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Umbra on flushing medications

Dear Umbra, I work with a number of older women who try to be environmentally conscientious. When it comes to discarding outdated medications though, there seems to be conflicting advice. Medical doctors tell me that all such medicines should be flushed down the toilet. Water resource people say, don’t flush, because all those discarded medicines […]

Umbra on chlorinated swimming pools

Umbra, I recently managed to mangle my knee and am going through all the 4,673 steps necessary to unmangle it and make it happy and functional again. One of the things my doctor advised me to do was swim. Well, swimming pools are of course full of chlorine! Hey, I just bought an expensive filter […]

The Name of the Haze

The U.S. National Weather Service has long maintained the tradition of giving names to hurricanes, but in Toronto, the environmental organization Greenpeace is taking matters one step further by naming excessively smoggy days after national politicians. The program is designed to call attention to the failure of the Canadian government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol […]

The Sludge Report

From the department of You’ve Got To Be Kidding: An internal U.S. EPA document alleges that the 200,000 tons of toxic sludge dumped by the Army Corps of Engineers into the Potomac River every year is actually good for fish, because it forces them to flee the polluted area — and escape from anglers in […]

Take It Off. Take It All Off.

Writing about the undoing of Mutha Earth is a barrel of laughs, but even Grist staffers sometimes need a break. We’ll be taking a vacation over the next two weeks. We know you’ll miss your daily fix of green news, but fret not — we’ll be back at work on July 8, in better humor […]

The Song Doesn’t Remain the Same

Whales are the largest animals on Earth, not to mention among the most famous crooners — but scientists fear that whale songs will soon become as obscure as 12th century lute music. According to new research, whale sounds might be no match for ambient underwater noise from commercial shipping, military sonar, and seismic surveys. That […]

Going, Going …

Yeah, you’ve probably heard it before: We’re in the middle of a massive extinction era on a par with the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago — only this one is our own doing. By the middle of this century, human activities will have erased up to 30 percent of all […]

Small Wonder

In other news from the Golden State, California could soon have the world’s toughest standards for emissions of microscopic pollutants. Regulations currently being considered by the state Air Resources Board target pollutants composed of particles of dust and soot that are smaller than 10 microns in diameter, or about one-seventh the diameter of a human […]

Downwind for the Count

Thousands of “downwinders” — people living in the path of radiation releases from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation — scored a legal victory yesterday when a federal appeals court ordered a lower court to reconsider two lawsuits against five former Hanford contractors. From 1944 to 1989, Hanford produced most of the nation’s plutonium for warheads; research […]

Dumbstruck

The sins of the fathers (etc.) shall be visited on the children — at least when the sins are environmental and the children are in China. A recent survey of more than 11,000 schoolchildren in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen found that nearly two-thirds suffered from lead poisoning. Such poisoning, when untreated, can cause […]