Month: March 2023

Beyond Benign offers online professional development courses to middle and high school chemistry teachers

Beyond Benign is offering three online courses for middle and high school teachers this summer. Each course provides professional development points and graduate credits for continuing education for teachers. The courses are:

  • Sustainable Science: Contextualizing Chemistry Through Safer Hand-On Labs (Middle and high school teachers)
    Learn how to weave Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) sustainability content into your classrooms in this remote learning course for middle school and high school science teachers. Beyond Benign Lead Teacher Erin Mayer will teach this course through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning. Participants will leave with a toolkit of resources and access to a network of other like-minded educators in the region. ($150 to enroll* + $67 (optional) for 1 graduate credit from CSM — Free for teachers from NY, Oregon and Environmental Justice Communities)
  • Introducing Green Chemistry in the High School Classroom (High school teachers)
    In this course, Beyond Benign Certified Lead Teacher Cassidy Javner will help prepare you to integrate green chemistry principles and practices into your teaching through real-world sustainable inventions. You’ll also learn how to develop safer labs and lessons aligned to your local standards in an interactive online environment. This course features forum discussions, lesson plan development, and 4 synchronous zoom classes. Discussions will focus on how to prepare for effective remote learning in this time of an ever-changing educational landscape. ($475 to enroll + $149 (optional) for 3 grad credits from CSM. Free for teachers from NY, Oregon and Environmental Justice Communities; 1/2 off for Washington teachers)
  • Advanced Green Chemistry: Connections to Our World (High school teachers)
    Join Beyond Benign Certified Lead Teacher Annette Sebuyira as you expand your knowledge of green chemistry principles and practices by analyzing Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award technologies. In this course, you’ll dive into toxicology for chemistry basics and investigate the pedagogy for effective guidance of student-based research projects and inquiry-based projects. ($475 to enroll + $149 (optional) for 3 graduate credits from CSM. Free for teachers from NY, Oregon and Environmental Justice Communities; 1/2 off for Washington teachers)

Visit Beyond Benign’s website to learn more about professional development opportunities for teachers.

Despite national goals, agricultural greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked

Read the full story at Energy News Network.

While nationwide emissions from energy and other sectors have fallen in recent decades, those from agriculture — especially livestock and corn — have grown.

New Michigan scholarship seeks to fill jobs at state’s EV companies

Read the full story at Bridge Michigan.

Michigan expects about 3,000 new job openings related to electric vehicles this year, and it aspires to upwards of 290,000 more by 2030. 

To fill those jobs — particularly in electrical engineering and software — the state is now targeting college students with a new recruiting campaign and scholarship program.

The Michigander EV Scholars program, announced on Wednesday, offers up to $10,000 to 350 university students who can use the money toward tuition, but who also must commit to remaining in Michigan for 12 months with one of eight EV-related companies participating in the program. 

A new alliance for ‘high quality’ carbon removal highlights tensions within the industry

Read the full story at Grist.

The group will focus on permanent removal, distancing itself from “temporary” solutions and traditional offsets.

A ‘climate solution’ that spies worry could trigger war

Read the full story from the Washington Post.

Solar geoengineering holds promise for reducing global temperatures. Absent international agreements, it could also spark conflict.

‘This is not a one-off year’: U-M climate expert says more Michigan ice storms likely as warming trend continues

Read the full story from WWJ.

Winter in Southeast Michigan has been relatively quiet this year — until a historic ice storm pommeled the area and knocked out power to more than 600,000 homes and businesses.

Officials are calling it one of the worst winter storms to hit the area in over a decade, but is extreme weather becoming less of an anomaly and more of the norm?

Richard Rood, a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, says yes — and what we’re now is only likely to get worse.

To study human-wildlife encounters, scientists turn to Tik Tok

Read the full story at e360 Digest. The research paper is open access.

Herders on the Tibetan plateau are prone to seeing gray wolves, snow leopards, brown bears, and other wildlife, with the potential for conflict. Historically, it has been difficult to study these encounters, but the rise of smartphones has given researchers a valuable new tool — videos of wildlife taken by the herders themselves.

For a new study led by the Yale School of the Environment, scientists combed through social media videos of wildlife encounters in the Sanjiangyuan region of the Tibetan plateau. Researchers assembled 207 videos from TikTok and other platforms, including 49 videos of gray wolves, 93 of snow leopards, and 65 of brown bears.

Bottle bill or ‘recycling refund’ legislation? Advocates commit to 2023 policy push

Read the full story at Waste Dive.

More than a dozen organizations voiced support for passing container deposit laws in 2023 and changing some terminology to garner more support. Some MRF representatives are wary.

How much will we sacrifice for plastics?

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

A miracle material. A scourge on the earth. An unfortunate, but necessary, part of modern life. Whatever your perception of plastics, few materials evoke more collective ire. 

That vitriol and venom is usually directed at the downstream consequences: Dismal recycling rates; alarming pollution pileups in our lands and ocean; or the proliferation of microplastics — now so pervasive they can be found in human blood, lungs, breast milk and placenta. 

As it turns out, it’s rarely understood just how harmful downstream plastics are to our health (although mounting evidence and common sense leads me to believe eating a credit card’s worth of plastic every week can’t be good for us). 

What’s becoming evident is the often overlooked, underreported and devastating effects that plastics have on human health upstream. The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — which spilled and burned the carcinogen vinyl chloride, a critical ingredient for certain hard plastic resins — is a top-of-mind example. 

While the long-term health implications of this particular accident are concerning but unknown, one thing is clear: Many chemicals and manufacturing processes required to make plastics are toxic to life. 

EU urged to ban ‘carbon neutral’ claims for food and drink: ‘There’s no such thing as a CO2 neutral banana’

Read the full story at Food Navigator Europe.

The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) is calling for an ‘outright ban’ of carbon neutral claims for food and drink in Europe, claiming they confuse and mislead shoppers. FoodNavigator asks the Carbon Trust to weigh in.

Lawmakers press for answers on hazardous waste facilities involved in Norfolk Southern derailment cleanup

Read the full story at Waste Dive.

During a Thursday Senate committee hearing, lawmakers said they want timelines and locations for sites that are handling material from East Palestine, Ohio.

U.S. EPA Small Drinking Systems Webinar – Lead and Copper

Mar 28, 2023, 1 pm CST
Register here and view past webinars in the series.

A certificate of attendance will be offered for this webinar

EPA’s Lead Service Line Inventory Guidance — Kira Smith
This presentation will provide an overview of EPA’s Guidance for Developing and Maintaining a Service Line Inventory. The guidance was developed to assist water systems in developing and maintaining service line and to provide best practices for inventory development and communicating information to the public.

Corrosion Test Methods — Christina Devine
Bench top and pilot lead corrosion studies are gaining more interest, considering revisions and upcoming improvements to the Lead and Copper Rule. This presentation will review studies ranging from simpler month(s)- long bench-top dump-and-fill tests to more complicated year(s)-long intermittent flow pilot studies.

Green Chemistry Connections – Tools in Green Chemistry

In January, Beyond Benign hosted a webinar on tools in green chemistry. Speakers included:

Watch the recording on the Beyond Benign website.

How educator Annette Sebuyira is advancing green chemistry in New York

Read the full story at Beyond Benign.

Based in New York, Annette Sebuyira is a retired Guilderland High School chemistry teacher with over 30 years of experience. Annette is a Beyond Benign Certified Lead Teacher and is doing inspiring work to advance green chemistry education. Currently, she is involved in creating a green chemistry lab book for New York educators and is a co-facilitator of the New York State Master Teacher Green Chemistry Professional Learning Team.

In this Q&A, Annette shares more about the projects she’s working on, how she’s brought green chemistry into her classroom, and her hope for the future of green chemistry.

Multimillion-dollar project investigates potential CO2 storage at Heidelberg Materials’ cement plant in Mitchell, Indiana

Read the full story from the Prairie Research Institute.

With $8.9 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Carbon Transport and Storage CarbonSAFE Program, the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS), part of the Prairie Research Institute (PRI), is leading a two-year project to explore the feasibility of safely storing more than 50 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) over 30 years captured from the Heidelberg Materials cement plant in Mitchell, Indiana.

Heidelberg Material’s new Mitchell plant uses state-of-the-art technology to increase capacity, minimize energy consumption, and allow for the potential use of alternative fuels and raw materials to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This project will characterize rock strata more than a mile below the land surface to determine if the site is suitable to store more than 95 percent of CO2 emissions captured from the cement plant.

Cement production is a carbon-intensive process, so these systems could play an important role in the company’s ambitious goal of decarbonizing by 2050.