Curbs on the sale of house coal and wet wood for household burning in England have come into force under new rules aimed at cutting air pollution.
By Justin Rowlatt, Chief environment correspondent, BBC News
People will still be able to use stoves and open fires but they will need to burn cleaner alternatives.
These are the first restrictions on what people can burn in their homes since the clean air acts of the 1950s.
The UK’s air is far cleaner now, but in recent years pollution from log burners has increased dramatically.
Only 8% of households use them, but they are now the biggest source of the tiny pollution particles that are most damaging to health, according to government data.
It shows domestic wood burning in both closed stoves and open fires was responsible for 38% of pollution particles under 2.5 microns in size, three times more than road traffic.
These tiny particles can enter the bloodstream and lodge in lungs and other organs, the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) warns, and have been identified by the World Health Organization as the most serious air pollutant for human health.
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Sun sets on the Philadelphia Energy Solutions plant refinery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., January 9, 2020. REUTERS/Mark Makela
By Laura Sanicola and Laila Kearney, Reuters
Thirteen U.S. oil refineries released the cancer-causing chemical benzene in concentrations that exceeded federal limits last year, according to government data published by the green group Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) on Wednesday.
The study is based on the second full year of data reported by U.S. refineries since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2015 began requiring continuous monitoring of air pollutants around plants to protect nearby communities, many of which are disproportionately poor, Black and Hispanic.
In 2019, eleven refineries made the list, EIP said.
“If the Biden EPA wants to act on its environmental justice promises, these neighborhoods near refineries are a great place to start,” Benjamin Kunstman, staff engineer at EIP, told Reuters.
For eight of the 13 refineries, benzene levels exceeded the EPA standard of nine micrograms per cubic meter of air at the fencelines at the end of every quarter in 2020, according to the report.
When refineries monitor results that exceed the action level, the program requires them to undertake root cause analyses and corrective actions to reduce benzene, the EPA said in a statement.
The agency said it was “committed to reducing benzene and other air toxic emissions from refineries and protecting those communities most at risk from air toxics.”
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By John L. Micek | Editor, Pennsylvania Capital-Star
It’s Earth Day 2021 in America and in Pennsylvania. So what better time to step back and take stock of the health of one of our most important natural resources: the very air that we breathe.
A new report by the American Lung Association gave letter grades to nearly all of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. And for its two largest, it’s off to clean air summer school: Philadelphia and Allegheny County each got an ‘F’ from the Lung Association for high ozone days.
But before suburbanites in Philadelphia’s four collar counties start getting too smug, you have some remedial work ahead of you as well. Bucks and Montgomery counties each got an ‘F’ from the Lung Association, while Chester and Delaware counties received a ‘D’ grade in the report for the same metric.
Counties also were graded for particle pollution. The report includes data from 2017, 2018 and 2019, which is “the most recent quality-assured nationwide air pollution data publicly available,” the document reads.
“The American Lung Association’s 2021 ‘State of the Air’ report shows that despite some nationwide progress on cleaning up air pollution, more than 40 percent of Americans live with unhealthy ozone or particle pollution,” the Lung Association’s director of environmental health, Kevin Stewart, said in a statement. “People of color are significantly more likely to breathe polluted air than white people. As the nation works to address climate change and continue reducing air pollution, we must prioritize the health of disproportionately burdened communities.”
Below, a look at how Pennsylvania’s most populous counties finished across the two grading areas.
Grade, by county, high ozone days: Berks County: D Blair County: A Centre County: A Cumberland County: DNC (no monitor collecting such data) Dauphin County: B Erie County: B Lackawanna County: A Lancaster County: C Lebanon County: B Lehigh County: C Luzerne County: B Northampton County: D
Grade, by county, particle pollution: Allegheny County: F Berks County: D Blair County: B Bucks County: DNC (no monitor collecting such data) Centre County: B Chester County: B Cumberland County: C Dauphin County: C Delaware County: C Erie County: A Lackawanna County: A Lancaster County: F Lebanon County: C Lehigh County: C Luzerne County: DNC (no monitor collecting such data) Montgomery County: A Northampton County: B Philadelphia: A
The Covanta plant in Newark has operated since 1990. They take in 2,800 tons of waste from 22 municipalities in Essex County as well as New York City. The garbage is burned and then converted into energy. The company says burning trash is a better alternative to dumping garbage in a landfill that produces methane. (Karen Yi | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
Scattered across New Jersey, four looming incinerators spend day and night torching our trash.
The facilities receive tons of waste from homes and businesses each day, burn it all, then recycle the metal that’s left behind and sell the electricity generated in the process to power thousands of homes.
It’s a model that incinerator companies have held up as a cleaner alternative to simply dumping trash in methane-belching landfills. But many Garden State residents living in their shadow, often in places plagued by dirty air, have long seen incinerators as a threat to their health. Organizations advocating for these communities have for years railed against the incinerators and pushed for their closures.
Now, a newly-released catalog of pollution and violations associated with those incinerators, plus information about subsidies provided to the facilities, has opened a new chapter in the controversy.
A new report published Wednesday by a coalition of environmental groups details the scope of collective pollution from New Jersey’s four active incinerators, plus one that was retired less than two years ago.
The report also highlights millions of dollars worth of subsidies paid to the incinerators by electric customers, and questions whether such payment was legal.
The findings are presented by Earthjustice, the Vermont Law School Environmental Advocacy Clinic, the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance and the Newark-based Ironbound Community Corporation. The information matches much of what the groups sent in a letter to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities last April. That letter was first reported by Politico.
The two companies that operate New Jersey’s incinerators, Morristown-based Covanta and New Hampshire-based Wheelabrator Technologies, blasted the new report as anti-industry misinformation and defended their environmental records to NJ Advance Media.
Major sources of dirty air
The report focuses on four incinerators currently operating in the state — three facilities run by Covanta in Newark, Camden and Rahway, and another run by Wheelabrator in Gloucester County — plus the former Covanta facility in Warren County that closed in 2019.
Those five incinerators, according to the report, consistently ranked among the largest sources of air pollution in New Jersey between 2015 and 2018, when compared to all 215 facilities with major air permits in in the state — places like factories and power plants.
That pollution is compounded by the incinerators’ proximity to other major industrial facilities, leaving nearby communities to breathe air dirtied by the cumulative effects. The Newark incinerator, for example, is on the edge of the city’s Ironbound neighborhood and near to factories, tank farms, a natural gas power plant and a sewage treatment facility.
“They’re not standalone facilities that are in the middle of nowhere,” Ana Baptista, a Newark-native and professor at The New School who focuses on environmental justice, told NJ Advance Media.
“Even when they’re within their permit limits, they’re part of the problem,” she added.
The legacy of heavy pollution in these places has left residents, who are largely people of color, with higher rates of respiratory problems and at higher risk of COVID-19.
James Regan, a Covanta spokesman, said the locations of the company’s incinerators were chosen years before the company took them over.
“These facilities were sited by local governments for their use,” Regan said. “Covanta operates them as best we can with minimal environmental impact.”
Regan stressed that pollution from incinerators is dwarfed by tailpipe pollution from cars, trucks, buses and other transportation sources in the communities. The transportation sector is the state’s largest source of air pollution, according to the DEP.
But environmentalists argue it is misleading to compare a single source of pollution to the collective total of thousands of other smaller sources. They also point out that transportation pollution is predictable, and theoretically easier to address. Pollution from incinerators, however, can fluctuate based on the type of trash is being burned at a given time.
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State Senator Scott Weiner recently introduced the Climate Corporation Accountability Act (SB 260 or the Bill) on the California Senate floor. If enacted, SB 260 would create mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for large corporations that do business in California.
While California regulations currently encourage private entities to volunteer GHG emissions information regarding their inventories, goals, and agreements, SB 260 would make this disclosure mandatory for large corporations and would require those entities to produce a comprehensive, publicly available report detailing a wide array of GHG emissions directly generated by the company or incidental to business operations. Companies would also be required to adopt GHG emissions targets and employ measures to reduce those emissions.
SB 260 would apply to all publicly traded, domestic and foreign corporations with annual revenues in excess of US$1 billion that do business in California. The Bill envisions a two-prong approach, mandating (1) accurate and science-based reporting of all associated GHG emissions from covered entities and (2) a measured approach to reduce those emissions starting in 2025. Each covered entity under the Bill would be required to provide GHG emissions data in three scopes:
Scope One – All direct GHG emissions from sources that an entity owns or directly controls, such as fuel combustion;
Scope Two – Indirect GHG emissions related to electricity that is purchased and consumed by an entity; and
Scope Three – Indirect GHG emissions the entity does not directly control or own, which may include emissions associated with supply chain, business travel, water usage, employee commuting, and waste.
All three sources of emissions would need to be verified by a third-party auditor, approved by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and publicly disclosed on widely available digital platform at the beginning of each calendar year, starting 1 January 2024. By the time the first reporting period ends, the Bill would require CARB to have developed and adopted regulations setting reduced annual emissions targets for each entity, derivative of the entity’s reported emissions.
Read the full story
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On 19 January 2021, the eve of inauguration for the Biden Administration, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (D.C. Circuit) struck down the Affordable Clean Energy Rule (ACE Rule).1
Issued under the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the ACE Rule repealed and replaced the formerly enacted Clean Power Plan (CPP)2 and sought to establish a more narrowly defined framework for the regulation of power plant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.3
As a premise for the ACE Rule, the Trump EPA argued that Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (CAA), codified at 42 U.S.C. § 7411, contains clear and unambiguous language limiting the EPA’s emission reduction measures to improvements “at” and “to” existing GHG emissions sources.4 However, the D.C. Circuit held that the CAA does not require the EPA to confine its GHG regulation in this way and, in fact, that the Trump EPA’s interpretation under the ACE Rule constituted a “fundamental misconstruction” of the statute.5
The D.C. Circuit also found that the ACE Rule’s extended compliance deadline requirements were arbitrary and capricious insofar as they relaxed the schedules for federal action and state compliance under Section 7411(d).6 The D.C. Circuit’s decision clears the way for the Biden EPA to establish a new regulatory framework for power plant GHG emissions.
