimate.)

While most of the chemicals were dumped when such practices were legal, the Superfund law requires the responsible polluting party, when one can be pinpointed, to foot the cleanup bill.

Yet G.E has reserved the right, after a review of the operation in 2010, to reject the project’s much larger second phase. Federal environmental officials have said that if it did that, they would most likely order the cleanup to proceed and levy enormous penalties against the company.

Even as it embarks on the cleanup, G.E. has a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Superfund law working its way through federal court. (The company is a responsible party in 52 active Superfund sites across the country, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.)

Yet spokesmen for G.E. are quick to defend the record of the company, which these days, with its Ecomagination line of products, is casting itself as a good environmental citizen.

Mark Behan, a longtime spokesman for the company on PCBs, said that the challenge to the Superfund law “has no bearing on the Hudson project.”

He said G.E. had acted in good faith for many years and that in 2002, its chairman, Jeffrey R. Immelt, made a public pledge to cooperate and implement the dredging plan, drafted and approved by the E.P.A. Three related accords have since been signed, he said, and the company has met every commitment so far.

Yet Edward O. Sullivan, who from 1987 to 1995 wrestled with General Electric lawyers and scientists as New York State’s deputy commissioner of environmental conservation and ran the state’s hazardous-waste cleanup program, said that by pursuing the court challenge to the Superfund law and reserving the right to reject the second phase of the cleanup, General Electric had constructed two potential “escape hatches.”

“Clearly, G.E. has the capability to do it right,” said Mr. Sullivan, who now runs the private group Scenic Hudson and witnessed the start of the dredging on Friday. “But the question remains, is the commitment there? So far, the company has been masterful at instigating delay.”

The decision by the E.P. A. in 2002 to require dredging was a mix of politics and science, with a variety of expert panels split on the efficacy of dredging, but also on the perils of leaving so much contamination in sediments that might be disturbed by powerful floods or other factors.

In the 400 years since the first Europeans probed its waters, the Hudson has seen grand phases of development, with oyster, sturgeon and shad fisheries replaced by factories spewing everything from paint and dye to adhesives and toxic chemicals into the waters.

From the 1970s onward, the nascent American environmental movement grew partly out of efforts to restore the Hudson. The battle over PCBs dominated that phase.

After other cleanups, communities that avoided their riverbanks for two generations because of sewage or chemicals have reclaimed them. Still, from Fort Edward south to the dam at Troy, residents cannot keep any fish hooked in the river because of the chemicals that accumulate in them.

The hope now, environmental officials say, is that dredging 98 percent of the PCBs out of hot spots in the river like the Thompson Island Pool will greatly speed what has been a slow natural decline in levels of the chemicals in striped bass and other fish species.

After the PCB-tainted sediment is extracted, it will be replaced by clean fill, along with plants native to the river. Barges holding the contaminated mud will pass through locks into the Champlain Canal to a nearby $100 million treatment plant and transport hub built by General Electric for that purpose.

As work crews in an aluminum boat passed back and forth Friday along the waterfront in Fort Edward, some local residents at Jim’s Broadway Cafe reflected on how the river might benefit from the dredging operation.

Mary Cunningham, a former Chamber of Commerce president and self-described “river bug” whose house sits on one of the banks, said raw sewage was the main concern when she was young, and later, the chemical contamination.

She and Jim Rosch, the cafe’s owner, said that while the community has been divided over whether to dredge, for them it was never a question.

Mr. Rosch, 62, said he looked forward to taking a swim in the river without concern, and someday, to seeing people catch fish and keep them.

“For the plant life, the fish life, the human life, it just has to be done,” he said. “The scientists made one thing clear: It’s not going to clean itself.”

Electric Car Charging Stations in San Jose

Article Date: 2009

Source:Scientific American Special Edition; 2009, Vol. 19 Issue 1, p6-6, 1/2p

Chapter: 17 Alternative/Renewable Energy

Region: Local

Summary: San Jose, California has recently implemented electric car charging stations in select locations to encourage the purchase and use of electric vehicles rather than traditional fossil-fuel powered cars. Users can pay a monthly subscription based on how much they will use the charging station, and can check online to find which stations are unused at any given time. These stations are compatable with both fully electric cars and with plug-in hybrids. Coulomb Technologies, the company that owns the stations,

My Position: I think that this is a great idea, and I hope that other states/regions will follow suit. Actions like these will help to dismantle the arguments presented by people who oppose electric cars as an alternative to gasoline powered engines. I hope that policies such as this one will stir consumer interest in electric cars, and thus stimulate manufacturers to work on making them more efficient, more available, and more affordable for the average consumer.

Vocabulary: plug-in hybrid: a car with a hybrid gasoline/electric engine, which has the ability to recharge its battery with both its gasoline engine and with a wire for recharging in a regular circuit

Charging Ahead
Section: Inspirations
Success in Sustainability

Owning a plug-in hybrid car just got a little easier … if you live in San Jose, Calif., that is. If so, you can now drive your car downtown, park and recharge your battery by plugging into the power supply on a nearby lamppost. Coulomb Technologies in nearby Campbell has installed four charging stations in the city--three in a parking garage on 4th Street and one curbside across from city hall.
Using the company's ChargePoint Network, subscribers receive a smart card that allows them to fuel up at any station. Users can pay for 10 sessions a month for $15 or all the way up to unlimited monthly access for $50. The charging station will work for fully electric vehicles as well as plug-in hybrids. Subscribers can visit Coulomb's Web site to see in real time, via Google Maps, which stations are occupied or available.
Coulomb hopes to keep expanding: it's working to supply 40 charging stations at truck stops along several California highways, and distributors are set up in 28 states. CEO Richard Lowenthal points out that in large cities, where cars typically outnumber residential garage spaces, drivers have nowhere to plug in. Placing chargers at offices and public lots will make owning electric vehicles more convenient. "Right now this is mostly policy-driven," Lowenthal says. "But when people see that electric cars can be compatible with daily life, it will start to be consumer-driven."