Getting Gassed In Your Sleep: Pollution in the Bedroom

Posted on June 15, 2009
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Getting Gassed In Your Sleep: Pollution in the Bedroom
Most people spend at least a third of their lives in bed. In fact, given that one\’s face is planted right in a pillow or mattress much of the time, the potential for being, quite literally, gassed in your sleep is quite high. Many of the materials that make up modern pillows, mattresses and bedclothes have been shown to release fumes that are either themselves or in combination with other bedroom chemicals, harmful to human health. Over the span of a lifetime, this can add up in ways that are just now being explored.

Flame retardants, federally mandated in new mattresses, are known to bio-accumulate in human beings. They are so widespread that in recent tests researchers couldn\’t find a single lactating mother who didn\’t have this chemical in her breast milk. The coverings and petrochemical fillings are also well known to off-gas for months and even years, with potentially carcinogenic consequences.
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Why Factory Farmed Meat Causes So Much Pollution

Posted on June 9, 2009
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Why Factory Farmed Meat Causes So Much Pollution
Most North Americans are now familiar with the term factory-farmed meat. Though somewhat rhetorical in its use, it is an accurate way to describe the process that has become conventional ranching and animal husbandry. There are, of course, many concerns from a humane treatment standpoint, but the pollution concerns from such operations are equally, if not more, compelling.

Consider what happens when you put several thousand cows together who are not part of the same herd. First and foremost, you get a lot of animal waste enough to fill entire lagoons with the stuff. This is rarely, if ever, given much in the way of treatment before being put into the nearby environment. Such lagoons often overflow into river systems during storms, especially in states and provinces without regulation.

The practice of finishing these animals on grains allows them to fatten up before slaughter. It also changes their intestinal pH, allowing them to be susceptible to dangerous organisms such as E. coli and others. These grains are also far more likely to be contaminated with heavy metals and PCBs than pasture.
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Tales From the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Posted on June 3, 2009
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Tales From the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
There is a place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is about as far from human habitation that one can possibly be while still on the planet. Here, the currents of the North Pacific turn inward and form one of five great oceanic gyre currents. Thousands of miles from the nearest civilization, this area that has for millions of years been home to sea turtles and albatross is now home to the largest floating garbage dump the planet has ever seen.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it is often called is an ever growing mat of swirling plastic. This includes just about every plastic item that has ever been manufactured (and that\’s a lot), as well as abandoned nets. In the sunlight and seawater these plastics tend to degrade into even smaller particles that form an even denser mat.

This is tremendously dangerous to wildlife, that is increasingly found dead, having starved to death with a belly full of the stuff, unable to process food.
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How Everyone Got a Free Dose of Anti-depressant Medications

Posted on May 28, 2009
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How Everyone Got a Free Dose of Anti-depressant Medications
Pharmaceutical are not known for handing out their medications, especially those that make good money for them, for free. However, in recent years, that\’s exactly what has been happening, in very small doses, in most major North American cities. These and other drugs, including hormones, over-the-counter medications and water soluble vitamins turn up in water supplies in increasingly large amounts.

Though there are no thresholds for exposure, there is also (as of the late \’aughts) no way to filter them out. The molecules in question are simply far too small to be pulled out that way. Furthermore, since there are no regulations regarding these substances, municipal water treatment systems are not compelled to innovate a way to deal with the problem, if they even see it as a problem.

Most people see it as a problem. In fact, until these stories broke, most were unaware that sewage was recycled into drinking water. This has been safely done many times over for the last several decades all over the arid parts of North America.
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Stirring up Contaminated Waters: Dredging Operations in Polluted Rivers

Posted on May 22, 2009
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Stirring up Contaminated Waters: Dredging Operations in Polluted Rivers
When air, water and soil pollution end up at the bottom of a river, they usually stay relatively put unless stirred up. This is done on small scale whenever a large boat anchor puts down in a harbor without mooring. This may also be done when constructing docks or platforms for extraction or recreation. However, the most common way these waters are disturbed is through dredging operations that keep channels open that would otherwise be narrowed and made to shallow for ship traffic by the buildup of silty erosion.

For this reason, many waterways were declared Super fund sites in the US during the 1990s, with special monies made available for the removal and treatment of these sediments, at great cost. Many of the major waterways in North America have been found to contain large amounts of heavy metals, PCBs and other persistent pollutants.
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Lingering Lead Continues to Pose Developmental Threats Decades Later

Posted on May 16, 2009
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Lingering Lead Continues to Pose Developmental Threats Decades Later
Most people are aware of the damage to cognitive development that arises as a result of lead poisoning. In fact, even thought it used as a sweetener for wine during the Roman Imperial Era, even Roman contemporaries knew it was a neurotoxin. It is especially harmful to pregnant women and children, causing blood and brain disorders, accumulating in the tissues and shaving IQ points off entire neighborhoods.

Until the 1970s, lead paint and leaded gasoline were common in North America. Unlike many of the other neurotoxic metals, it also happens to be rather common, naturally. It is still used extensively in car batteries, though most of these are caught in the hazardous waste recycling stream as per federal, state and provincial law. It\’s use in paint has proven particularly difficult to remediate given how long these substances are capable of persisting in soils, particularly in urban areas. The long time use of lead in gasoline has resulted in a very widespread soil contamination.
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The Erosion and Pollution Connection

Posted on May 10, 2009
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The Erosion and Pollution Connection
All types of environmental degradation share a common root. In the case of erosion, one might be surprised how various types of pollution lead to erosion and visa-versa.

In this difficult cycle, these depletion-prone soils are unable to support more than the barest minimum of plant life. Due to subsequent erosion nearby forest are being opening up new forest lands to agriculture. Often this is in conjunction with very regular tillage and pesticides, causing the soil to be less able to stay put, making it far more mobile and liable to run-off with the first rainstorm.

The soils that are runoff into streams as silt often mixes with soils that are heavily contaminated with heavy metals, dioxins and PCBs, to name just a few major contaminants that make these eroded soils unsuitable to be reapplied to soils. As pollution falls from the sky, soil surfaces must sometimes be scraped away and treated, if treatment is even possible.

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What Does Mercury Do To Brains, Anyhow?

Posted on May 3, 2009
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What Does Mercury Do To Brains, Anyhow?
Mercury, or quicksilver as it\’s often called, is a substance that\’s been known to cause mental dysfunction and erratic behavior for a very long time. However, this didn\’t prevent it from being used extensively for various tasks. Many people are familiar with mercury as the liquid metal that acted as the active filling of thermometers until the 1990s.

However, perhaps the most common way that mercury becomes a pollutant is not from broken thermometers, but the aerosolized fraction that is emitted from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants. This mercury as air pollution is then free to float down to Earth and contaminate the soil as well as the surfaces of urban areas. The production of gold is also a very potent source of mercury, much of this ending up in run-off water.

This metal is especially reactive in human tissue where it actually blocks several necessary metabolic pathways in the human brain. It is not eliminated from the body and continues to gather in fatty tissues forever.

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Could the Vegetarians Be Right? Refusing Meat for Environmental Reasons

Posted on April 27, 2009
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Could the Vegetarians Be Right? Refusing Meat for Environmental Reasons
In a 2008 report on the biggest threats to the climate, the United Nations identified the number one threat to life on Earth to be the consumption of far too much meat. While they did not go nearly so far as to advocate that everyone should become a vegetarian, the report did list why most people in North Amercia should consider doing their part to eat far less flesh.

The reasons for this are multi-faceted. For starters, the land that\’s cleared for cattle grazing is very often in poor and environmentally sensitive areas. Smoke from these fires is a major air pollutant in Asia and South America. When the trees are removed, much less carbon dioxide is able to be absorbed into them from the already overloaded atmosphere. On top of all that, the animals themselves are responsible for producing massive amounts of methane, an organic substance that is known to be as much as 45 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

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Can Enough Food Be Grown Without Pesticides?

Posted on April 21, 2009
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Can Enough Food Be Grown Without Pesticides?
Perhaps one of the most often cited reasons that conventional farmers give for their continued use of toxic pesticides and herbicides is the belief that it\’s impossible to grow enough food for everyone without them. In fact, this is repeated often enough by critics of the organic movement, they may even believe it to be true. However, when crops are evaluated on the basis of mineral nutrition, flavor compounds and protein content instead of simple weight, organic produce is far more productive, per acre, than water-filled conventional produce and grains.

This has been proven at places such as the Rodale Institute, where the longest-running organic trials in North America have been running for decades. What may not be possible, however, is to keep producing crops that can be shipped thousands of miles. Plants rely upon careful attention and the crafty application of the agricultural arts far more than simply sitting on a tractor and doing what the chemical rep told you to do.

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