Word: epas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...human health. And authorities rarely stop the export of potentially hazardous e-waste. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that refused to ratify the 19-year-old Basel Convention, an international treaty designed to regulate the export of hazardous waste to developing nations. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversees the export of only one type of e-waste--cathode-ray tubes in old TVs and monitors--and a report last August by the Government Accountability Office dismissed the EPA's enforcement as "lacking...
...same report included a sting investigation that found that 43 U.S. recycling firms were willing to ship broken monitors with cathode-ray tubes to buyers in foreign countries without getting the required permission from the EPA and the receiving nations. Yet some of these companies had been trumpeting their exemplary environmental principles to the public. "At least three of them held Earth Day 2008 electronics-recycling events," the report notes...
...HCWH, in 1996, medical-waste incinerators [generated] 10% of all mercury air emissions as well as being a major source of mercury water emissions," says Gary Cohen, a co-founder and co-executive director of HCWH. In 1997, the last year for which data is available, according to the EPA, the health-care sector was the country's fourth largest source of mercury emissions, and mercury fever thermometers alone accounted for about 17 tons of mercury deposited yearly in solid waste landfills. Despite the lack of hard data, industry watchers estimate that the phase-out of mercury-based instruments...
...prominent foodies recently suggested to Obama - would get ripped to shreds by the aggies on Capitol Hill. Vilsack probably won't launch a Nixon-goes-to-China initiative to block environmentally destructive biofuels, but he might not resist that kind of initiative coming out of the White House and EPA...
...EPA is now devising a "life-cycle" test designed to measure whether various biofuels really reduce overall carbon emissions from the field to the tank; the farm lobby is already pushing for a weak test, because a strict one could halt the biofuel revolution. The position Vilsack's department takes on this arcane test could signal whether it will really serve, as Obama pledged on Wednesday, "not big agribusiness or Washington influence peddlers but family farmers and the American people." But that would require real change - not only for the department but for Vilsack and for Obama...