Environment Memo

Pennsylvania has had quite a few violations of the regulations by Marcellus shale drillers.  And it should be kept in mind that these are only the reported violations. How many went unreported, we will never know.

Eventually, there will be a lot of watchers, so the Marcellus shale gas drillers should really embrace the regulation, including by EPA, as a means of working together with concerned citizens. So long as the industry claims regulatory enhancements are unnecessary, they will be suspect.

A Kellog’s recall was apparently prompted by a chemical breakdown product, methylnaphthalene, in some of their cereals. The parent material is supposedly in the cereal box liner, not the cereal itself (one hopes).

While lack of information about this compound and others is a big part of the story, it’s not hard to learn some concerning facts about it by looking at its Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS):

Caution! May cause allergic skin reaction. Causes eye irritation. Causes skin irritation. May be harmful if swallowed. May cause respiratory and digestive tract irritation.
Target Organs: None.

Read the rest of this post »

That’s the report about the site in the river Jordan (the Qasr al-Yahud),  but I don’t quite follow why

Israeli inspectors sample the water at the site….twice a year.

That’s not very often. There are some fairly quick tests available these days for bacteria indicating fecal contamination, but I’ve not looked lately for them in the “Bible” of water analysis. At the least, the common tests take 24 hours of incubation, and they are relatively inexpensive.

Read the rest of this post »

The leaked BP oil appears to be dissipating relatively rapidly, due to a number of factors, one of which I identified earlier: the higher temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico as opposed to the arctic.

These high temperatures help speed the release of volatile compounds into the air (note: this increases worker exposures that will be under examination as matters unfold), while also increasing microbial activity. Given the tens of thousands of oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, the microbial population there is likely already adapted to eating these compounds. And, as much as some people may hate to admit it, the dispersant may help increase the rate of microbial activity by improving access of bacteria to the oil compounds (their food).

There’s a certain amount of nitrogen in sewage, and a bit of it is released as nitrous oxide during treatment. One problem is that nitrous oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas (about 300 times stronger than carbon dioxide).

It is reported that researchers at Stanford believe they might one day increase that amount, separate it, and then burn the nitrous oxide in a rocket thruster. On the downside, the increase in nitrous oxide results from increasing anaerobic activity, which could cause bad odors.

On the upside, there’s the idea that this process could be used to get a lot of energy out of wastewater. (But I doubt it.) On the more realistic upside, nitrous oxide is in fact also known as laughing gas, so the faculty and students can at least have some fun with tanks of it at parties.

What’s the rush? NRDC sues the Food and Drug Administration

for failing to issue a final rule regulating the chemicals triclosan and triclocarban, which are commonly found in antibacterial soaps. These chemicals are suspected endocrine disruptors linked to reproductive and developmental harm in laboratory studies.
…
In April, FDA acknowledged soaps containing triclosan offer no additional benefit over regular soap and water.
…
lawsuit asks the court to impose a strict deadline for FDA to finalize the rule, which has been pending for 32 years

AP reports that

Crews were working Tuesday to contain and clean up more than 800,000 gallons of oil that poured into a creek and flowed into the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan, coating birds and fish.

It’s interesting to note that the pipeline’s uses include carrying tar sand oil to a BP refinery. I wonder where these tar sands are.

Wow. A quarter of the surface water is reported to be unfit for industrial use, due to pollution. Pretty bad.

Walk into any Lowe’s or Home Depot and look at their ceiling fans. Almost all of them are flat as a pancake. As pointed out in the Economist, quoting David Collins of Synergetics Environmental Engineering:

If blades were designed for better aerodynamic efficiency, instead of for being stamped from sheet metal as cheaply as possible, the electricity consumption of many cooling systems could, he says, be cut by a third.

Fan blades should be shaped like real airplane or boat propellers, curved with a twist, dating back to the Wright brothers. The people who design real propellers want the most thrust per unit of energy input, i.e. moving air (or water) as efficiently as possible.

Read the rest of this post »