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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A group of Wisconsin landfill operators have formed a coalition as they seek to avoid shouldering the blame for toxic chemical contamination, WXPR reported last week. The coalition comes as landfills grapple with the looming fallout from the presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the waste stream. Chemical companies like 3M, Chemours, and DuPont are the manufacturers of PFAS, but the substances have wound up in landfills, composting sites, and wastewater treatment plants. The new Wisconsin coalition argues those manufacturers should be responsible for cleanup associated with the contamination. They also aim to improve communication between landfills and wastewater treatment plants, in addition to coming up with both short and long-term solutions to the PFAS problem. "We are sick and tired of having the finger pointed at the solid waste industry," Meleesa Johnson, administrator for Marathon County's solid waste department and president of the Associated Recyclers of Wisconsin, told Waste Dive. "Until we actually have a conversation about the real cause and effect, we will only put a band-aid on the problem," she added.
This should be fun, especially for the lawyers who make the big bucks.