…but this one contains information that could save our readers money and energy. We wish we had known about the fridge/freezer recycling offer last week when we replaced our 30-year-old Frigidaire . We had to pay to have it carted off.
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Have you tried any of the PECO offers above? What was your experience? Let us know in the ‘comments’ section
Chemical manufacturer UCT will pay a $44,880 penalty to settle hazardous waste violations at its Bristol, Pennsylvania, facility, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today.
EPA cited the company for violating the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the federal law governing the treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste. RCRA is designed to protect public health and the environment and avoid long and extensive cleanups, by requiring the safe, environmentally sound storage and disposal of hazardous waste.
UCT manufactures a variety of chemical products at its facility at 2731 Bartram Road in Bristol. These include solid phase extraction products for hospitals, clinical and toxicology labs, food safety testing labs, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and environmental testing facilities; and silane/silicone products used in the glass and fiber optic industries, medical device, cosmetics, paints and coatings, adhesives and electronics industries.
According to EPA, the company violated RCRA rules including storing hazardous waste for more than 90 days without a permit, failure to properly mark hazardous waste containers, failure to keep hazardous waste containers closed, failure to make waste determinations and failure to provide annual RCRA training.
The settlement reflects the company’s compliance efforts, and its cooperation with EPA in the investigation and resolution of this matter. As part of the settlement, the company has certified its compliance with applicable RCRA requirements.
The Senate Environment and Energy Committee will meet online at 10 a.m. Thursday, March 4
The Committee will take testimony on proposed amendments to S2515 (post-consumer recycled content) that may be considered in the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.
Due to the public health emergency, the State House Annex remains closed to visitors.
The public may not attend the Committee meeting in person but may view and participate in the meeting via the New Jersey Legislature home page at https://www.njleg.state.nj.us/. The Committee will take oral testimony on bills, by telephone and video.
If you are interested in registering your position with the Committee, please fill out the Registration Form located on the New Jersey Legislature Home Page under the applicable Committee heading.
For those individuals who wish to testify, please check the box “Do you wish to testify?” on the Registration Form. Instructions for testifying before the Committee will be forwarded to you after you submit your Registration Form.
The form must be submitted by 3:00 PM on Wednesday, March 3, 2021. The public may also submit written testimony electronically in lieu of oral testimony. Written testimony will be included in the Committee record and distributed to all the Committee members. Written testimony should be submitted to OLSAideSEN@njleg.org.
Remember the troubling headlines in 2014 about the corroded lead pipes that threatened residents (especially infants and children) in Flint, MI? And the subsequent water scare in 2018 that lead Newark, NJ to replace a large number of household water lines and provide filters to others?
Despite those costly and well publicized remediations, utilities in New Jersey are still not required to inform their customers about the status of their drinking water.
That could change under new legislation sponsored by Assembly Democrats Bill Moen (D-Camden, Gloucester), Lisa Swain (D-Bergen, Passaic), and Christopher Tully (D-Bergen, Passaic). Their bill, A-2863, was released unanimously on February 22 by the Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee.
It would supplement the “Safe Water Drinking Act” by requiring public water systems to provide to their customers, local health agencies, and municipal governments expedited written notice of lead levels that exceed the “lead action level”.
(1) clearly state that the public water system is in exceedance of the lead action level; (2) explain what the lead action level is and the measurement process that the public water system is required to perform to monitor drinking water for lead; (3) provide additional information on the possible sources of lead in drinking water, the health effects of lead in drinking water, and measures a customer can take to reduce or eliminate lead in drinking water; and (4) state the responsibility of a landlord to distribute the notice to all tenants served by the public water system.
Additionally, the bill requires landlords to provide all tenants with any notice or information received from a public water system concerning the presence of lead in drinking water.
Specifically, the bill requires the landlord to: (1) distribute the notice or information to every tenant who has entered into a lease agreement with the landlord and whose dwelling unit is served by the public water system; and (2) post the notice or information in a prominent location at the entrance of each rental premises that is owned by the landlord and served by the public water system.
The bill also requires a public water system to include a statement explaining these requirements in any notice or information provided to its customers concerning the presence of lead in drinking water.
The bill was amended today (updated version) on the Assembly floor, along with an identical measure, S968, and is in position for a final vote before moving the Governor Murphy’s desk.
Robert R. Comstock, a widely respected statehouse reporter and newspaper editor who served as a former top aide to Gov. Brendan Byrne, died on February 25. He was 93.
He died of complications related to COVID-19, The Record reported on Sunday.
After a brief stint at the Ridgewood News, Comstock joined The Record in 1953 and was the statehouse reporter and public affairs editor until 1973, when he was named assistant editor. His weekly column, “The Record on Politics” became a staple for the state’s political elite.
In March 1975, Comstock took a leave of absence from The Record to become Byrne’s public information director, a post now known as communications director. He replaced Herb Wolfe, who went back to his job as assistant editor of the Trenton Times.
At the time, the first-term governor was struggling with low job approvals of around 20%.
Comstock announced in January 1977 that he would return to The Record in March as the new executive editor. He replaced Carl Jelinghaus, who had stepped down as editor and remained the newspaper’s vice president. Comstock added the VP title to his portfolio when Jelinghaus retired.
The revolving door attracted some criticism when The Record endorsed Byrne for re-election in 1977, although Comstock said he recused himself from those discussions and the Bergen County newspaper endorsed former state labor commissioner Joseph Hoffman against Byrne in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
While working at The (Bergen) Record, Byrne appointed him to serve on the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority.
He was part of an era of New Jersey journalism giants that included Joe Katz of the Newark News, John Kolesar of the Associated Press, George Cable Wright of the New York Times, George Schick of the Trenton Times and S. Bolton Schwartz, known as Boley, who covered Trenton for the Herald News. Comstock led the newspaper during a time when it was hugely influential and admired.
After his retirement from The Record, he served assistant director of the Rutgers University Journalism Institute and as a member of the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct. He also worked at a lobbying firm headed by Alan Marcus, a prominent Bergen County Republican insider.
Bob Comstock, longtime New Jersey journalist and former editor of The Record, dies at 93
Robert Ray Comstock, a fixture in the New Jersey press corps from the 1950s through the 1980s who served as Executive Editor of The Record for more than a decade, died Thursday. He was 93.
Comstock also had stints working as the press director for Gov. Brendan Byrne, as an associate professor at Rutgers University, and after leaving journalism, working in public relations.
Comstock died of complications from COVID-19.
Described by one former reporter as running The Record’s newsroom with “an iron fist and a velvet glove,” Comstock oversaw the newspaper in the pre-internet age when print was still king. His tenure at the helm of the paper covered everything from the Iran hostage crisis to President Ronald Reagan being shot to the Challenger space shuttle explosion and the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s.
In North Jersey, one of the most controversial stories of the decade — the Baby M case — occurred on Comstock’s watch.
Mary Beth Whitehead was paid to serve as a surrogate mother for Elizabeth and William Stern of Tenafly who were looking to have a child. The case made national headlines and resulted in a custody battle and trial that helped to define surrogacy law. A television movie was eventually made, and several books were written about Baby M.
Comstock also ran the paper during the tenure of former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean. Kean recalled that The Record did not endorse him for governor during his first-term campaign in 1981, but did when he ran for reelection.
“He was a first class guy,” Kean said of Comstock on Friday. “He did a tremendous job for the paper and the state. He was not a Republican, so we had some disagreements along the way. But always in friendship.
“You could disagree with him,” Kean said. “But you never lost respect for him.”
Robert Ray Comstock was born in New York City on Sept. 17, 1927 to Phyllis and Kenneth Comstock.
His mother, Phyllis Taylor, had come to the United States from Australia to tour on the the vaudeville circuit with her sister and parents. Kenneth Comstock was an insurance salesman with Mass Mutual during the depression. Robert Comstock himself had eight policies, his daughter Kate Comstock Davis said.
Comstock’s parents met at a Daughters of the British Empire tea, married and moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey, where they built a home in 1930.
Comstock began his newspaper career as a paper boy for The Ridgewood News at around age 10. He graduated from Ridgewood High School in 1945 and then enlisted in the Navy.
“As a boy growing up in a British household, Dad huddled by the radio with family, listening to the dispatches on the blitz in London, and was itching to join the fight,” Comstock Davis said. “He enlisted for a kiddie cruise before he even graduated high school, but by the time he actually served the war had ended.
With his naval service behind him, he returned to New Jersey, attending Rutgers University and majoring in journalism. A highlight of his senior year was representing Rutgers in the Philip Morris on Broadway CBS radio competition where he was paired with movie star Barbara Stanwyck — even sharing a kiss.
He spent those summers acting and doing press for the Summer Stock in Corning, New York, which gave him the chance to work with other notable stars of the era, including Burt Lahr, Kim Hunter, June Havoc, Zasu Pitts and Jerry Orbach.
Back in Bergen County, he landed a job with the Ridgewood News after meeting a young woman whose father was the managing editor. About a year later, in 1954, he was hired to write for the Bergen Evening Record.
For the next 20 years, Comstock held roles including reporter, political writer, public affairs editor and assistant editor.
“He was the political editor and a damn good one as I recall,” said former Record columnist John Cichowski, who penned the Road Warrior column. “He had such insights into how politics worked. Who all the movers and shakers were. He was able to straddle those boundaries between how to present the news objectively, yet still use the solid contacts with these people.”
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A windfarm near Velva, North Dakota. Two counties in the state have enacted drastic restrictions on new wind projects in an attempt to save coal mining jobs, despite protests from landowners who’d like to rent their land to wind energy companies.Karen Bleier/AFP via Getty Images
By Dan Charles, National Public Radio
North Dakota has lots of coal. It also has strong and consistent winds. It might be the perfect spot to showcase the long-awaited “energy transition” from climate-warming fossil fuels to climate-saving renewables.
Yet that transition has hit a snag. Two counties in the state have enacted drastic restrictions on new wind projects in an attempt to save coal mining jobs, despite protests from landowners who’d like to rent their land to wind energy companies. It’s a sign of how difficult that transition can be for communities that depend on coal for jobs and tax revenue. The economic benefits of wind power, even though substantial, often flow to different people.
The dispute erupted last year when Great River Energy, a rural electric cooperative based in Minnesota, announced that it planned to sell its Coal Creek Station, north of Bismarck, ND. If no buyer showed up, the company said it would shut the plant down in 2022. A coal mine that supplies the plant with fuel also would have to close. Roughly a thousand jobs would disappear.Article continues after sponsor message
“This has been a heart-breaking decision,” said David Saggau, the company’s CEO, speaking by video to the North Dakota Lignite Council, which represents North Dakota’s mining industry. Yet Saggua told the miners that he had little choice, because the coal plant couldn’t compete with cheaper electricity from other sources, mainly natural gas.
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That step cut the company’s losses, but it also opened up an intriguing new possibility. “We realized there was an opportunity right away,” says Beth Soholt, executive director of the Clean Grid Alliance, based in Minnesota.
The opportunity lay in a high-capacity transmission line that runs all the way from Coal Creek Station to Minneapolis. Closing Coal Creek would free up that line, sweeping aside one of the key roadblocks that have slowed the growth of wind energy in North Dakota.
“It’s no secret that one of the barriers to development is a lack of transmission capacity to move the wind- or solar-produced electricity from where it’s produced to where it needs to be used,” Soholt says.
Great River Energy, in fact, wanted to build huge wind farms around Coal Creek — a combined generating capacity of 800 megawatts — to take advantage of that transmission line.
That’s when Ladd Erickson stepped in. He’s the attorney for McClean County, North Dakota, where the coal plant is located, and he launched a battle over access to that power line. “The transmission line is everything,” he says. “It’s the golden goose.”
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