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Tainted Earth
Smelting is an industrial process involving the extraction of metal from ore. During this process, impurities in ore-including arsenic, lead, and cadmium-may be released from smoke stacks, contaminating air, water, and soil with toxic-heavy metals.
The problem of public health harm from smelter emissions received little official attention for much for the twentieth century. Though people living near smelters periodically complained that their health was impaired by both sulfur dioxide and heavy metals, for much of the century there was strong deference to industry claims that smelter operations were a nuisance and not a serious threat to health. It was only when the majority of children living near the El Paso, Texas, smelter were discovered to be lead-exposed in the early 1970s that systematic, independent investigation of exposure to heavy metals in smelting communities began. Following El Paso, an even more serious led poisoning epidemic was discovered around the Bunker Hill smelter in northern Idaho. In Tacoma, Washington, a copper smelter exposed children to arsenic-a carcinogenic threat.
Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research,Tainted Earthtraces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. Marianne Sullivan documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters as well as the long road to protecting public health and the environment. Placing the environmental and public health aspects of smelting in historical context, the book connects local incidents to national stories on the regulation of airborne toxic metals.
The nonferrous smelting industry has left a toxic legacy in the United States and around the world. Unless these toxic metals are cleaned up, they will persist in the environment and may sicken people-children in particular-for generations to come. The twentieth-century struggle to control smelter pollution shares many similarities with public health battles with such industries as tobacco and asbestos where industry supported science created doubt about harm, and reluctant government regulators did not take decisive action to protect the public's health.
eBook
I love our air
\"Find out what air is, why it's important, and how people can protect it\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Designing a circular carbon and plastics economy for a sustainable future
The linear production and consumption of plastics today is unsustainable. It creates large amounts of unnecessary and mismanaged waste, pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, undermining global climate targets and the Sustainable Development Goals. This Perspective provides an integrated technological, economic and legal view on how to deliver a circular carbon and plastics economy that minimizes carbon dioxide emissions. Different pathways that maximize recirculation of carbon (dioxide) between plastics waste and feedstocks are outlined, including mechanical, chemical and biological recycling, and those involving the use of biomass and carbon dioxide. Four future scenarios are described, only one of which achieves sufficient greenhouse gas savings in line with global climate targets. Such a bold system change requires 50% reduction in future plastic demand, complete phase-out of fossil-derived plastics, 95% recycling rates of retrievable plastics and use of renewable energy. It is hard to overstate the challenge of achieving this goal. We therefore present a roadmap outlining the scale and timing of the economic and legal interventions that could possibly support this. Assessing the service lifespan and recoverability of plastic products, along with considerations of sufficiency and smart design, can moreover provide design principles to guide future manufacturing, use and disposal of plastics.
Four future greenhouse gas emission scenarios for the global plastics system are investigated, with the lead scenario achieving net-zero emissions, and a series of technical, legal and economic interventions recommended.
Journal Article
Environmental decentralization, environmental protection investment, and green technology innovation
The reform of environmental management systems is key to improving environmental pollution treatment and green technology innovation. Based on panel data on 30 provincial administrative regions in China for 2008 to 2016, this paper analyzes the impacts of environmental decentralization and environmental protection investment on green technology innovation. It is first found that environmental decentralization promotes green technology innovation after inhibition. Similar effects are found for environmental administrative decentralization, environmental monitoring decentralization, and environmental supervision decentralization. Second, in the long run, environmental decentralization in developed and low-emission regions is more conducive to green technology innovation. Third, environmental pollution treatment investment has a significant inhibiting effect on green technology innovation under high levels of environmental decentralization, and the inhibiting effects of industrial pollution source treatment investment and “three simultaneous” construction project investments are particularly obvious. This paper explores green technology innovation as the goal of environmental decentralization, which is the driving force behind pollution control. From the perspective of environmental protection investment, the paper further analyzes the impact of environmental decentralization on green technology innovation. The study has important reference value for determining reasonable levels of environmental decentralization among different levels of governance and in formulating differentiated strategies of environmental decentralization.
Journal Article
The impact of local government debt on urban environmental pollution and its mechanism: Evidence from China
As an important financial means for governments to improve the quality of economic development, government debt greatly affects the quality of local environmental governance. Based on a theoretical mechanism analysis that uses the pollutant emissions panel data and new caliber urban investment bond data of 273 cities in China, this paper empirically tests the impact of local government debt on urban emission reduction and the mechanism that drives this impact. We find that local government debt significantly promotes urban emissions reduction, and as urban pollution becomes more aggravated, this promoting effect has a dynamic path, first strengthening and then weakening. The role of local government debt in promoting urban emission reduction is characterized by both temporal and spatial heterogeneity. A mechanistic analysis shows that local government debt can promote urban emission reduction by promoting urban environmental innovation, with green invention patents demonstrating a stronger intermediary role than green utility model patents.
Journal Article
Visit sunny Chernobyl : and other adventures in the world's most polluted places
For most of us, traveling means visiting the most beautiful places on Earth--Paris, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. It's rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada's oil sand strip mines, or to seek out the Chinese city of Linfen, legendary as the most polluted in the world. But in \"Visit Sunny Chernobyl,\" Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth. From the hidden bars and convenience stores of a radioactive wilderness to the sacred but reeking waters of India, \"Visit Sunny Chernobyl \"fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it's time to start appreciating our planet as it is--not as we wish it would be. Irreverent and reflective, the book is a love letter to our biosphere's most tainted, most degraded ecosystems, and a measured consideration of what they mean for us. Equal parts travelogue, expose, environmental memoir, and faux guidebook, Blackwell careens through a rogue's gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer--and approaches a deeper understanding of what's really happening to our planet in the process.
Book
The invisible hand and EKC hypothesis: what are the drivers of environmental degradation and pollution in Africa?
This study examined the drivers of environmental degradation and pollution in 17 countries in Africa from 1971 to 2013. The empirical study was analyzed with Westerlund error-correction model and panel cointegration tests with 1000 bootstrapping samples, U-shape test, fixed and random effect estimators, and panel causality test. The investigation of the nexus between environmental pollution economic growth in Africa confirms the validity of the EKC hypothesis in Africa at a turning point of US$ 5702 GDP per capita. However, the nexus between environmental degradation and economic growth reveals a U shape at a lower bound GDP of US$ 101/capita and upper bound GDP of US$ 8050/capita, at a turning point of US$ 7958 GDP per capita, confirming the scale effect hypothesis. The empirical findings revealed that energy consumption, food production, economic growth, permanent crop, agricultural land, birth rate, and fertility rate play a major role in environmental degradation and pollution in Africa, thus supporting the global indicators for achieving the sustainable development goals by 2030.
Journal Article