Chinese Chemical Company Captures and Reuses 6,000 Tons of a Super-Polluting Greenhouse Gas

Linggas tanks have begun capturing and purifying waste nitrous oxide gas from the Henan Shenma Nylon Chemical Company in central China.

The nitrous oxide, a byproduct of nylon manufacturing, is nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The amount recycled equals emissions from 400,000 cars.

BY Phil McKenna and Lili Pike

A Chinese industrial gas company recently took a noteworthy step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions from chemical plants in China by capturing and reusing waste gas from the production of nylon.

Linggas, a company based in Beijing that sells industrial gasses used in electronics manufacturing, began capturing and purifying waste nitrous oxide gas at a rate of 6,000 tons per year from the Henan Shenma Nylon Chemical Company in central China on September 15, according to a Linggas company official.

Nitrous oxide, the “laughing gas” long used by dentists, is also a climate super-pollutant, nearly 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Chemical plants that manufacture adipic acid, a key ingredient in the production of nylon and polyurethane, release vast quantities of nitrous oxide as an unwanted byproduct. The nylon and polyurethane the plants produce is used in everything from car parts to running shoes. 

Adipic acid manufacturing in China, where eleven chemical plants—including Henan Shenma’s—now produce nearly half of the world’s supply, generates hundreds of thousands of tons of nitrous oxide per year, the vast majority of which is likely emitted into the atmosphere.

A recent InsideClimate News investigation found nitrous oxide emissions from adipic acid plants in China may equal the greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 25 million automobiles, more than all the cars in California, Beijing and Shanghai combined. That is equal to 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions between now and 2035, a figure that nearly matches the additional emissions resulting from major climate policy rollbacks initiated under the Trump administration over the same time period, according to a recent analysis by the Rhodium Group. 

Eliminating the emissions of 6,000 tons of nitrous oxide per year would have a greenhouse gas impact equal to taking nearly 400,000 vehicles off the road for the same time period, according to the U.S. EPA’s greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator. 

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Enviro bills in NJ Assembly committee Thursday

The New Jersey Environment and Solid Waste Committee will meet virtually at 2 p.m. on Thursday, October 8 to consider the following bills:

A-2070 (Calabrese/Mukherji) (pending referral) and S-1016 Smith, B/Bateman (pending referral )
Neonicotinoid pesticides-directs DEP to classify as restricted use pesticide

A-2785 (Pinkin) / S-2607 (Smith, B/Greenstein)
Requires land use plan element of municipal master plan to include climate change-related hazard vulnerability assessment.

A-4180 (Houghtaling/Downey)
Revises DEP’s regulation of certain seasonal structures including cabanas under CAFRA.

AR67 (Pinken/Lopez/McKeon)
Urges Governor to make appointments to “Advisory Council on Solid Waste Management.”

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For Chris Christie, entry to Trump World comes with a steep price — Covid-19

By Charles Stile, NorthJersey.com

In August, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie championed the wearing of masks to ward off the silent and deadly coronavirus.

“I believe that it’s the right example to set to be wearing a mask,” he told The Washington Post.

But in the last week, Christie found himself roaming around without a mask as one of the trusted and chosen few within Trump World, billed — falsely, as it turns out — as a safe zone hermetically sealed off from the silent pathogen that has infected more than 7.3 million and claimed 209,000 lives in the United States.

It’s also a world guided by peer pressure to please an image-obsessed president who mocked mask-wearing as a sign of nanny-state weakness. And it’s a world where few — if any — dared to stop President Donald Trump from manufacturing false hopes and false facts about the COVID-19 plague almost on a daily basis.

On Saturday, Christie discovered that Trump’s alternative universe is most likely another high-risk hot spot, where the disease strikes without regard to rank or social status. It has already infected Trump and his wife, Melania, former adviser Kellyanne Conway and the Jersey-raised Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager and top former Christie operative.

And now Christie.

It’s stunning news — as the terse, somber statement suggests.

Christie’s obesity and age place him at a high risk, and he has suffered from asthma attacks — as he did in 2011 when state troopers rushed him to the Somerset Medical Center. 

“I feel fine now,” Christie said at the time as he left the hospital, speaking in a no-big-deal tone of reassurance. He was heading home, he said, to change, eat, catch up on his son’s baseball game and prepare to return to work. He also admitted to being scared — he said he hadn’t felt as frightened since he’d been hospitalized 25 years earlier while he was in law school. 

Chris Christie attends a Rose Garden Event at the White House.

But it was only a week ago that Christie was buzzing around Trump World with confidence and ease. He was among the 200 guests who attended Trump’s announcement of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Sept. 26. Most guests circulated without masks, back slapping, bro-hugging, chatting in confidential huddles.

Social distancing was ignored. The footage of the event conveyed the confidence of a power clique that felt impervious to the disease. Maybe the attendees were bolstered by negative virus tests that cleared them to enter the event. They gave Trump the maskless, COVID-19-free sanctuary photo-op he desired: the powerful elite beaming, glittering and schmoozing in the Rose Garden at the White House.

Now, the ceremony may very well emerge as a super-spreader event. Eight attendees have reported positive COVID-19 tests, including the University of Notre Dame’s president, the Rev. John Jenkins. 

“I failed to lead by example, at a time when I’ve asked everyone else in the Notre Dame community to do so,” he wrote. “I especially regret my mistake in light of the sacrifices made on a daily basis by many, particularly our students, in adjusting their lives to observe our health protocols.”

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Related news stories:
What is contact tracing, and how does it work with COVID-19? (Washington Post)
The President’s Illness Is Yet Another Dividing Line in the Trump Era (New York Times)
McConnell Cancels Senate Votes as GOP Lawmakers Test Positive (Wall Street Journal)

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Trump held fundraiser in N.J. hours before testing positive

Donald Trump's National Bedminster Golf Club Facts & Photos - Trump's NJ Golf Club History
Donald Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club

By Brent Johnson | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Just hours before President Donald Trump announced he has tested positive for the coronavirus, he traveled to his Bedminster golf club on Thursday afternoon to mingle and pose for photos with supporters at a high-dollar fundraiser for his re-election campaign, possibly exposing others.

In fact, the White House confirmed the event went forward even after Trump administration officials learned that one of the president’s closest aides, Hope Hicks, tested positive for COVID-19 — a timeline that has triggered questions about why the president still made the trip.

News that the president and First Lady Melania Trump contracted the virus sent shockwaves around the globe early Friday morning, about a month before Election Day — and sparked uncertainty in New Jersey, a state already hit heavily by the pandemic.

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It’s currently unclear how many people Trump interacted with at his country club in the Somerset Hills, who was there, or how this will affect the area.

The president was in New Jersey for only a few hours, arriving at Morristown’s airport around 2 p.m. before flying via helicopter to Bedminster. After the event, he helicoptered back to Morristown and departed in Air Force One around 4:40 pm.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy released a statement Friday morning saying “the contact-tracing is underway” and urged everyone at the Bedminster fundraiser to “take full precautions, including self-quarantining and getting tested.”

“Tammy and I send our best wishes to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a speedy and complete return to good health,” Murphy said. “If there is one thing we have learned in New Jersey over these months, it’s that we pull together and support everyone fighting this virus.”

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Controversial plan to treat toxic water beneath former dump site in Ringwood gains final EPA approval

But neighbors, including tribal members, say the liquid should be treated after being pumped to the surface, a more expensive method

By Scott Fallon and David M. Zimmer, NorthJersey.com

The Environmental Protection Agency has approved a cleanup plan for toxic water in Ringwood that many residents — and the operator of the nearby Wanaque Reservoir — have criticized because they say it falls short of a complete remediation plan at a Superfund site with a history of trouble.

The $3.4 million plan calls for compounds to be pumped underground to treat dangerous chemicals that likely originated from paint sludge and other pollution dumped by contractors for Ford Motor Co. a half-century ago next to a low-income neighborhood and just north of the reservoir.

Approximately 500 acres of forest land contaminated by the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s and 1970s in Ringwood, N.J.

EPA Regional Administrator Pete Lopez said Thursday that the plan will “ensure that [toxic water] does not pose a risk to people in the community.”

But critics, including members of the Ramapough Lenape tribe that calls the area home, have said the water should be pumped out of the ground and treated at the surface — a more costly process. The water contains levels of benzene, arsenic and 1,4-dioxane above state groundwater standards.

The North Jersey District Water Supply Commission, which operates the nearby Wanaque Reservoir, likewise pushed for a pump-and-treat system, saying it would provide better protection for drinking water that is supplied to as many as 3.5 million New Jerseyans.

There is no sign of contamination, but officials continue “to have serious doubts about the focus and potential effectiveness of the remediation plan as it is currently configured,” Bill Maer, a spokesman for the commission, said Thursday. 

The plan comes more than a year after the EPA approved a similarly controversial $21 million settlement with Ford and Ringwood to deal with toxic soil at the sprawling Superfund site, which is home to centuries-old iron mines nestled among forested hills.

That plan keeps 166,000 tons of contaminated soil at the O’Connor Disposal Area despite the objections of residents who live nearby, including many members of the Ramapough tribe.

Like the soil cleanup, Ford and the borough of Ringwood are responsible to pay for the groundwater cleanup.

Nearly all samples collected in February 2017 exceeded the New Jersey groundwater quality standard for 1,4-dioxane, a chemical compound and a probable carcinogen under investigation by the EPA. One well sample exceeded the standard by a factor of over 200.

There is similarly contaminated groundwater under the town-owned landfill, records show.

The EPA plan also calls for sentinel wells in areas with no groundwater contamination to warn of migrating toxic materials. But Joe Gowers, EPA project manager, said they are only precautionary. Decades of samples show that contaminants are not migrating off-site, into town drinking water wells or to the reservoir, Gowers said.

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EPA finalizes cleanup plan for Superfund site in Fairfield, NJ

EPA Region 2 Administrator Peter Lopez.
EPA Regional Administrator Pete Lopez

By Anthony Zurita, NorthJersey.com

Federal officials have finalized a plan to remove thousands of cubic yards of soil laced with carcinogens at a former industrial site in Fairfield to prevent the pollution from reaching the Passaic River.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized the second part of an $18 million plan from 2016 to clean up the former Unimatic Manufacturing Corp. site, which lies between Willowbrook Mall in Wayne and Essex County Airport, the EPA said in a statement. 

The site was added to the EPA’s Superfund program in 2014. Unimatic ran a metals-molding facility on the 1-acre property from 1955 to 2001 and operated machines that used lubricating oil containing cancer-causing PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls.

“EPA’s plan will protect residents from the PCB contamination at the site over the long term by removing contaminated sediment and restoring wetlands while monitoring and controlling area groundwater,” EPA Regional Administrator Pete Lopez said in a statement.

The first part of the cleanup plan, which was finalized in 2016, will be to raze a contaminated building on Sherwood Lane and remove contaminated soil to an “off-site facility,” the statement said.

The building will need to be razed carefully so harmful particles are not released into the air. The site is about 800 feet from residential subdivisions.

PCBs cause such serious health problems that the product was banned in 1979, though companies still were allowed to use PCB-laden products made before the ban. Exposure to the chemicals can cause skin conditions such as acne and rashes, and PCBs are considered a likely human carcinogen. They can affect the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems.

Because they don’t break down easily, PCBs can travel long distances in the air and stick to soil and sediment in waterways. There is concern about the contamination leaving the site because a storm drain that collects most rainfall runoff from the property flows to an unnamed tributary and into Deepavaal Brook, which enters the Passaic near Willowbrook Mall.Get the Coronavirus Watch newsletter in your inbox.

Any areas of wetlands and vegetation disturbed by the cleanup will then be restored, the statement said. The EPA will also restrict the use of groundwater from the site and monitor it to prevent and reduce human exposure until the cleanup goals are met.

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