Electric school buses are starting to appear in central Illinois, and more are on the way thanks to a $1 billion federal grant.
Producing zero emissions, the buses are a great choice for the environment and the health of children, but critics worry that the technology and infrastructure are not ready for electric to be adopted in a big way.
Administrators at a school district in Peoria County learned pretty quickly that electric has limitations. Hollis Consolidated School District got a brand-new electric school bus in 2020 with money from the settlement of the Edwards coal plant lawsuit. While the bus works great for the district’s daily 30-mile route, it left a group of children stranded during a field trip to Tanners Orchard in 2021.
3M has agreed to widespread water testing and treatment for people living near its Cordova, Ill., factory after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that contamination from PFAS has created “an imminent and substantial endangerment” of drinking water supplies.
The requirement, part of an EPA administrative order, comes as the agency is accelerating its response to these substances, collectively known as PFAS. This move towards regulation and a bevy of lawsuits based on the health effects of these chemicals present a mounting cost for Minnesota-based 3M, which developed the compounds and uses them in products like the water and stain protector Scotchgard.
Read the full story from the Illinois State Water Survey.
Evan Rea, head of the Health and Environmental Applications Laboratory (HEAL) at the Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I), was recently awarded a grant by the U of I Chancellor’s Office to sample private wells in the Chicago metro area. The Chancellor’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program provides $2 million annually to U of I researchers to support projects that address systematic racism and social justice, law enforcement and criminal justice reform, and disparities in health and health care.
Rea says that it is a great fit to look at the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic health disparities in private well water quality, as well as to promote good well stewardship for well owners in an underserved area.
On November 3, the 3M Company agreed to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) order to sample and provide treatment to address contamination from per- and polyfluoroakyl substances (PFAS) found in drinking water in the vicinity of 3M’s Cordova, IL facility. Recent sampling results provided by 3M indicate the widespread presence of a mixture of at least 19 different PFAS chemicals in drinking water within a 3-mile radius of the Cordova facility. Given the unique circumstances affecting this community, including more than five decades of PFAS discharges and the many types of PFAS chemicals found, EPA has concluded that the situation constitutes an imminent and substantial endangerment under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
“I have directed EPA staff to use every enforcement tool at our disposal to require manufacturers of PFAS to address potential endangerment to the public and to compel them to characterize, control, and clean up ongoing and past PFAS contamination. Communities have suffered far too long from exposure to these chemicals. This settlement is a critical step forward in our work to protect communities from pollution and hold polluters accountable for their actions.”
EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan
As part of this settlement, 3M is required to offer treatment to all private well owners within 3 miles of the facility and to the Camanche Water Supply in Iowa, in an effort to remove PFAS from the drinking water. 3M is also required to offer drinking water sampling out to 4 miles from the facility for private well owners and out to 10 miles from the facility for public water systems as well as to the Quad Cities’ public water systems, using EPA protocols and conducted under EPA oversight.
3M’s sampling of the drinking water in private wells near the facility detected a range of concentrations including: perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) of non-detect to 25 ppt, perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) of non-detect to 30 ppt, hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid (HFPO-DA), or “GenX” of non-detect to 59 ppt, and perfluorobutane sulfunate (PFBS) of non-detect to 51 ppt. 3M did not use EPA test methods for this sampling. As a result, the order issued today requires 3M to sample these wells again following EPA test methods.
3M was one of the original companies developing and producing PFAS within the United States, and their Cordova facility operations and discharges containing PFAS chemicals date back to the 1970s. 3M’s agreement to the terms of the Order including completing the work required under EPA’s oversight is an important step to begin addressing the problem created by decades of contamination. This settlement is part of EPA’s ongoing efforts to compel major PFAS manufacturers to characterize and control ongoing releases from their facilities.
Background
Last year, EPA launched the PFAS Strategic Roadmap, a whole-of-agency approach for addressing PFAS. The Roadmap sets timelines by which EPA plans to take specific actions and commit to new policies to safeguard public health, protect the environment, and hold polluters accountable. In the national PFAS Roadmap, EPA commits to investigate releases of PFAS and where needed require manufacturers to characterize and control their PFAS releases. In the Roadmap, EPA also commits to take swift action to address potential endangerments to public health. EPA is actively working with its state partners on this effort, which will build upon valuable work led by a number of states.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, collectively called “PFAS,” are a group of man-made chemicals that have been manufactured and used in industry and consumer products since the 1940s. There are thousands of different PFAS chemicals, some of which have been more widely used and studied than others.
In Illinois, a rural Black farming community shows that energy efficiency and electrification of appliances can lead to economic justice, without the need for more fossil fuel infrastructure. The program behind this success offers a template for other states to follow.
Even as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has stepped up enforcement of federal coal ash rules this year, the groups say more urgent action is necessary, including mandates that companies test all drinking water wells within a half-mile of coal ash impoundments, and that companies cease storing coal ash in contact with groundwater.
Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury and other toxins that have been linked to a range of health impacts. And drinking water wells near coal plants, unlike municipal water systems, do not typically undergo regular testing.
For six decades, a coal power plant near Peoria, Illinois, belched black soot into the air, polluting nearby neighborhoods and racking up thousands of air quality violations. Like other coal plants, it was also a major contributor to climate change. But the plant will close by the end of this year. By 2025, it will become a battery storage facility for renewable energy.
The same transition to clean energy is happening at coal plants across the country. In Illinois alone, 11 plants will close over the next three years and be converted to solar farms or battery storage. In Louisiana, where a coal plant closed last year, a new solar farm is planned that could power 45,000 homes. In Hawaii, where the last-ever shipment of coal arrived in July, a huge battery storage facility is now being built with Tesla Megapack batteries near a former coal plant. In Virginia, a former coal plant may be replaced by a hydrogen plant. In Massachusetts, coal plants near the coast will soon connect with offshore wind power. In Minnesota, a 3,500-acre solar farm will soon be built next to a coal plant that is being shut down in phases. Other projects are underway in multiple states.
Coal plants have been steadily closing over the last two decades, driven largely by economics (though in Illinois, the Peoria plant closed after a lawsuit over its air pollution). More than 350—more than half of all the plants—have retired since 2010, or have plans to shut down. When plants stop running, reusing them for renewable energy is an obvious choice, says Andy Knott, the central region director for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, which works with grassroots activists to push for the transition.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration must ramp up its distribution of free water filters to protect residents against lead poisoning as the city moves at a “glacial” pace to remove pipes with the brain-damaging metal, advocates said Monday.
Three environmental organizations and state Sen. Ram Villivalam, D-Chicago, called on City Hall to improve access to free water filters to address the “crisis” of lead exposure. That move should also be part of a larger program to warn low-income residents about the hazards of lead, especially among children.
Lightfoot has boasted that she’s the first Chicago mayor to begin tackling the problem of removing almost 400,000 lead service lines in the city but her administration has fallen behind its own modest goals of replacements.
The Campus Landscape Master Plan (CLMP) presents a shared vision for the overall campus landscape and provides specific design guidelines, tested through extensive public engagement and stakeholder input. The campus community desires a landscape that inspires, nurtures, restores and educates. They desire a multifunctional landscape that provides opportunities for collaboration, celebration and gathering; a landscape that clearly defines the University of Illinois brand and is accessible, safe, inviting and manageable; a landscape that respects origins and heritage, a landscape that will amplify the region’s biodiversity and assist in the University with achieving its Climate Leadership commitments. The CLMP outlines a vision to achieve a resilient, sustainable campus landscape. The realization of this vision will require a commitment towards phased investment year by year over the coming decades. By committing to a sustainable campus the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will embody resilience as a model landscape in the Midwest and a world-leader in campus native landscape expression and honoring rain water as a valued resource.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration is negotiating with President Joe Biden’s housing officials over potential city reforms after federal investigators accused Chicago of environmental racist zoning and land-use practices.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has held off on making an official declaration of next steps in an almost two-year civil rights investigation. The agency could force the city to make significant and permanent changes to its planning processes or risk losing millions in federal dollars.
In a bid to reduce the environmental burden associated with both the manufacturing and disposal of plastics, scientists have demonstrated a new upcycling technique that turns one common form of it into another. The team says they also have the means to scale up and implement their technology, which they calculate could lead to massive reductions in global greenhouse emissions as a result.
As Chicagoans maneuver around torn-up streets and sidewalks while utility crews install new underground gas pipelines, City Hall announced a climate-fighting plan Thursday that envisions the end of fossil fuel hookups to homes and buildings.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration announced more than two dozen recommendations from outside advisers representing advocacy, business and labor interests to cut emissions from homes and buildings that add to the climate crisis.
Among the recommendations, Chicago would require new residential or commercial construction to be built without any gas or other fossil fuel-burning equipment, such as heating systems or appliances. A “fossil fuel mitigation fee” would be added to construction that chooses to use gas.
This Thanksgiving, your pumpkin pie might have a lower carbon footprint.
On the central Illinois farms that supply most of the world’s canned pumpkin, farmers are adopting regenerative techniques designed to reduce emissions, attract natural pollinators like bees and butterflies and improve the health of the soil.
The effort is backed by Libby’s, the 150-year-old canned food company, which processes 120,000 tons of pumpkins each year — or about 85% of the world’s total canned pumpkin — from these Illinois fields.
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