Day: June 13, 2017

How CVS is cutting back on chemicals in cosmetics

Read the full story in GreenBiz.

As vice president of store brands and quality assurance at CVS Health, I spend a lot of time thinking about one big question: What do our customers want?

Every decision our team makes is driven by customer trends and insights, gleaned through research, external data and consumer testing. When it comes to our store brand beauty and personal care products, we’ve heard our customers loud and clear. They want products that work, with all the benefits they’re accustomed to, but with fewer ingredients of concern.

Last month we announced a major step forward with respect to “free-from” products: We will remove parabens, phthalates and the most prevalent formaldehyde donors (preservative ingredients that can release formaldehyde over time) across nearly 600 of our beauty and personal care products from our CVS Health, Beauty 360, Essence of Beauty and Blade store brands.

We will begin rolling out products that do not contain these ingredients to our stores in the coming months, and we plan to stop shipping products that don’t meet these standards to our distribution centers by the end of 2019.

We have been working on this important initiative for the last couple of years. We started with extensive customer research, including surveys, focus groups, analysis of social chatter, customer service channels and more.

Ph.D. student pioneers storytelling strategies for science communication

Read the full story from the University of California Berkeley.

Sara ElShafie used to struggle to explain her research to her family in a meaningful way. A UC Berkeley graduate student in integrative biology with an emphasis on how climate change affects animals over time, she says she “would always get lost in the details, and it was not doing justice to what is so amazing about natural history.”

But she doesn’t have that challenge anymore. Today, 28-year-old ElShafie is one of the few people in the country who focus on adapting storytelling strategies from the film industry to science communication. For the past year and a half, she has been leading workshops for scientists — primarily graduate students — on how to tell stories about their research that resonate with a broader audience.

State legislation aims to curb food waste

Read the full story from WXXI.

Bipartisan legislation under consideration in both the New York State Senate and Assembly would give grocery stores, restaurants, caterers, and other food industry companies an incentive to donate surplus food to local food banks or pantries through a  a tax credit.

County officials conducting health survey among neighbors of former battery-recycling plant

Read the full story in the Los Angeles Times.

Hundreds of Los Angeles County health officials and volunteers went door to door Saturday conducting health surveys of residents who live around a shuttered battery-recycling plant near downtown, which is blamed for decades of lead emissions spread across seven southeast communities.

‘We’re still on fast-track to trial’: Kids’ climate lawsuit against Trump administration stays alive

Read the full story in the Washington Post.

Late last week, a federal judge denied a Trump administration move to prevent a major climate change lawsuit from going to trial. The case, being brought by 21 young people against the federal government, is now closer to a full-fledged trial that will pit the Trump administration against children and young adults who insist the government is undermining their future through climate change inaction.

It’s a “very significant” decision, according to chief counsel for the plaintiffs, Julia Olson, executive director of advocacy group Our Children’s Trust. “This allows us to keep moving forward to trial.”

Demonstrations yield cleaner wastewater with energy benefits

Read the full story from the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center.

Two new clean water technologies under development by ISTC were demonstrated June 2 at the University of Illinois’ Swine Research Center.

How to Find Deleted Public Health Assessments for Contaminated Sites

Via The Memory Hole.

Click here to access the missing reports from prior to October 2004

UPDATE [June 8, 2017]: There’s a second source for these documents. Most of them exist in PDF format in the Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service website. (These PDFs were never posted to the ATSDR’s own site.) Go here, and in the left-hand column search for either “public health assessment” or “health consultation” (in quotation marks), followed by the city, state, or site that you’re interested in. Be sure to check the box that says: “Only documents with full text.” [Thanks to Susan Maret for pointing this out.]

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) – a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – conducts health assessments and consultations for contaminated Superfund sites designated as national priorities by the EPA or “when petitioned by concerned individuals.” As ATSDR explains: “The aim of these evaluations is to find out if people are being exposed to hazardous substances and, if so, whether that exposure is harmful and should be stopped or reduced.”

ATSDR posts these reports on its website here. But in January 2017 (the time Trump assumed office), it pulled down all assessments and consultations dating prior to October 1, 2004, in order to somehow “streamline” the site. Huh?

Those 1,200 deleted reports are still technically available but in a highly inconvenient way. ATSDR has made a list(which I’m mirroring here) of all reports that it deleted. When you want one, you must email them asking for a copy, which they will then mail to you on paper. So, instead of simply leaving these reports online so they’re instantly available in full, they delete them, give us a list, make us email them for what we want, then snailmail us print-outs. That’s “streamlining”?

But all those reports are still online. They were captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and you can browse them at the link at the top of the page. The link takes you to a December 2004 capture of the ATSDR site, so it almost exclusively contains the deleted pre-Oct2004 reports.

[Hat tip to Frank Vera for pointing out that the reports had been deleted.]

 

EPA Announces Student Award Winners

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced the winners of the 2016 President’s Environmental Youth Award (PEYA). The program recognizes outstanding environmental stewardship projects by K-12 youth. These students demonstrate the initiative, creativity, and applied problem-solving skills needed to tackle environmental problems and find sustainable solutions.

Fifteen projects are being recognized this year, from 13 states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Nebraska, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.

“Today, we are pleased to honor these impressive young leaders, who demonstrate the impact that a few individuals can make to protect our environment,” said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. “These students are empowering their peers, educating their communities, and demonstrating the STEM skills needed for this country to thrive in the global economy.”

Each year the PEYA program honors environmental awareness projects developed by young individuals, school classes (kindergarten through high school), summer camps, public interest groups and youth organizations.

This year’s PEYA winners conducted a wide range of activities, such as:

  • developing a biodegradable plastic using local agricultural waste product;
  • designing an efficient, environmentally friendly mosquito trap using solar power and compost by-product;
  • saving approximately 2,000 tadpoles to raise adult frogs and toads;
  • implementing a hydroponics and aquaculture project in a high school;
  • repurposing over 25,000 books;
  • creating an environmental news YouTube channel;
  • organizing recycling programs to benefit disaster victims and underserved community members;
  • reclaiming and repurposing over 4,000 discarded pencils within their school;
  • promoting food waste reduction;
  • creating a small, portable tool to prevent air strikes of migratory birds;
  • engaging their community in a program to save a threatened bird, the Western Snowy Plover;
  • testing grey water to encourage water conservation;
  • promoting bee health;
  • uniting their schools to address local environmental issues.

The PEYA program promotes awareness of our nation’s natural resources and encourages positive community involvement. Since 1971, the President of the United States has joined with EPA to recognize young people for protecting our nation’s air, water, land and ecology. It is one of the most important ways EPA and the Administration demonstrate commitment to environmental stewardship efforts created and conducted by our nation’s youth.

For information on environmental education at EPA, visit:
https://www.epa.gov/education.

EPA Honors Winners of the 2017 Green Chemistry Challenge Awards

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is recognizing landmark green chemistry technologies developed by industrial pioneers and leading scientists that turn potential environmental issues into business opportunities, spurring innovation and economic development.

“We congratulate those who bring innovative solutions that will help solve problems and help American businesses,” said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. “These innovations encourage smart and safe practices, while cutting manufacturing costs and sparking investments. Ultimately, these manufacturing processes and products spur economic growth and are safer for health and the environment.”

The Green Chemistry Challenge Award winners will be honored on June 12 at a ceremony in Washington, DC. The winners and their innovative technologies are:

  • Professor Eric Schelter, University of Pennsylvania, for developing a simple, fast, and low-cost technology to help recycle mixtures of rare earth elements. Reducing the costs to recover these materials creates economic opportunity by turning a waste stream, currently only recycled at a rate of 1%, into a potential revenue stream. About 17,000 metric tons of rare earth oxides are used in the U.S. annually in materials such as wind turbines, catalysts, lighting phosphors, electric motors, batteries, cell phones, and many others. Mining, refining, and purification of rare earths are extraordinarily energy and waste intensive and carry a significant environmental burden.
  • Dow Chemical Company, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, in partnership with Papierfabrik August Koehler SE, Germany, for developing a thermal printing paper that eliminates the need for chemicals used to create an image, such as bisphenol A (BPA) or bisphenol S (BPS). Thermal paper is used broadly throughout the world for cash register receipts, tickets, tags, and labels. This technology reduces costs by creating records that do not fade, even under severe sunlight, allowing the original document to be preserved for long term storage. The paper is compatible with thermal printers currently in commercial use around the world.
  • Merck Research Laboratories, Rahway, New Jersey, for successfully applying green chemistry design principles to Letermovir, an antiviral drug candidate, that is currently in phase III clinical trials. The improvements to the way the drug is made, including use of a better chemical catalyst, increases the overall yield by more than 60%, reduces raw material costs by 93%, and reduces water usage by 90%.
  • Amgen Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, in partnership with Bachem, Switzerland, for improving the process used to manufacture the active ingredient in ParsabivTM, a drug for the treatment of secondary hyperparathyroidism in adult patients with chronic kidney disease. This improved peptide manufacturing process reduces chemical solvent use by 71%, manufacturing operating time by 56%, and manufacturing cost by 76%. These innovations could increase profits and eliminate 1,440 cubic meters of waste or more, including over 750 cubic meters of aqueous waste annually.
  • UniEnergy Technologies, LLC (UET), Mukilteo, Washington, in partnership with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), for an advanced vanadium redox flow battery, originally developed at the PNNL and commercialized by UET. The battery, when used by utility, commercial and industrial customers, allows cities and businesses more access to stored energy. It also lasts longer and works in a broad temperature range with one-fifth the footprint of previous flow battery technologies. The electrolyte is water-based and does not degrade, and the batteries are non-flammable and recyclable, thus helping meet the increasing demand of electrical energy storage in the electrical power market, from generation, transmission, and distribution to the end users of electricity.

During the 22 years of the program, EPA has received more than 1600 nominations and presented awards to 114 technologies that spur economic growth, reduce costs, and decrease waste. The agency estimates winning technologies are responsible for annually reducing the use or generation of more than 826 million pounds of hazardous chemicals, saving 21 billion gallons of water, and eliminating 7.8 billion pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent releases to air.

An independent panel of technical experts convened by the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute formally judged the 2017 submissions from among scores of nominated technologies and made recommendations to EPA for the 2017 winners. The 2017 awards event will be held in conjunction with the 21st Annual Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference.

More information: www.epa.gov/greenchemistry

With Trump, A Full-Scale Assault on Protections for U.S. Public Lands

Read the full story at E360.

With a series of actions – including proposals to de-authorize recently created national monuments and open environmentally sensitive lands to fossil-fuel development – the Trump administration is moving to overturn long-standing U.S. policies on protecting the nation’s public lands.