GEOLOGY WITH JEFF SIMPSON
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Going Beyond Recycling: Net-Zero Plastics (Article + Video - 2:32)

8/21/2022

 
Governments and corporate net-zero commitments are pushing the petrochemicals industry to cut its emissions by 2050. Despite facing a more complex decarbonization path than any other sector, petrochemicals players’ net-zero targets cover more of the global manufacturing capacity than other heavy emitters like steel and cement. Electrification and carbon capture and storage are likely to play a central role in reducing emissions from the production of high-value chemicals, or HVCs, which are key feedstocks used to make plastics and many manufactured goods. - BNEF

Kentucky eligible for nearly $75 million to clean up abandoned historic mines

2/12/2022

 
Historic abandoned mines litter the Appalachian landscape: unreclaimed high walls scar foothills and threaten landslides, toxic mine drainage leaches into local waterways and some underground mine shafts even catch fire and burn for years at a time. Now, Kentucky is eligible for an unprecedented investment in reclaiming and restoring those abandoned mine lands. With the passage of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act, U.S. communities will receive $11.3 billion over the next 15 years for reclamation & restoration of historic mines. - WFPL News
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US coal communities get historic $11B to clean up abandoned mines

2/10/2022

 
The transition to clean energy won’t be complete without cleaning up the messes left behind by dirty energy. The federal government took a new step toward that goal this week. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced the release of nearly $725 million in funding for cleaning up old coal-mining facilities. It’s the first tranche of a record $11.3 billion dedicated to coal cleanup in last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to be disbursed over the next 15 years. States and tribes with abandoned coal mines will be able to apply for a portion of the funding in the coming weeks. - Canary Media
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Harvard Study Links Fracking Air Pollution to Early Deaths Among Nearby Residents

1/30/2022

 
Western Pennsylvania residents and doctors have been going public for several years with their concerns that fracking for fossil gas has sickened people and may be causing rare cancers in children. Today, a new study out of Harvard links fracking with early deaths of senior citizens. Published in the peer reviewed scientific journal Nature Energy, the team of researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health blames a mix of airborne contaminants associated with what is known as unconventional oil and gas development. That is when companies use horizontal drilling and liquids under pressure to fracture underground rock to release the fossil fuels through a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The closer people 65 and older lived to wells, the greater their risk of premature mortality, the study found. Those senior citizens who lived closest to wells had an early death risk 2.5 percent higher than people who did not live close to the wells, the researchers found. - Inside Climate News
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This ‘Plastic Man’ Has a Cape and a Superhero’s Mission: Cleaning Up Senegal

1/20/2022

 
He can often be seen dancing through the streets dressed in a self-designed and ever-evolving costume made entirely of plastic, mostly bags collected from across the city. Pinned to his chest is a sign that reads NO PLASTIC BAGS. It’s a fight he takes very seriously. His costume is modeled after the “Kankurang” — an imposing traditional figure deeply rooted in Senegalese culture who stalks sacred forests and wears a shroud of woven grasses. The Kankurang is considered a protector against bad spirits, and in charge of teaching communal values. - NYTimes
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Coal Powered the Industrial Revolution. It Left Behind an ‘Absolutely Massive’ Environmental Catastrophe

1/3/2022

 
Along the winding, two lane road that leads to Tracy Neece’s mountain, there’s no hint of the huge scars in the hills beyond the oaks and the pines.  Green forests cover steep slopes on each side of the road, which turns from blacktop to dusty gravel. Modest homes are nestled into the bottomlands along a creek with gardens that grow corn and zucchini under a hot summer sun. The first sign of the devastation above is a glimpse of a treeless mesa, a landform more appropriate in the West. As Neece navigates his Ford F-150 pickup truck past an abandoned security booth, he drives into a barren expanse. The forest is gone, replaced by grasses. The tops and sides of entire mountains have been blasted away by dynamite. - Inside Climate News
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The Most Detailed Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution in the U.S.

11/2/2021

 
It’s not a secret that industrial facilities emit hazardous air pollution. A new ProPublica analysis shows for the first time just how much toxic air pollution they emit — and how much the chemicals they unleash could be elevating cancer risk in their communities. ProPublica’s analysis of five years of modeled EPA data identified more than 1,000 toxic hot spots across the country and found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable. The agency has long collected the information on which our analysis is based. Thousands of facilities nationwide that are considered large sources of toxic air pollution submit a report to the government each year on their chemical emissions. - ProPublica
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They pulled 63,000 lbs of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - just the start

10/29/2021

 
A fridge, toilet seats, and more than 63,000 pounds of trash. That's what a cleanup team recovered in a monthslong effort to chip away at the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive collection of marine debris plaguing the Pacific Ocean.  A half-mile long trash-trapping system named "Jenny" was sen  out in late July to collect waste, pulling out many items that came from humans like toothbrushes, VHS tapes, golf balls, shoes and fishing gear. Jenny made nine trash extractions over the 12-week cleanup phase, with one extraction netting nearly 20,000 pounds of debris by itself. The mountain of recovered waste arrived in British Columbia, Canada, this month, with much of it set to be recycled. - USA Today

Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics

9/22/2021

 
WHENEVER A PLASTIC bag or bottle degrades, it breaks into ever smaller pieces that work their way into nooks in the environment. When you wash synthetic fabrics, tiny plastic fibers break loose and flow out to sea. When you drive, plastic bits fly off your tires and brakes. That’s why literally everywhere scientists look, they’re finding microplastics—specks of synthetic material that measure less than 5 millimeters long. They’re on the most remote mountaintops and in the deepest oceans. They’re blowing vast distances in the wind to sully once pristine regions like the Arctic. In 11 protected areas in the western US, the equivalent of 120 million ground-up plastic bottles are falling out of the sky each year.  And now, microplastics are coming out of babies. In a pilot study published today, scientists describe sifting through infants’ dirty diapers and finding an average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) per gram of feces, 10 times the amount they found in adult feces. They even found it in newborns' first feces. PET is an extremely common polymer that’s known as polyester when it’s used in clothing, and it is also used to make plastic bottles. The finding comes a year after another team of researchers calculated that preparing hot formula in plastic bottles severely erodes the material, which could dose babies with several million microplastic particles a day, and perhaps nearly a billion a year.  - Wired

Russian Investigators Probe Big Black Sea Oil Spill

8/17/2021

 
Russia's top criminal investigation agency on Thursday probed an oil spill off the country's Black Sea coast that appeared hugely bigger than initially reported.  The spill occurred over the weekend at the oil terminal in Yuzhnaya Ozereyevka near the port of Novorossiysk that belongs to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which pumps crude from Kazakhstan. The oil spilled while being pumped into the Minerva Symphony tanker, which sails under the Greek flag. - Phys.Org
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She asked CNN where her recycling goes.  See what we discovered

8/17/2021

 
CNN found out why.  Lilly Geisler goes to a lot of trouble to recycle. So she left CNN a voicemail asking: How much of my recycling actually gets recycled? John Sutter travels to Muncie, Indiana, to find out. See more from our "Let's Talk About the Climate Apocalypse" series.  (A lot of your plastic isn't being recycled.)  - CNN

How Yellowcake Shaped the West

8/13/2021

 
The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water and people - High Country News

Right: Uranium processing mill at Monticello, Utah, owned by the government and operated for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission by the National Lead Company, Inc. This is the only government-owned uranium mill. c. 1957 - U.S. Department of Energy  

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We Could Convert Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells into Millions of Acres of Green Space

6/9/2021

 
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan proposes to spend $16 billion plugging old oil and gas wells and cleaning up abandoned mines. But there’s no authoritative measure of how many of these sites exist across the nation.  In a recent study, my colleagues and I sought to account for every oil and gas well site in the lower 48 states that was eligible for restoration—meaning that the well no longer was producing oil or gas, and there were no other active wells using that site. We found more than 430,000 old well sites, with associated infrastructure such as access roads, storage areas, and fluid tanks. They covered more than 2 million acres—an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. - Fast Company

20 Companies Are Behind 1/2 World's Single-Use Plastic Waste

5/19/2021

 
In 2019, more than 130 million metric tons of single-use plastics were thrown away, with most of that waste burned, buried in a landfill or dumped directly into the ocean or onto land. Now, a new report finds that just 20 companies account for more than half of all single-use plastic waste generated worldwide.  The report, published Tuesday by Australia's Minderoo Foundation, offers one of the fullest accountings, to date, of the companies behind the production of single-use plastics that researchers believe could account for as much as 10% of global greenhouse emissions by 2050. - NPR
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Only 3% of Earth’s Land Hasn’t Been Marred by Humans

4/28/2021

 
The vast majority of land on Earth — a staggering 97 percent — no longer qualifies as ecologically intact, according to a sweeping survey of Earth’s ecosystems. Over the last 500 years, too many species have been lost, or their numbers reduced, researchers report April 15 in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Of the few fully intact ecosystems, only about 11 percent fall within existing protected areas, the researchers found. Much of this pristine habitat exists in northern latitudes, in Canada’s boreal forests or Greenland’s tundra, which aren’t bursting with biodiversity. But chunks of the species-rich rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia also remain intact. - Science News
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How a Shocking Env disaster was Uncovered off the CA Coast After 70 Years

4/19/2021

 
Just 10 miles off the coast of Los Angeles lurks an environmental disaster over 70 years in the making, which few have ever heard about... until now.   Working with little more than rumors and a hunch, curiosity guided David Valentine 3,000 feet below the ocean's surface. A few hours of research time and an autonomous robotic submersible unearthed what had been hidden since the 1940s: countless barrels of toxic waste, laced with DDT, littering the ocean floor in between Long Beach and Catalina Island. - CBS
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The Coal Plant Next Door

3/22/2021

 
Near America’s largest coal-fired power plant, toxins are showing up in drinking water and people have fallen ill. Thousands of pages of internal documents show how one giant energy company plans to avoid the cleanup costs. - ProPublica
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Mountaintop Removal Threatens Traditional Blackfoot Territory

2/7/2021

 
The Rocky Mountains that lie within Blackfoot traditional territory are threatened with mountaintop removal. The Grassy Mountain coal project in Alberta, Canada, is slated to begin coal extraction in fall 2021. It is expected to be profitable for only 25 years. However, by then the almost 4,000-acre project will have blasted the terrain with explosives, separating the substrata from the coal and creating a new rock-scape the size of almost 3,000 American football fields.  Places where mountaintop coal removal occurs are never the same; just look at West Virginia, where mountain areas once rich with biodiverse forests have been reduced to barren desolation. And, as my grandmother taught me, disturbed areas are not places to practice Blackfoot traditional knowledge. - - High Country News Perspective
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Mountaintop removal mining in British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains.
BC Mining Information

Better Disposable Coffee Cups

1/11/2021

 
Sugar cane contains around 10% sugar and around 90% non-sugar, the material known as bagasse which remains once the cane has been pulverised and the sugar-bearing juice squeezed out of it. World production of cane sugar was 185m tonnes in 2017. That results in a lot of bagasse which at the moment is often burned. Often, it fuels local generators that power the mills, so it is not wasted, but Zhu Hongli, a mechanical engineer at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks it can be put to better use. As she and her colleagues describe, with a bit of tweaking bagasse makes an excellent—and biodegradable—replacement for the plastic used for disposable food containers such as coffee cups. - Forbes and Northeastern University
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A Recycling Plan to Clear Wind Turbine Blades From Graveyards

1/5/2021

 
It’s difficult to recycle a gigantic wind turbine. The blades are built to withstand extreme weather, from scorching desert heat to hurricane-like winds, and that means their life almost always ends in a landfill. In Europe alone, about 3,800 blades will be removed every year through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF, as the oldest turbines reach retirement age.  Now a Danish startup has found a way to crush these blades, turning an ultra-resistant mix of fiberglass and industrial glue into barriers designed to block noise from highways and factories. Copenhagen-based Miljoskarm can grind the blades into small pieces of 1 to 2 centimeters with the same type of machines used in auto junkyards. The material is then placed in recycled plastic cases that block noise at least at the same level as barriers made from aluminum and mineral wool, with less maintenance required. - Bloomberg Green
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    GeoNews

    This is a way to share science-based info from reliable sources. Click the source link after text to read more. Use this Google Doc or this Google Slides template to summarize an article. An occasional podcast featuring news and topic experts will be included.
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