A single rifle shot last Tuesday morning signaled the end of a 15-year-old moratorium on bison hunting in Montana. The state legislature this year opened a three-month season on the animals, limiting the take to 50 lucky permit holders. More than six thousand applicants vied for the coveted permits, which were awarded via a lottery earlier in the year.
As part of the settlement of a class-action lawsuit, chemical maker DuPont is paying for a medical survey checking the health of as many as 60,000 residents of the Ohio River Valley near its Washington, West Virginia Teflon plant. Environmentalists are worried that workers and others nearby may have been exposed to unhealthy amounts of the chemical ammonium perfluorooctanoate, also known as C8, which the company uses in the production of its non-stick Teflon coating.
How can stop or at least curtail the amount of wasteful junk mail that still comes through my mail slot every single day?
Most of the carpet cleansers on store shelves today contain toxic ingredients such as petroleum solvents and glycol ethers that are effective on tough rug stains but harmful to both the environment and our health.
ARGONNE, ILLINOIS—The spinning drum didn’t look like much, but by sorting one form of scrap from another it was pointing the way to an important new frontier for recycling. Here on the grounds of the Argonne National Laboratories near Chicago, a pilot recycling plant is trying to convince cars to go the extra mile in donating their rusting carcasses to new products. The goal? The fully recycled automobile.
As originally hinted two months ago, Chinese government officials announced last week that the world’s most populous country will double its reliance on renewable energy sources by 2020. Currently China derives about 7 percent of its energy from renewable sources like hydro-electric, solar and wind power, but plans to derive 15 percent of its energy from these so-called alternatives within a decade and a half.
The National Biodiesel Board (NBB), a trade group representing the burgeoning American biodiesel industry, reported last week that production and consumption of biodiesel is expected to jump threefold this year in the U.S. The industry expects to churn out 75 million gallons of the alternative fuel in 2005, as compared to the 25 million gallons produced in 2004.
From 1979’s The China Syndrome to 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, numerous films with controversial environmental themes have enticed grown-ups to theatres over the past few decades. But the pickings are a little slimmer when it comes to green flicks for kids.
E Magazine does not as a rule cover conferences–our space is too precious to offer blow-by-blow accounts of speeches. But this newsletter allows us to bend the rules, and the Internet gives us breathing space to keep you informed at rather greater length than is possible on the printed page. So here are detailed reports from two important gatherings, one in the U.S. and the other from Rome, the eternal city.
In an effort to generate revenue to rein in the ballooning federal deficit, the House Resources Committee has approved a federal budget package calling for an end to a decade-old moratorium on the sale of public lands to mining companies. Committee Chair Dick Pombo said that the contentious provision would add $2.4 billion or more to federal coffers over five years.
