Materials and Waste 📍

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Life Kit : NPR

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12 Tips For Fighting Food Waste: Life Kit : NPR

Food waste is a big problem in the United States, where a typical household of four tosses out about $1,600 worth of food annually. So, Life Kit did a deep dive on how how to reduce food waste.

I like a lot of frozen fruits and vegetables that don't come in a lot of packaging and rarely step foot in a store more than once a week. Frozen things rarely spoil and I have some weeks where I don't shop at all or buy minimally and cook from what I have. Plus having to haul any waste I don't compost to the transfer station is another incentive to reduce waste. 

Hexavalent chromium (aka Chromium-6 )

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Toxic Chemistry: Hexavalent chromium (aka Chromium-6 )

Chromium is a lustrous, brittle, hard metal. Its colour is silver-grey and it can be highly polished. It does not tarnish in air, when heated it burns and forms the green chromic oxide. Chromium is unstable in oxygen, it immediately produces a thin oxide layer that is impermeable to oxygen and protects the metal below.

The most common forms of chromium in the environment are trivalent chromium (chromium-3), hexavalent chromium (chromium-6) and the metal form of chromium (chromium-0).

Hexavalent chromium occurs naturally but it is usually produced by industrial process.

It can easily gain electrons from other elements, meaning that it can easily react with them. This ability to react can produce hard coatings.

However, its ease of reaction with other elements is the main reason why hexavalent chromium is considered a major health hazard.

With that spill at the electro-plating facility in Michigan, a lot of people are talking about Chromium-6.

Planning ahead for mounting challenges of special waste at landfills | Waste Dive

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Planning ahead for mounting challenges of special waste at landfills | Waste Dive

More and more, landfill operations are identifying those waste streams which predictably cause problems due to odors, reactions, fires and difficult to manage leachate. The list includes aluminum smelting and other metal wastes, high sulfur content waste streams from the oil and gas industry, and high moisture-containing wastes including biosolids and sludges. Growing coal ash disposal volumes also add to the complicated chemical mixture.

Glitter Spreads More than Holiday Cheer – The Allegheny Front

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Glitter Spreads More than Holiday Cheer – The Allegheny Front

In November, an article in the UK’s Independent, and then other publications, pointed to the problem with glitter, and calls from some scientists to ban it. Sherri Mason is a chemist at the State University of New York at Fredonia. She studies plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She says when you wash your hands or clothes to get rid of glitter, it ends up in lakes, rivers and oceans. “The vast majority of plastics that we find in the environment are these small pieces of plastic that are considered microplastics,” she says. “The majority of glitter…it’s a microplastic.”

Microplastics are technically 5 millimeters in diameter or smaller. Mason says most are more like a millimeter. They can be manufactured that way, like most glitter on the market, or might start out as a macro plastic, like a bottle of water that’s been ground down by the elements. Researchers estimate that 10,000 metric tons of plastic debris enter the Great Lakes every year.

Federal Toxmap Shutters, Raising the Ire of Pollution Researchers

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Federal Toxmap Shutters, Raising the Ire of Pollution Researchers

Fifteen years ago, the U.S. National Library of Medicine launched Toxmap, a free, interactive online application that combines pollution data from at least a dozen U.S. government sources. A Toxmap user could pan and zoom across a map of the United States sprinkled with thousands of blue and red dots, with each blue dot representing a factory, coal-fired power plant, or other facility that has released certain toxic chemicals into the environment, and each red dot marking a Superfund program site — “some of the nation’s most contaminated land,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Toxmap allowed users to pull up detailed EPA data for each toxic release site, and to overlay other information, such as mortality statistics, onto those maps. And it’s precisely those capabilities that earned Toxmap a devoted following among researchers, students, activists, and other people keen to identify sources of pollution in their communities.

Those capabilities appear to no longer be available to the public.