tagged w/ Waste
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Recently I returned from a nearly month-long reporting trip about shit. If you've been following the Vanguard blog, you've probably read and seen some of the shit (literally) we'd been filming. Here's another clip from that trip. It takes place in New Delhi, India along the once-mighty, holy Yamuna River, which has today become a virtual open sewer. We took a short ride on this toxic, bubbling river and stepped off onto the riverbank... Where we were surrounded by shit. Here's a little preview of the long, sometimes excruciating month I spent on the road.
Vanguard is Current TV's original documentary series. Led by correspondents Mariana van Zeller, Christof Putzel, Adam Yamaguchi and Kaj Larsen, Vanguard features enterprising reports from around the globe. It airs every Wednesday at 10pm on Current TV.
View all Vanguard stories by visiting current.com/vanguard.Recently I returned from a nearly month-long reporting trip about shit. If you've... more
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A growing number of cities and municipalities are testing solar-powered trash compactors as a way to go green and save some green.
Communities in 46 states, as well as some state parks and colleges, are replacing regular trash cans, according to Richard Kennelly, vice president of BigBelly Solar marketing, which manufactures the devices.A growing number of cities and municipalities are testing solar-powered trash... more
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The Department of Defense agreed to pay KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical vehicles, yet according to a new Pentagon report, what the military got was as many as 144 civilian mechanics, each doing as little as 43 minutes of work a month, with virtually no oversight.
This is the real reason we have wars, not to defend anyone's "freedom".The Department of Defense agreed to pay KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical... more
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In the city of Naples and the surrounding countryside of Campania, Italy, the Mafia has controlled the waste-management industry for decades. Filth has taken to run the streets in more ways than oneIn the city of Naples and the surrounding countryside of Campania, Italy, the Mafia... more
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No one loves that trash smell in the morning, and certainly not Beijing residents who have complained about a landfill at the city's edge. Chinese officials will respond to the Asuwei dump crisis by installing 100 deodorant guns that can literally cover up the problem temporarily with the sweeter smell of fragrance, The Guardian reports.
Each gun can spray gallons of fragrance per minute over distances of 164 feet (50 m), and are made by Chinese firms based on German and Italian technology. Officials also expect to add more plastic layers to cover the site and try to keep the smell down, but all these represent just temporary fixes for a city of 17-million people producing more trash than it can handle.
Recycling remains at a measly 4 percent of all rubbish for Beijing, compared to a 25 percent recycling rate for London or 36 percent for New York. A Beijing waste expert told The Guardian that landfill and treatment sites in Beijing would all fill up in just four years.
Trash incineration takes care of just 2 percent of Beijing's waste, but building new incinerators has run into a growing "not-in-my-backyard" movement from Beijing residents who have safety fears about the incinerators. Presumably they're less concerned about the giant fragrance guns.
Aside from the usual recycling and waste treatment solutions, perhaps greater public awareness of where all their coffee cups go could go some ways toward boosting greener practices. MIT has already begun a trash-tracking program that follows thousands of pieces of trash in U.S. and other cities.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/beijing-deploys-giant-deodorant-cannons-freshen-city-landfillNo one loves that trash smell in the morning, and certainly not Beijing residents who... more
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In 1991, when the government of Somalia collapsed, foreign interests seized the opportunity to begin looting the country’s food supply and using the country’s unguarded waters as a dumping ground for nuclear and other toxic waste. According to the High Seas Task Force (HSTF), there were over 800 IUU fishing vessels in Somali waters at one time in 2005. .......... http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/recent-news/221-toxic-waste-behind-somali-piratesIn 1991, when the government of Somalia collapsed, foreign interests seized the... more
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(This is a playlist - each successive video will start automatically.)
BBC Two's overpopulation programme "Horizon: 2009-2010: How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?".
Synopsis:
"In a Horizon special, naturalist Sir David Attenborough investigates whether the world is heading for a population crisis.
In his lengthy career, Sir David has watched the human population more than double from 2.5 billion in 1950 to nearly seven billion. He reflects on the profound effects of this rapid growth, both on humans and the environment.
While much of the projected growth in human population is likely to come from the developing world, it is the lifestyle enjoyed by many in the West that has the most impact on the planet. Some experts claim that in the UK consumers use as much as two and a half times their fair share of Earth's resources.
Sir David examines whether it is the duty of individuals to commit not only to smaller families, but to change the way they live for the sake of humanity and planet Earth."(This is a playlist - each successive video will start automatically.)
BBC... more
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The latest federal budget opens the American public to yet more pain, while shielding the military and the rest of the national security establishment from the same.
March 2, 2010 |
Send up a flare! The 2011 federal budget has sprung some leaks in the midst of a storm. Not sure there's enough money for life rafts! Forget women and children first!
Buffeted by economic hard times, the 2,585-page, $3.8 trillion document is already taking on water, though this won’t be obvious to you if you’re reading the mainstream media. Let’s start with the absolute basics: 59% of the budget’s spending is dedicated to mandatory programs like Medicaid, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and now Pell Grants; 34% is to be spent on “discretionary programs,” including education, transportation, housing, and the military; 7% will be used to service the national debt.
A serious look at this budget document reveals some “leaks” -- two in actual spending practices and two in the basic assumptions that undergird the budget itself. Ship-shape as it may look on the surface, this is a budget perilously close to an iceberg, and it’s not clear whether the captain of the ship will heed the obvious warning signs.
Whose Security Is This Anyway?
In his State of the Union Address, given several days before the 2011 budget was released, President Obama announced a three-year freeze on “non-security discretionary spending.” This was meant as a gesture toward paying down the looming national debt, but it should also be considered an early warning sign for leak number one. After all, the president exempted all national-security-related spending from the cutting process. Practically speaking, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP), national security spending makes up about 67% of that discretionary 34% slice of the budget. In 2011, that will include an as-yet-untouchable $737 billion for the Pentagon alone.
Within the context of the total budget, then, so-called non-security discretionary spending represents a mere 11% of proposed 2011 spending. In other words, Obama’s present plans to chip away at the debt involve leaving 89% of the budget untouched. Only the $370 billion going to myriad domestic social programs will be on the chopping block.
What's in that $370 billion? Well, for starters, programs that focus on the environment, energy, and science. In the 2011 budget, these categories combined are projected to receive $79 billion or 6% of total domestic discretionary spending. Though each of these areas could actually use a significant boost in funds, that’s obviously not in the cards -- and this will translate into less money at the state level. New York, for example, is projected to receive $247 million in home energy assistance for low-income folks, down more than $230 million from 2010. These funds mean an energy safety net for our communities, and also warmth and jobs in a cold winter, which looks like “security” to most of us, no matter what our captain says.
Asking for disproportionate cuts and efficiencies in programs in only 11% percent of the overall budget might perhaps be slightly easier to stomach if military spending wasn’t allowed relatively free rein in 2011 (and thereafter). The NPP estimates, in fact, that aggregated increases in military spending over the next decade will exceed $500 billion, drowning twice-over the projected $250 billion in non-security discretionary savings from the president’s cuts over the same time period. Consider this visible unwillingness to control military-related spending leak two in our budgetary Titanic.
By now, danger flags should be going up in profusion because the second leak is so familiar, so George W. Bush. With each new bit of information, in fact, it sounds more and more like the same old song, the last guy's tune. It’s clear that, as soon as the stimulus bump wears off later this year, we're in danger of falling back into exactly the same more-money-for-the-military, less-federal-aid-to-the-states rut we’ve been in for years, despite strong statements from both President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates decrying Pentagon waste.
And speaking of waste, the Department of Defense is currently carrying weapons-program cost overruns for 96 of its major weapons programs totaling $295 billion, which alone are guaranteed to wipe out any proposed savings from President Obama's non-security discretionary freeze, with $45 billion to spare. That's only to be expected, since neither the Pentagon nor any of the armed services have ever been able to pass a proper audit. Ever.
Even more at the link:The latest federal budget opens the American public to yet more pain, while shielding... more
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t costs £140,000 a year to lock up a young offender, a report has revealed.
That’s six times the cost of sending a child to Eton, says the New Economics Foundation.
But where else does our hard-earned money go?
£25bn
Drinking costs a lot more than the money you hand over in the pub or off-licence.
The Department of Health says the cost to society of alcohol abuse is between £17.7bil lion and £25.1bn every year.
The NHS alone is hit with a bill of £2.7billion.
£9,000
Thinking of starting a family?
You might want to check you can get an overdraft – it costs £9,000 to raise a baby
for 12 months.
£112
We spend an average of £112 each a year on internet gambling, says researcher TNS.
Would be interesting to see how much is spent on corporate lobbying those soul less prostitutes we call MPs, wonder why the article didn't include that!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/03/01/it-costs-how-much-a-year-the-truly-horrifying-price-of-well-everything-115875-22079175/t costs £140,000 a year to lock up a young offender, a report has revealed.... more
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That a man with unpaid-for cheese in his underwear could ever have faced essentially the same sentence as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is an absurdity.
February 25, 2010 |
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In an era of savage budget cuts to the most basic of public services, does it make sense for a state to spend $50,000-$100,000 a year to lock up a cheese thief for the rest of his natural life?
The obvious answer to that question would be "no." After all, $100,000 could keep one or two teachers employed; could pay the home-health care costs of disabled low-income Americans; or could keep an after-school program afloat. And yet, that is precisely what a grandstanding California district attorney's office earlier this month suggested was an appropriate solution for the problem that is Robert Ferguson: a mentally ill, drug-addicted 53-year-old habitual offender who has cycled in and out of prison for most of his adult life and found himself on the wrong end of a three strikes prosecution for the monstrous crime of stuffing a $3.99 bag of shredded cheese down his underpants and hot-tailing it out of a Nugget supermarket without paying.
Deputy District Attorney Clinton Parish argued that because of Ferguson's past history, his inability to learn from his mistakes, the public would be best served by putting him away for at least the next 20 years behind bars -- in effect a life sentence for a man of his age. Parish intended to push for a three strikes ruling during a sentencing hearing scheduled for March 1. Since it costs an average of about $40-$50,000 per year to house an inmate in California, and upwards of $100,000 once they get older and sicker, Parish was essentially asking the state to pony up one to two million dollars to pay for Ferguson's incarceration over the next several decades.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum…
Three strikes and you're out has been a sacrosanct part of the California legal system for nearly 17 years now. It has cost the state a royal fortune and while it has undoubtedly put some very hardened criminals behind bars, it has also snared an awful lot of non-violent, middle-aged offenders in its net. It's like industrial fishing -- sure, you get the tuna, but you also end up destroying a huge number of fish you don't want or need. Yet, the public has remained attached to the three strikes law, DAs love the power it gives them, and attempts to reform it, or to limit its applicability to more serious crimes, have all failed. This time around, however, a number of newspapers, including conservative publications such as the Orange County Register, ridiculed the DA's office for its willingness to waste taxpayer dollars.
Earlier this week, the Yolo County DA suddenly withdrew the request for a Three Strikes sentence. Hostile press coverage, of course, had nothing to do with it; apparently a new psychological evaluation had convinced the office that Ferguson should no longer be looked at as a "life case."That a man with unpaid-for cheese in his underwear could ever have faced essentially... more
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By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
Image courtesy of Flickr user net_efekt, under Creative Common LicenseEd. note: This week’s Mulch is pint-sized and will run on Monday rather than Friday. We’ll be back to our regular schedule next week.
Some people live off the grid, eat local food, and have an energy footprint so minuscule that even the canniest hunter couldn’t track them down. But the rest of us buy from supermarkets, get our energy from at least in part from traditional sources like coal, and occasionally forget to turn off the lights when we leave the house. For those of us who are still living with one foot in the old energy world, here are a few helpful hints about what you should buy and what the consequences of shifting to “clean energy” sources like natural gas and nuclear energy are.
Green consumption
Mother Jones’ Julia Whitty points out a useful tool for correcting any misconceptions about how green a company actually is. It’s an assessment that graphs public perception of a company’s environmentalism against its practices. Besides making sure you’ve got the right idea about Starbucks or Nike, Whitty writes, “You can also get a pretty good sense of how sectors perform in relation to other sectors: food and beverage, bad overall; technology, better overall.”
One of the biggest energy expenditures that many of us indulge in is airplane travel. Just one flight can enlarge your carbon footprint dramatically. Although flying may never be truly green, Beth Buczynski reports at Care2 that one airline is moving in the right direction. British Airways is planning the first “sustainable jet fuel” plant.
The plant will make a biofuel, which generally has plenty of drawbacks, but this one sounds pretty good. The company says it will source its raw materials from local waste management facilities and produce relatively harmless waste products.
Hot air from natural gas companies
But the hazards of many “clean energy” sources make going off the grid sound better and better. More and more information is coming out about the environmental hazards that accompany the mining of natural gas, one of Washington’s new energy fascinations. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report on natural gas late last week, and Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones that Halliburton, a major player in this industry, admitted to using 807,000 gallons of diesel-based chemicals in the extraction process, which involves pumping large amounts of water deep into the ground.
“Even though the natural gas industry is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, it’s still required to limit the amount of diesel used in fracturing, under a December 2003 agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency,” Sheppard writes. “Halliburton and BJ Services appear to have violated the agreement, according to yesterday’s disclosure.”
That doesn’t inspire confidence in these companies’ assurances that their techniques will not contaminate water sources.
Another meltdown
Nuclear power sounds better than ever to the government, investors, and even some environmentalists. If you need a rundown of the issues involved in nuclear energy production, Grist’s Umbra Fisk has answers to questions like “is nuclear really better than coal?”
One of the strongest objections to nuclear power, however, is the financial risk of investing in nuclear infrastructure. “Nuclear power offers all the fiscal risks of a “too big to fail” bank, with the added risk of being too dangerous to fail as well,” writes Sam McPheeters for The American Prospect.
“And although current nuclear defenders love to crow about the free market…the industry operates with an exponential financial handicap over all other energy technologies, gas and coal included,” McPheeters explains. “Factor in overruns, plant cancellations, and chronic mismanagement, and the only genuine advantage nuclear holds over renewable energy sources is that its infrastructure currently exists.”
Maybe it’s time to invest in solar panels after all.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
Image courtesy of Flickr user net_efekt,... more
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Throughout the ages, artists have transformed the most humble objects into veritable works of art that now adorn the walls of the world's most illustrious museums. Can the same be said of "plastic portraits" which strive to shine new light on the very material that has degraded our natural environment?
http://www.greenwala.com/community/blogs/all/4878-Still-Life-With-Post-Consumer-PlasticThroughout the ages, artists have transformed the most humble objects into veritable... more
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Racketeering: The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) (18 USC §§ 1961-1968) prohibits (1) acquiring, establishing, or operating an enterprise with illegally derived income, (2) acquiring or maintaining an interest in or control of an enterprise through illegal activity, and (3) using an enterprise to commit illegal acts (Extortion, Blackmail, Etc. , 31A Am Jur 2d).
As fearless nonviolent protestors occupy the corporate office of a life-threatening and violation-ridden mountaintop removal operation in the Coal River Valley, West Virginia this morning, hundreds of thousands of American citizens are jamming the social media networks today, calling on JP Morgan Chase to end their financing of arguably criminal mountaintop removal coal mining operations in Appalachia.
Al Gore may have called mountaintop removal “a crime and ought to be treated as a crime,” but God bless veteran activists Mike Roselle, Joseph Hamsher, and Tom Smyth and the footslogging Climate Ground Zero nonviolent campaigners who are willing to put their lives on the line to stop mountaintop removal mining.
God bless the Rainforest Action Network and their broad alliance of citizens groups and environmental organizations that are bringing the deadly realities of mountaintop removal–from forced removal of American citizens, devastated communities and economies, poisoned watersheds, and unacceptable levels of blasting and fly rock–to the Wall Street bankers that earn millions of dollars every year from the sacrifice zones in the Appalachian coalfields.
Last year, RAN and other organizations effectively convinced Bank of America to stop lending money to mountaintop removal outlaws.
Daring and effective groups like RAN and Climate Ground Zero deserve as much financial support as possible–write and tell Chase Community Giving to make a huge donation to their work.
In the meantime, these activists and organizations follow a long line of great American patriots willing to stand up to unscrupulous corporate activity. An old coal miner in eastern Kentucky, who had once been beaten and left for dead by coal company thugs in his attempt to form a union in the 1930s, told me this story many years ago: As a young banker during the Civil War, JP Morgan purchased 5,000 defective rifles (Hall carbines) from an arsenal, and then resold them back to Union forces for a 5-fold increase in profits, despite knowing that the defective rifles often blew off the thumbs of the American soldiers.
Howard Zinn added in his classic, A People’s History of the United States, “A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract. Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute.”
The Appalachian coal miner was proud of the fact that his ancestors, like many mountain communities in the South, had served in the Union forces during the Civil War–that Appalachians, in fact, had been in the forefront of the anti-slavery movement. Instead of blowing off the thumbs of soldiers, Appalachians patriots are now contending with outside financiers and bankers like JP Morgan Chase bankrolling the criminal and civil violations of absentee coal companies that are blowing off the tops of mountains.
According to RAN:
JP Morgan Chase is the biggest US financier of mountaintop removal coal mining. According to Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase maintains ongoing financial relationships with 5 of the top 10 corporate producers of mountaintop removal coal. These 5 companies: Massey Energy, International Coal Group, Arch Coal, CONSOL Energy, and TECO Energy were responsible for mountaintop removal mining nearly 38 million tons of coal in 2008 – the most recent year with complete data. Imagine if JP Morgan Chase took this money and invested it in renewable energy alternatives!
Massey Energy, in particular, appears to revel in its violations of laws and regulations.
According to an intent to sue legal notice filed last month by various citizens groups:
Between April 1, 2008, and March 31, 2009, Massey violated its effluent limits at its various operations at least 971 times, and accrued 12,977 days of violation during that 12-month period. The U.S. government’s lawsuit against Massey, which resulted in the $20 million settlement, alleged more than 60,000 days of violations over a six-year period, or about 10,000 days of violations per year.
Massey’s violations are both civil and criminal. As I wrote last year on the battle at Coal River Mountain, where the protesters are currently halting blasting:
With 19 Appalachian mining operations valued at $2.6 billion in 2008, parent company Massey had demonstrated a merciless coveting for coal at any expense. In a haunting parallel to the Tennessee coal ash disaster, a Massey subsidiary in eastern Kentucky had been responsible for the largest coal slurry spill in 2000, leaking over 300 million gallons of toxic sludge into the area’s waterways and aquifers. Massey’s political connections in the Bush administration, however, resulted in a slap-on-the-wrist fine and the firing of one of the industry’s veteran whistle-blowers. Not that Massey altered its policies. By 2008, it had been forced to pay $20 million in penalties for dumping toxic mine waste into the region’s waterways; before the year was out, Massey shelled out a record $4.2 million for civil and criminal fines in the death of two coal miners in West Virginia.
For more information on today’s Chase Social Media Day of Action, go to Dirtymoney.org
And to follow the nonviolent protest on Coal River Mountain, go to Climategroundzero.orgRacketeering: The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO)... more
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