Echo

Salvaging Insolvency: Sites GM helped pollute no longer get cleanup dollars from the bankrupt automaker

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By Kimberly Hirai and Jeff Gillies
Jan. 20, 2010
Editors note: This is part two of a three-day series on the environmental implications of GM’s bankruptcy. The bankrupt shell of General Motors could dodge environmental cleanup costs for dozens of properties that the automaker polluted but doesn’t own. Motors Liquidation Co. — the bundle of old GM debt and real estate that the automaker abandoned though bankruptcy — will clean up polluted property it inherited from GM with part of a $1.17 billion loan from the U.S. and Canadian governments.

Echo

Salvaging Insolvency: GM bankruptcy could shortchange pollution cleanups

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By Jeff Gillies, Kimberly Hirai and Shawntina Phillips
Jan. 19, 2010
Editors note: This is part one of a three-day series on the environmental implications of GM’s bankruptcy. The money set aside to clean up pollution at 120 sites a bankrupt General Motors left across the country may be enough to address the sites in only two states, according to court records. And that estimate ignores dozens more sites across the country that GM polluted, but either gave away or never owned — sites even less likely to get any cleanup money through the bankruptcy. GM entered a government — engineered bankruptcy aiming to emerge as a new, leaner company with fewer factories, dealerships and employees.

Echo

Special Report: Salvaging Insolvency

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When an industrial giant like General Motors goes bankrupt, who pays to clean up its toxic legacy? Jan. 19, 2010
GM bankruptcy could shortchange pollution cleanups: The money set aside to clean up pollution at 120 sites a bankrupt General Motors left across the country may be enough to address the sites in only two states, according to court records. Jan. 20, 2010
Sites GM helped pollute no longer get cleanup dollars from the bankrupt automaker: The bankrupt shell of General Motors could dodge environmental cleanup costs for dozens of properties that the automaker polluted but doesn’t own.

Echo

Scientists: Mayflies may amplify oxygen and algae problems, but don’t blame the bugs

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By Jeff Gillies
Dec. 3, 2009

Lake Erie’s pollution in the ’60s and ’70s killed off its mayflies, insects that spend most of their lives underwater before flying off in huge hatches that carpet coastal towns. But the bugs have returned in a big way. “I’ve seen people out there with snow blowers, blowing them around,” said Justin Chaffin, a doctoral student in the University of Toledo’s biology department. “If you walk down the sidewalk or a parking lot it’s like you’re walking on bubble wrap.”

Wildlife

Walleye in Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay carry less PCB contamination than a decade ago

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By Jeff Gillies
Nov. 24, 2009

Walleye swimming in Michigan’s largest watershed are 80 percent less contaminated with PCBs than they were in 1997, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Great Lakes Research. PCBs are toxic, potentially cancer-causing chemicals that were used in electrical insulators, hydraulic equipment and some paints. The U.S. and many other countries banned PCB production in the 1970s and 1980s

PCB levels in Saginaw Bay walleye have dropped 80 percent since 1997, said study author Chuck Madenjian, a fishery biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Great Lakes Science Center. He credits the drop to a dredging project in 2000 and 2001 that pulled more than 340,000 cubic yards of polluted sediment out of the Saginaw River, the bay’s main tributary.

Wildlife

PFCs are contaminant of new concern in Indiana Dunes’ great blue herons

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What do cologne and Indiana’s great blue herons have in common? They both contain chemicals that are increasingly worrisome to Great Lakes officials. A list of contaminants of emerging concern includes synthetic musks and perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs. Musks are a key ingredient of perfume. PFCs have had a bevy of industrial uses including fire-fighting foams and stain-resistant Scotchgard.

Echo

VIDEO: Can ants carry us to the biofuels promised land?

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By Alice Rossignol and Jeff Gillies
Oct. 27, 2009

Wisconsin researchers hope six-legged fungus farmers can speed the switch from gasoline to plant-based fuels. The farmers are leafcutter ants, and for millions of years they’ve been breaking down plants into the ingredients people now hope to use to brew environmentally friendly fuels. By studying how plants break down in a leafcutter ant colony, we might do a better job of breaking them down in a big biofuel production facility, said Cameron Currie, a bacteriology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We can learn about how natural systems do it to model our own attempts to do it,” he said.

Wildlife

New insight on old pesticide spells trouble for the Great Lakes’ invasive sea lamprey

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By Jeff Gillies
Oct. 20, 2009

While Great Lakes officials beat back the voracious Asian carp at the gates of Lake Michigan, they still wrangle with another nasty fish that snuck in at least 90 years ago. Sea lampreys, eel-like parasitic fish native to the Atlantic Ocean, use a mouthful of teeth and a bony tongue to latch onto and scrape through fish flesh. Scientists debate whether the lamprey is native to Lake Ontario, where it was discovered in 1835. But it invaded Lake Erie by 1921 and the rest of the Great Lakes by 1946.

Echo

Great Lakes biologists brace for hydrilla, the next big invasive water weed

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By Jeff Gillies
jeffgillies@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
Oct. 1, 2009
Editors note: This story is part of a series relevant to the International Joint Commission’s Oct. 7 and 8 biennial meeting in Windsor. When Matt Preisser thought he saw a photo of a potential Great Lakes invasive species in a Michigan newspaper, he tracked it down and checked it out. “The plants in the photo were suspiciously similar to hydrilla,” said Preisser, who works for Michigan’s Aquatic Nuisance Control Program.