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Oil Spills Into Yellowstone River, Possibly Polluting Drinking Water

By Wendy Koch
National Geographic
Published January 20, 2015

 The scenic Yellowstone River has suffered its second sizable oil spill in four years, prompting truckloads of drinking water to be shipped into the eastern Montana city of Glendive. The latest spill is not expected to affect Yellowstone National Park, about 350 miles upstream.

Some oil from the weekend spill got into a water supply intake along the river that serves about 6,000 people in Glendive, according to preliminary tests at the city's water treatment plant. The sample showed elevated levels of volatile organic compounds, predominantly benzene, that would explain the odor in tap water, officials at the plant said. The potential health risks are uncertain until further testing is complete, they said.

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Humans are Nearly Halfway to Wrecking the Planet

Jan 17, 2015 08:20 AM ET
By Patrick J. Kiger      
 
Toxic algae blooms, such as this one in Lake Erie in 2014, are one sign that human’s are exceeding “planetary boundaries” that keep the Earth hospitable to life, according to a new study.
 
Humans are nearly halfway to damaging the environment so gravely that the Earth will cease to be a “safe operating space” for our species, reports a just-published article in the journal Science.

The paper, which is the work of an international team of 18 scientists headed by Will Steffen of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Australian National University in Canberra, reports that four of nine “planetary boundaries” have been crossed as the result of human activity, meaning that we’re in big trouble in those areas.

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Scientists: Great Lakes teeming with tiny plastic fibers


1/12/2015

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — Scientists who have reported that the Great Lakes are awash in tiny bits of plastic are raising new alarms about a little-noticed form of the debris turning up in sampling nets: synthetic fibers from garments, cleaning cloths and other consumer products.

They are known as "microfibers" — exceedingly fine filaments made of petroleum-based materials such as polyester and nylon that are woven together into fabrics.

"When we launder our clothes, some of the little microfibers will break off and go down the drain to the wastewater treatment facility and end up in our bodies of water," Sherri "Sam" Mason, a chemist with the State University of New York at Fredonia, said Friday.
 
The fibers are so minuscule that people typically don't realize their favorite pullover fleece can shed thousands of them with every washing, as the journal Environmental Science & Technology reported in 2011.

Report: Tests of ballast water treatment systems are flawed



01/15/2015

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — Government-sanctioned tests of equipment designed to cleanse ship ballast water of invasive species are seriously flawed because they don't determine whether the systems will remove microbes that cause gastrointestinal illnesses, scientists said Wednesday.
 
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Coast Guard have set limits on the number of live organisms ballast water can contain, based on standards proposed by an international agency in 2004. To comply, ship companies must install technology that kills enough creatures to meet the limits.
 
Laboratory testing of treatment systems has been conducted for 10 years. But a newly published paper in the Marine Pollution Bulletin contends the evaluations have a crucial defect: They don't adequately measure the systems' effectiveness against three disease-carrying microbes that the regulations target. One of them, E. coli, can indicate the presence of fecal sewage.
 
"This is a real problem," said Andrew Cohen of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions in Richmond, California, who wrote the paper with Fred Dobbs of Old Dominion University in Virginia. "We know there are serious pathogens in ballast water. There's good evidence that ballast water has moved them around the world and into U.S. waters."
 
The Coast Guard declined to comment and EPA had no immediate reaction to the report.
 

Veolia searches for profit from first-world waste


1/9/2015  

PARIS (Reuters) - French environmental services group Veolia plans to rummage through the rubbish for valuable raw materials to help offset stagnation in its water business, Chief Executive Antoine Frerot said.
 
Frerot ruled out acquisitions in the water business and said that water, waste and energy divisions -- which made up 45, 35 and 20 percent of 2014 revenue respectively -- will move towards one third each as technological breakthroughs in waste recovery and scarcity of commodities boost recycling worldwide.
 
He expects the global recycling market to grow 10-15 percent per year to 40 billion euros by 2020 from 25 billion today. Veolia's recycling turnover should more than double to about 5 billion euros by 2020.
 
Frerot sees huge potential in the waste flow from developed countries, where high-tech sorting and recycling technologies increasingly turn household and industrial detritus into a source of new commodities and energy.
 

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