EnviroPolitics Blog

Aloha, Welcome to the Tour de Trash

Governing.com’s Idea Center profiles the city and county of Honolulu’s Tour de Trash, an award-winning program that offers free, full-day tours of different recycling sites in an effort to facilitate educated public discussions and decision-making on recycling and waste management initiatives.

Apparently, the program has lots to show, as Honolulu recycles more than 600,000 tons of waste each year, and has one of the nation’s highest recycling rates at 35 percent.

The City Department of Environmental Services staff conducts six tours a year of recycling processes at various workplaces including hotels and restaurants; a wastewater treatment facility; waste-to-energy plants; construction and demolition landfills; and facilities that recycle rubber, aluminum, glass and plastic. The tours sell out every year and have earned the program a 2007 Outstanding Achievement Award from the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

For more information on Tour de Trash, click here.

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Who built the first green building on Capitol Hill?

The Senate? The House of Representatives? The EPA?
The Sierra Club?

No, no, no and no. It’s the Quakers.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation (the Quakers national lobbying arm) has transformed two Civil-War era buildings across the street from the Senate into a green building that has cut their energy consumption in half.

Considering that buildings account for 50% of U.S. energy consumption and 40% of CO2 emissions, that’s quite an accomplishment–one that others, including government, might well emulate. Click here for a virtual building tour.

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Great timing for New Jersey’s global warming law

Supporters will tell you that New Jersey’s new law pushing the
state toward a greater use of non-fossil energy production, like
solar and wind, is just-in-time legislation, considering the heel-
dragging in corporate-owned Washington. But the signing of the
“Global Warming Act” was also a brilliant example of public relations timing.

Governor Jon Corzine’s PR team arranged to have the bill signed at a news conference in the Meadowlands where reporters from across the country were converging on Giant’s Stadium to cover Live Earth, a series of worldwide concerts promoted by former Vice President Al Gore to spread word of “climate crisis.”

Lest anyone fail to link the two events, the Corzine team invited Gore to attend the public signing. The resulting coverage gained New Jersey (and Corzine) international attention.

Here are just a few of the stories the event produced: Forbes, ABC News, Gannett, Reuters, Associated Press, Star-Ledger, The (Bergen) Record .

The new law calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020–a 17 to 20 percent reduction, followed by a further reduction of emissions to 80 percent below 2006 levels by 2050. New Jersey is only the third state in the nation make greenhouse gas reduction goals law.

While the state’s environmental-activist community worked hard to get the bill through the Legislataure, one group was issuing a post-enactmenet warning. Bill Wolfe, executive director of the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, noted that state lawmakers last month removed mention of a program that would have required cuts at power plants and jettisoned plans for a fee on industry that would have paid for the state to monitor emissions.

“The goals are well and good, but there is no implementation, there is no regulatory program to meet the goals and there’s no funding in place,” Wolfe said.

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Fries with your fuel, Mac?

The Associated Press reports that McDonald’s will be scouring its fry pits for leftover oil and recycling it into biodiesel to power its fleet of British delivery vehicles.

The Oak Brook, Illinois-based, fast-food giant says it expects the move to save about 1,700 tons of carbon annually, which is the equivalent of removing about 2,400 cars from the road each year.

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PA enviro groups sue over TCE emissions

Penn Future and the Sierra Club, filed a lawsuit today in federal appeals court, claiming the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is failing to protect citizens against harmful health effects of the industrial uses of such solvents as perc (perchloroethylene) and TCE (trichloroethylene).

The groups are being represented by the public interest law firm, EarthJustice, which is based in Oakland, CA.

In a news release, the groups linked two industrial firms–Superior Tube and Accellent–to higher than normal levels of TCE in the Collegeville, PA area and blamed the EPA for backtracking on a previous decision to regulate the use of the solvent.

The PA-DEP has confirmed the TCE findings and is negotiating with Superior Tube over voluntary reductions. The company has proposed two projects that DEP said “should produce a 30-percent decrease in TCE emissions this year.” A public hearing on the company’s air permit is scheduled for August 8.

The environmentalists apparently are not impressed by the state’s response.

“Hundreds of our 10,000 area members are put at risk by these emissions,” said Dennis Winters, Conservation Chair of the Sierra Club’s Southeastern Pennsylvania Group. “We are not surprised that the EPA has not acted to protect Montgomery County residents living around these facilities, but we expect more from our own Department of Environmental Protection.”

That criticism, however, appears harsh, considering the fact that the state DEP, on May 17, beat the enviros to federal court, with a petition challenging the controversial EPA rule that exempted the two local companies, and other narrow tube manufacturers, from new EPA standards requiring reductions in TCE emissions in many other industries.

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NJ sues 120 for natural resource damages

New Jersey expects to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental resource damages from companies named in some 120 separate lawsuits filed on Friday, one day short of a legislative deadline.

Known as Natural Resource Damage (NRD) claims, the lawsuits seek compensation above and beyond fines and cleanup costs that already might have been paid by the companies.

One of the lawsuits specifically targets scores of designers and manufacturers of the gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether as well as major-brand refiners and marketers of gasoline that used MTBE, including Amerada Hess, Atlantic Richfield Co., BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Getty, Shell, Texaco and Valero Energy. New Jersey is now the third state to seek NRD damages for the recovery of all past and future costs to investigate, remediate and restore natural resources damaged by the discharge of MTBE.

Other companies facing NRD claims are: Ciba Geigy Specialty Chemicals in Dover, Ocean County; the Bayway refinery in Linden, Union County; Gloucester City Titanium in Gloucester City, Camden County; Landfill & Development Co. in Lumberton, Mount Holly and Eastampton, Burlington County; as well as Dow/Union Carbide in Middlesex Borough and Piscataway Township, Middlesex County.

[See Asbury Park Press story on the Ciba Geigy suit and Bergen Record and NJ-DEP news release on the general filing]

DEP says its lawsuits also focus on polluters that have damaged river resources. Included in this category are ISP Environmental Services and G-I Holdings Inc., located in Linden along Piles Creek near the Arthur Kill; Mallinckrodt Baker, along the Delaware River in Phillipsburg, Warren County; Genstar Gypsum, located along the Delaware River in Camden, Camden County; and Rhone Poulenc along the Raritan River in Middlesex Borough.

Click here for a list of the companies and electronic copies of the individual suits.

Since 1994, the state has recovered more than $51 million and preserved approximately 6,000 acres of open space as wildlife habitat and ground water recharge areas as compensation for pollution resulting from 1,500 contaminated sites and oil spills.

Under DEP’s technical rules, all parties responsible for polluting a site must conduct an analysis to determine the nature and extent of pollution. Once this remedial investigation is completed, DEP has 5 ½ years to file a lawsuit to recover damages to natural resources if the responsible party does not restore the injured resource before then.

Recognizing that remedial investigations were completed at some sites many years ago without the filing of natural resource damage lawsuits, the state Legislature required the state to file of lawsuits within 5 ½ years of Jan. 1, 2002. The filing of the 120 lawsuits on Friday came on the last day prior to the Legislature’s July 1, 2007 deadline.

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