Articles by Grist staff

Sludge Hammer

After highway infrastructure, the U.S. water and sewage system is the single biggest public works network in the country — and it is in trouble. Annual spending on the system falls tens of billions of dollars short of what is needed to maintain and expand it enough to keep up with population growth and stricter […]

Russian to the Brink

Russian environmentalists announced yesterday that they would take their government to court over its decision to accept spent nuclear waste from foreign countries for storage and reprocessing. The law allowing the country to import such waste was signed by President Vladimir Putin last summer. Proponents say it could generate up to $20 billion over 10 […]

Burning Desires

Concerned about air quality and human health, community delegates to a four-day meeting in Durban, South Africa, yesterday called on the governments of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland to ban all waste incinerators and tighten controls over medical waste disposal by 2006. The three governments haven’t yet responded to the call, although South Africa is […]

Sea Ya!

Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which used to be the world’s fourth-largest lake, has shrunk so dramatically that it has split into two separate bodies of water. The two rivers that feed it were diverted in the 1960s to water cotton fields; now just a trickle reaches the sea, and much of that is contaminated by […]