Land

Detroit to host Greening the Heartland conference

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(MI) Booth Newspapers – Charles Poat is an architect and senior project manager with the Mannik & Smith Group in Canton. He’s also chairperson of the Detroit Regional Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council. “It’s really easy to part of an association that’s associated with green and the environment,” says Poat. “Our membership has quadrupled in the last year.” The Detroit chapter is hosting the Greening the Heartland Conference in Detroit May 31 through June 2.

Echo

Conflicting report on dredging remains secret

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(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – The public will have a chance to comment Wednesday night on a controversial study that clears the Army Corps of Engineers of allegations that a botched dredging job in the 1960s permanently lowered Lakes Michigan and Huron. But what people attending the hearing in Evanston, Ill., won’t get to see is a second report that contradicts the new study’s findings. The reason: That report – essentially a critique requested and paid for by the producers of the new study – is still being reviewed, according to study spokesman John Nevin. More

Waste

Cloth bags condemned as plastic strikes back

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(ON) The Toronto Star – The plastics industry is warning consumers that reusable fabric grocery bags can create a health risk because they can become contaminated with fungus and bacteria if not properly washed. As the green movement against disposable plastics gains momentum, the Canadian Plastics Industry Association warns that it had 24 reusable bags tested at two laboratories and in many of them found mould, yeast and bacteria, including intestinal fecal bacteria. More

Waste

Detroit incinerator’s burning issues

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(MI) The Detroit News – If you eat, sleep or waste in Detroit, or Royal Oak or a dozen other local municipalities, chances are good your garbage will be shipped to the heart of this city where it will be incinerated and converted into steam, electricity and exhaust fumes that will be recycled into some citizen’s lungs. If you take a trip to the incinerator — or if you prefer the official Orwellian name, the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Facility — you are in for a view of the decadent, profligate habits of the American citizen and the protracted problem of trying to dispose of his detritus. More

Echo

Belle Isle water prompts concern

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(MI) The Detroit News – There isn’t much that’s tropical about Krystale Houston’s West Detroit neighborhood so, for her, the beach at Belle Isle Park is a real escape. In the summers, she and her friends try to get there every other day or so for swimming and sunning. But depending on which public beach you’re talking about in Metro Detroit, that water gets varying levels of attention from health officials charged with ensuring it’s safe to swim in. And while surrounding governments have compiled years of data on their beaches — telling them which times are most likely to produce E.coli contamination — Detroit’s only public beach at Belle Isle has never been monitored regularly. More

Echo

Waste agency to restart pharmaceutical collections

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(IL) Chicago Tribune – North Shore and northwest suburban residents can resume giving some old pharmaceuticals to the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County as long as those medications do not include controlled substances. SWANCC stopped collecting pharmaceuticals from member cities earlier this year after the federal Drug Enforcement Administration called its attention to a regulatory hitch: Patients cannot give controlled substances to anyone for disposal, except police departments. More

Wildlife

30,000 cormorants destroying lakeside park

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(ON) The Toronto Star- One arm of the Leslie Street Spit, home to Tommy Thompson Park and the Great Lakes’ largest colony of cormorants, looks like a wintry apocalypse. There are no trees now, just a few guano-spattered snags. This is where cormorants first settled in the park in 1990. They now number about 30,000. In some Ontario parks, Parks Canada officials shoot cormorants to stem the loss of trees.

Air

China benefits from Obama’s fuel mandate

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(MI) The Detroit News – On the same day President Barack Obama marched the Big Three auto executives smiling to the guillotine, China announced it will not set mandatory emissions standards and instead will attack greenhouse gases with a strategy that doesn’t threaten its ferocious economic growth. America has chosen a sharply different tack, as was apparent this week at the White House, where Obama announced he would make the harsh California emissions mandates the national standard. The automakers, now wards of the federal government, had no choice but to cheer the mandates, even though a senior Ford executive told the L.A. Times the mandates would likely put the automaker out of business.  More

Land

Detroit farming interest grows

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(MI) Detroit Free Press – The Detroit-based Self-Help Addiction Rehabilitation Inc. (SHAR), a nonprofit drug rehab center funded by the state and others, is proposing that it be given up to 2,000 acres of vacant city-owned land to farm. The project, known as Recovery Park, would have the dual purpose of teaching addicts therapeutic and marketable skills and rehabbing the city itself, said SHAR’s chief executive, Dwight Vaughter. More

Wildlife

Counting frogs: Keeping track of species keeps habitats healthy

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(IL) Chicago Tribune – Crouched in fields of prairie grass under moonlit skies, Matt Hokanson leads workshops three times in the spring to teach new monitors how to count the population of frogs by the number of calls they hear. There are 13 native species of frogs in Illinois, Hokanson said, but four to five are limited to specific habitats such as sandy areas. The rest can be found in wetlands where habitats are located by aerial photographs taken by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the Audubon Society Chicago Region. More