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 Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 7:05 pm
A few weeks ago in my ES class, we had a discussion about waste pollution and talked about how we can NEVER really trow anything away. The text book required for the class called it, NO "AWAY". There was breif mention of the Love Canal and I wasn't too familiar with it so I looked more into it.
What is the Love Canal?
Between 1942 and 1953, Hooker Chemicals and
Plastics sealed chemical wastes containing at
least 200 different chemicals into steel drums and dumped them
into an old canal excavation (called Love Canal after its
builder, William Love) in Niagara
Falls, New York (USA).
In 1953, Hooker Chemicals filled the canal, covered it with
clay and topsoil, and sold it to theNiagara Falls school board for
$1. The company inserted a disclaimer in the deed denying legal
liability for any injury caused by the wastes. In 1957, Hooker
warned the school board not to disturb the clay cap because of
possible danger from the buried toxic wastes.
By 1959, an elementary school, playing fields, and 949
homes had been built in the 10 square-block Love Canal area. Some of the roads and sewer lines crisscrossing the
dumpsite disrupted the clay cap covering the wastes. In the 1960s, an expressway was built at one end of the dump. It blocked groundwater from migrating to the Niagara River and allowed contaminated ground-
water and rainwater to build up and overflow the disrupted cap.
Residents began complaining to city officials in 1976 about chemical smells and chemical burns their children received playing in the canal area, but their concerns were ignored. In 1977, chemicals began leaking from the badly corroded steel drums into storm sewers, gardens, basements of homes next to the canal, and the school playground.
It wasn't until 1978 that the state of New York finally acted after media publicity and preasure from resident's. The state closed the school and arranged for 239 homes closest to the dump to be evacuated, purchased, and destroyed.
Two years later, after protestes from families still living close to the landfill, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a federal disaster area, offered to have the remaining families relocated and provided federal funds to buy 564 more homes. Because of the difficulty in linking specific health problems to exposure to multiple chemicals, the long-term health effects for Love Canal residents remain unknown and controversial.
The dumpsite has been covered with a new clay cap and in June 1990, state officials began selling 260 of the remaining houses in the area- renamed it Black Creek Village. o.o Of course buyers have to sign an agreement aknowleding that the state nor the federal government make no guarentees about the saftey of living in these homes.
Love Canal sparked creation of the Superfund law, which foced polluters to pay for cleaning up abandoned toxic waste dumps and made them wary of producing new one's. After 21 years and nearly $400 Million spent on cleanup it was removed from the superfund priority list in March 2004.
The Love Canal incident raises some improtant questions.
arrow How can we avoid such disasters in the future?
arrow How many other Love Canals are there around the world?
arrow What can we do to locate and defuse these chemical time bombs?
Love Canal is also a vivid reminder of three lessons from nature:
arrow We can never really trow anything away
arrow wastes often do not stay put
arrow preventing pollution is much safer and cheaper than trying to clean it up.
-Source: Living in the enviroment/ G.Tyler Miller Jr.
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Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 7:06 pm
Solid Waste in the United States: Affluenza in action!!
((Affluenza is a term used to desribe the unsustainable addiction to overconsumption and materialism))
The United States leads the world in producing solid waste. (Solid waste is any unwanted or discareded materical we produce that is not a liquid or a gas.) With only 4.6% of the world's population, the United States produces about one-third of the worlds Solid waste. About 98% of this is industrial solid waste from mining, oil and natural gas production, agriculture ...ect.
The remaining 1.5% of U.S. Solid waste is Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) ...known as garbage or trash.
Each year the U.S. generates enough trash to fill a bumper to bumper convoy of garbage trucks encircling the globe almost eight times!!
The U.S. also leads the world in trash production (by weight) per person. Each day the average american produces over 4.5 pounds of trash!! o.o
According to the U.S. Enviromental Protection Agency, about 55% of trash in the U.S is dumped in landfills with 30% being recycled or composted and 15% is burned in incinerators.
Here are a few of the solid wastes that consumers throw away in the high-waste economy of the U.S.:
arrow Enough alunimun to rebuild the country's entire comercial ariline fleet every 3 months.
arrow Enough tire's each year to encircle the planet almost three times
arrow Enough disposable diapers per year that if linked end to end would reach the moon and back 7 times.
arrow About 27 Mllion tons of edible food per year.
arrow About 25 Million throwaway styrofoam cups used mostly for drinking coffee per year.
arrow Enough office paper each year to build a wall 11 feet high across the country fron New York City to San Fransisco, California
arrow Some 186 Billion Pieces of Junk mail each year, 45% which are thrown in the trash unopened.
I just thought I'd add this bit to the thread as well.
One thing everyone should do (in my oppinion) is visit their local garbage dump. You will be shocked at just how much s**t we trow away - and even more shocked at how much of that can be recycled or reused.
My source is my ES text book - Living in the Enviroment/ G. Tyler Miller Jr.
Something to think about:
What role does your lifestyle play in producing some of the wastes in each of the categories listed? What are some things you are willing to do, to reduce your output of such wastes?
______________________________________________
The 5 R's: What you can do to reduce your contribution to waste:
idea Refuse: Escape from affluenza by refusing to buy items that we really don't need.
idea Reduce: consume less and live a simpler and less stressful life by practicing voluntary simplicity.
idea Reuse: rely more on items that can be used over and over instead of trowing away items. For exapmle, take a refillable coffee cup to the office and use it instead of trowaway cups.
idea Repurpose: Use something for another purpose instead of trowing it away. For example, use a tire to make a swing.
idea Recycle: Separate and recylce paper, glass, can's, plastic's, metal, and other items and buy products made from recycled materials.
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Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 8:12 pm
Pictures:
This is the only picture I found....governtment propbably trying to cover up this Amreican Tradjedy....
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Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 11:20 pm
Wow, that's horrible! I've never actually heard of a story like that, but I've thought of it before. Especially with things like nuclear waste that is disposed of in containers that they say will take hundreds of years to burn through, but what happens when those "hundreds of years" come to be the present? confused Humans don't think things through.
Of course I'm just one person with little impact when it comes to the big disasters, but I try to help as much as I can. I always recycle and I save anything that seems even the slightest bit useful for something else (I think you've seen some of the random objects I reuse for cosplay xd ), and recently I just started a recycling program at work. I was horrified by how much paper we go through every day, so I decided to bring in a box to collect it. I bring it to the nearest recycle drop off every week. Every little bit helps, right?
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Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 10:50 am
Every little bit helps!
How awsome!
I did the same thing a few months ago at work, when I looked in the trash can's in the offices and saw that there was nothing but paper.
I put a box in the office and told everyone to trow their paper in there.
Of course people still don't, and I go around when I'm at work looking in the trash can's to pull out all the paper that can be recycled...and it usually fills up my med. size box everyday.
Crazy!
All that paper would be going in the trash if I didn't take it with me.
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 4:13 pm
I've never heard of the Love Canal. That's crazy. Well, one solution to stopping things like this from happening again is give all the people in charge at the White House a brain. These politicians don't stop to think about what their actions will do towards the earth, and us. Not only did they damage the environment, they also damaged people's homes, schools, and so on. Another way is recycling it, if it can be recycled. Or reusing it; Or, probably the easiest of them all, reducing our consumption of these products. It's as simple as that. If you reduce, reuse, or recycle, things will be alot better mrgreen
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 5:09 pm
yes!
Go Green!
I love your Siggy!!
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 9:05 pm
This story reminds me of Erin Brokovich. I hear that story was highly exagerated in the movie, but I haven't done the research. Annnyways back to what I was thinking. If the state of New York is actually selling this property now they are criminals (even with waivers) and anyone who buys the property is stupid.
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Posted: Thu May 03, 2007 9:02 pm
Emily`s_Gone_Mad Pictures:
This is the only picture I found....governtment propbably trying to cover up this Amreican Tradjedy.... That looks Horrible! It looks like a part from the hollywood movie, War of the worlds! And trust me, you do not want to see that.
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Posted: Sun May 06, 2007 2:00 pm
As for recycling, in my youth (alas, long ago) I used to go alley bopping with my friends. We were in college and off campus housing. We needed furniture.
We knew where the rich neighborhoods were and when the big item pick up was schedules by the garbage people.
So, the night before that pickup, we'd pile into somebody's van around 2am (when the bars closed) and head for that neighborhood. We got couches, beds, chairs, tables, all kinds of stuff we needed. And some we took to sell to used furniture stores. It was free, relieved the dump of yet more huge things, and was a lot of fun.
As for the Big Questions, like how to dispose of dangerous waste, I have no idea other than not producing it in the first place. America and much of the rest of the wealthy countries in the world, has a disposable economy, the big corporations encouraging replacement of large ticket items (cars, furniture, computers, tv's, etc.) regularly, so there are lots of those to be junked.
I'm sure most of you are familiar with the death of street cars due primarily to the influence of auto and tire manufacturers. There is little profit in street cars, but plenty of money in "new car a year", replacing tires, buying gas, etc. Our whole society revolves around transportation... being able to go off for a weekend, running to the store several times a week, going out to dinner and a show.... Autos and their emissions are a way of life, as is getting a more powerful computer every two or three years, a bigger screen tv, a more powerful stereo system....
We have been trained to be master consumers. We haven't been trained in what to do with the stuff we toss out.
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Posted: Tue May 08, 2007 11:55 am
Part of the trash problem is that simply, there isn't a lot of effort being invested into dealing with the problem.
An easy example would be the college I attend. Obviously, since this is a college, there are a lot of caffeinated beverages consumed, and a lot of it is contained in aluminum cans, since late-night studying is a fad during dead week.
By logic, there should be some sort of recycling set up.
There isn't. If you really care, you could drive out to the recycling center (I don't have a clue where that place is), and dump off your cans and whatnot there.
I've seen a dumpster with a layer of cans in it. One of the big ones.
Now honestly, I'm fairly good about recycling. If it can be recycled, it's going in the blue bin, I was raised that way. Leftovers aren't tossed, I eat 'em. However, the university makes it a pain to even try to care.
I imagine there's plenty of other examples like that. Why go through all the extra effort, when it feels like you're really wasting your time doing something like that when you could be doing something more productive?
Additionally, where's the profit in being a green corporation, when you can bend the rules, and walk away with cash that would have went towards expensive proper disposal methods? I imagine that's how Love Canal came about, and future examples will result. Greed is a powerful motivator, after all.
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Posted: Tue May 08, 2007 12:40 pm
Anywhere you are you can always demand for recycling services to be provided. Especially in a school.
Simply march up and talk to the board of directors, or go through the sudent government body.
Same goes for where you live, if you don't have a recyling service you can get in contact with your local city council members and request it.
If requests are ignored, then you can move on up to higher powers, but I can almost guarentee that they will provide those services for you.
At work, I requested that a service of recycling of alluminum cans be provided and a few day's later a blue trash can was brought in and placed in the break room to recycle alluminum cans.
Sometimes all we have to do is ask, but the question is, can we even do that?
How many of us can honestly say "yeah, I'm going to go talk to the student government tommorow and lobby until we get a recyling service at our school..."
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Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 10:40 am
It might be a good idea to start investing in ways to convert dangerous waste like chemicals into another form, and if you can't completely change it into something safe then at least reduce its mass. With chemicals this could be done by adding another chemical to change the composition, or perhaps engineer a bacteria to digest the chemical and convert it to something safer.
I can't believe someone would ever build anything over a waste dump. I would figure that it wouldn't support something like a house and it would all cave in.
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Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 3:14 pm
Simyr It might be a good idea to start investing in ways to convert dangerous waste like chemicals into another form, and if you can't completely change it into something safe then at least reduce its mass. With chemicals this could be done by adding another chemical to change the composition, or perhaps engineer a bacteria to digest the chemical and convert it to something safer. I can't believe someone would ever build anything over a waste dump. I would figure that it wouldn't support something like a house and it would all cave in. Follow the money... You really think investors care about people? The stuff in the ground will just bubble up to the surface a la Carousel Mall in Syracuse, NY.
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Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 7:46 pm
Akira Seki Simyr It might be a good idea to start investing in ways to convert dangerous waste like chemicals into another form, and if you can't completely change it into something safe then at least reduce its mass. With chemicals this could be done by adding another chemical to change the composition, or perhaps engineer a bacteria to digest the chemical and convert it to something safer. I can't believe someone would ever build anything over a waste dump. I would figure that it wouldn't support something like a house and it would all cave in. Follow the money... You really think investors care about people? The stuff in the ground will just bubble up to the surface a la Carousel Mall in Syracuse, NY.
It's all about making the most money-- and the cheapest way to get rid of waste...although in the long run...it's really more expensive...
question
XP
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