Echo

Urban gardening lets women grow

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(MI) The Detroit News – Gardening is quiet and hopeful, a specific remedy for despair that requires only soil, water, sunshine and human will. That’s why, in the shadow of a long-closed Catholic school, in a ravaged east side neighborhood, a woman steers a small tractor through a field, leaving crisply trimmed grass behind. That’s why “urban farming” is suddenly being talked about as a practical way to reclaim the Detroit prairie: It nurtures people and feeds them. More

Echo

Study on Lake Huron bacteria points to agriculture

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(MI) Bay City Times – A university study says agriculture is the main contributor of E. coli bacteria to Lake Huron. The study by the University of Guelph and Ontario’s Environment Ministry looked at the Canadian side of the lake. But a Michigan regulator says the same thing could be happening in the Thumb – home to numerous large livestock operations and ongoing problems with beach muck, or dead algae, fouling shorelines. More

Echo

Analysis Finds Elevated Risk From Soot Particles in the Air

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(NY) The New York Times – A new appraisal of existing studies documenting the links between tiny soot particles and premature death from cardiovascular ailments shows that mortality rates among people exposed to the particles are twice as high as previously thought. Dan Greenbaum, the president of the nonprofit Health Effects Institute, which is releasing the analysis on Wednesday, said that the areas covered in the study included 116 American cities, with the highest levels of soot particles found in areas including the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Central Valley of California; Birmingham, Ala.; Atlanta; the Ohio River

Echo

City, port get $8.8M

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(PA) Erie Times-News – A 12th Street parking lot, transformed into a welcome center. Pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and safe intersections. And a port that serves as an international shipping center. It could become a reality, thanks to a combined $8.8 million in grant money the city of Erie and the Erie-Western Pennsylvania Port Authority received from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for “smart transportation” More

Echo

New York State Ordered to Delay Deposits on Water Bottles

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(NY) The New York Times -A federal judge has blocked state officials from implementing an expansion of the state’s recycling laws that would include a deposit on water bottles, a delay that could cost the state tens of millions of dollars that it was counting on to balance its budget this year. In an order issued late last week, Judge Thomas P. Griesa of United States District Court in Manhattan ordered state officials to wait until next April 1 before requiring retailers to collect a 5-cent deposit on bottled water. More

Land

BP faces new heat from feds over plant

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(IL) The Chicago Tribune – BP is facing new questions about its Whiting refinery from federal environmental regulators, who accused the company Thursday of starting a project to process heavy Canadian oil three years before it obtained the necessary permit. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cited the Midwest’s largest refinery with significantly increasing air pollution linked to asthma, heart disease and early deaths as a result of the project, though the agency did not quantify the amount.Regulators said BP’s actions are troublesome because northwest Indiana, like other parts of the Chicago area, already violates federal standards for harmful smog and soot pollution. The complaint comes a year after the Tribune reported that Indiana regulators had allowed BP to dump more water pollution into Lake Michigan from its Whiting refinery, about 15 miles southeast of downtown Chicago. More

Echo

Battle to clean up arsenal site is far from over

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(IL) Chicago Tribune – To walk the grounds of the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant in 2009 is to see nature’s best effort to heal the scars of a once-heralded manufacturing empire. Rich, green grass has returned to the small ridge known simply as “the burning grounds,” where TNT and old munitions were melted and recast decades ago. Lush cottonwood and hackberry trees now stand on the high grass where smoke stacks spewed noxious fumes into the air. Beavers and birds cool themselves in the winding creek that was a dumping ground for harmful solvents and chemicals. But below ground, the picture is different.

Echo

S.S. Badger must stop dumping ash by 2012

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(MI) Ludington Daily News – Ludington’s S.S. Badger is lauded, revered and adored for its uniqueness as the last operating coal-fired passenger ship in the United States. On the other, it faces environmental regulation for that very reason – coal, or, in this case, a coal-burning waste product, ash. With coal burning comes waste, emissions through the stack – specifically exempt from regulation by Wisconsin and Michigan state law – but also an ash slurry that is dumped daily into Lake Michigan. That ash discharge used to be considered normal operating procedure for coal-fired vessels. A 1973 portion of the U.S. Clean Water Act – when there were still more than 50 coal-fired vessels operating – stated discharges like the Badger’s, which are “incidental to normal operations,” were allowed.

Wildlife

Crews in St. Paul cut down trees infested with ash borers

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(MN) Minneapolis Star-Tribune – Chain saws and experts are converging in the Twin Cities in the fight against the emerald ash borer. In St. Paul, foresters identified eight more infested trees Tuesday as workers continued to remove dozens of others fatally damaged by the bug that, first found in St. Paul May 13, threatens the state’s 900 million ash trees. So far, 67 trees have been either taken down this week or targeted for removal in an effort officials hope will thwart the insect that has killed tens of millions of trees across the Midwest and southern Canada in the past seven years.

Echo

Feds, Georgia-Pacific agree on Kalamazoo River PCB landfill containment plan

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(MI) Michigan Messenger – Federal environmental officials recently announced an agreement with Georgia-Pacific Corp. to begin work on capping a Kalamazoo Township landfill filled with material laden with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, part of a federal Superfund cleanup of the Kalamazoo River. Design work on the $13 million project will begin this year and be complete sometime in 2010, said Michael Berkoff, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s project manager in charge of landfills on the Superfund project. More