Mercury Converted to Its Most Toxic Form in Ocean Waters

University of Alberta-led research has confirmed that a relatively harmless inorganic form of mercury found worldwide in ocean water is transformed into a potent neurotoxin in the seawater itself.



After two years of testing water samples across the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found that relatively harmless inorganic mercury, released from human activities like industry and coal burning, undergoes a process called methylation and becomes deadly monomethylmercury.



Unlike inorganic mercury, monomethylmercury is bio-accumulative, meaning its toxic effects are amplified as it progresses through the food chain from small sea creatures to humans. The greatest exposure for humans to monomethylmercury is through seafood. The researchers believe the methylation process happens in oceans all over the world and that the conversion is carried out by microbial life forms in the ocean.



The research team, led by recent U of A biological sciences PhD graduate Igor Lehnherr, incubated seawater samples collected from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Lehnherr says conversion of inorganic mercury to monomethylmercury accounts for approximately 50 per cent of this neurotoxin present in polar marine waters and could account for a significant amount of the mercury found in Arctic marine organisms. The researchers say this is the first direct evidence that inorganic mercury is methylated in seawater.



The research was published earlier this month online in Nature Geoscience.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110427131935.htm

Don't be scared by Toxics this Halloween!

Halloween is only one week away. Get ready for the scary fun in your neighborhood but don't get scared by toxics in your costumes.




Three of our coalition partners have great tips on ways to make this Halloween safe for you and your whole family.

Check them out and share the info with friends and family!





CHEJ.org: PVC, the most toxic plastic for children’s health and the environment, has scared its way into some of our beloved children’s costumes. Even scarier is that many vinyl products are laden with harmful phthalates, endocrine disrupting chemicals banned in toys but widespread in many other vinyl products children come in contact with. Read more..



Mom'sRising.org: "In the grand scheme of holidays, Halloween can be costly, complicated, and not traditionally eco-friendly. Luckily, it is also incredibly, ridiculously easy to makeover. Costumes can be found, faces can be painted, and tricks and treats can be dispensed, all at a low-cost, in a green way. Here’s a Tips Tuesday breakdown on how to detox your Halloween: Read more..



HealthyChild.org: "Looking for ways to have a green & healthy Halloween? Just apply this equation: 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) + 3Gs (good for people, good for planet, good for community) = a green and healthy Halloween!Read more...



Have a HAPPY AND SAFER HALLOWEEN!



We believe everyone should be able to enjoy a safer Halloween this year and every year. ALL consumer products should be free from dangerous toxic chemicals, and we need to grow our community of people who are talking about it.



Please share this on Facebook and Twitter to help all

U.S. Adults Recognize Need to Recycle Car Batteries More Than Any Other Kind of E-Waste

90% of U.S. Adults Want Car Batteries Recycled in U.S.

Miami, FL, October 20, 2011—In conjunction with the opening of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Annual Conference in Miami, Florida, SLAB Watchdog released the results of its first national survey on the recycling habits and beliefs of U.S. adults.

The survey, which was conducted online on its behalf by Harris Interactive from October 10-12, 2011, surveyed 2,050 U.S. adults on their views and opinions on the recycling of car batteries and other electronic waste in the form of cell phones, televisions, and computers.

The survey showed that by a margin of three to one, American adults recognize the need to recycle a car battery more than any other form of e-waste. The survey also showed overwhelming strength for the idea that car batteries purchased for use in government vehicles with taxpayer money should be recycled domestically instead of sent to foreign recyclers. Some survey highlights: ·


Ninety-five percent believe recycling car batteries is an important way to protect the environment from potentially hazardous materials like lead and battery acid. ·

Eighty two percent agree the car battery recycling industry provides good jobs for American workers. · Ninety percent believe it makes more sense to recycle batteries domestically where stricter regulations better protect workers and the environment. ·

Ninety-three percent of U.S. adults believe car batteries purchased for use in government vehicles with taxpayer money should be recycled domestically instead of sent to foreign recyclers.

For the complete release please click on this link http://bit.ly/o960h4 or go to the News section of http://www.slabwatchdog.com/

Elouise Cobell dies at 65; Native American activist

Elouise Cobell was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating Native Americans in its management of Indian land, resulting in a record $3.4-billion settlement.




Elouise Cobell was the treasurer of the Blackfeet tribe who tenaciously pursued a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating Native Americans out of more than a century's worth of royalties. (Louis Sahagun / Los Angeles Times)



Elouise Cobell, the treasurer of the Blackfeet tribe who tenaciously pursued a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating Native Americans out of more than a century's worth of royalties, resulting in a record $3.4-billion settlement, has died. She was 65.



Cobell died Sunday at a hospital in Great Falls, Mont., of complications from cancer, her spokesman Bill McAllister announced.



Growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwest Montana, Cobell often heard her parents and neighbors wonder why they weren't being paid for allowing others to use their land, she later recalled.



When she took over as treasurer of the tribe in 1976 she found herself in charge of an accounting system "in total chaos," she told The Times in 2002.



As Cobell attempted to unravel the books, she could make neither "hide nor hair of the trust accounts," she later said, referring to trusts that had been set up as part of the 1887 Dawes Act.



The act tried to erode the tribal system by granting parcels of land to individual Native Americans, but not allowing them to control their new property. Instead, the land was placed in trust with the promise that owners would be paid royalties for oil and gas, grazing or recreational leases.



Yet the Indians received little or no payment, The Times reported in 2009.



Cobell approached the Boulder, Colo.-based Native American Rights Fund about filing a class-action lawsuit against the Interior and Treasury departments, and she was named as lead plaintiff when the suit was filed in 1996. The suit contended that the Dawes Act arrangement allowed U.S. officials to systematically steal and squander royalties intended for Native Americans.



"It's just such a wrong that if I didn't do something about it I'm as criminal as the government," Cobell told the Associated Press in 1999.



Just this June, a federal judge approved the $3.4-billion settlement, the largest payment Native Americans have ever received from the U.S. government.



It provides a $1,000 cash payment to every individual who has a trust account and $2 billion for the federal government to buy back the land parcels, The Times reported when the settlement was reached in 2009. Cobell was to receive $2 million, according to the AP.



In deciding whether to accept the settlement, Cobell said she had to weigh the possibility of winning a greater sum against a harsh reality. The plaintiffs had estimated they were owed as much as $47 billion.



"Time takes a toll, especially on elders living in abject poverty," Cobell said in a 2009 Times interview. "Many of them died as we continued to struggle to settle this suit. Many more would not survive long to see a financial gain, if we had not settled now."



One of eight children, she was born Elouise Pepion on Nov. 5, 1945, on the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, Mont. Her parents owned a 200-acre ranch.



After high school, she attended Great Falls Commercial College and Montana State University in Bozeman but had to leave school after two years to care for her dying mother.



In 1968, Cobell moved to Seattle and worked in the accounting department of a television station. She also met her future husband, Alvin Cobell, a fisherman and fellow member of the Blackfeet tribe.



When her father asked her to come home to help run the struggling family ranch, she returned to the reservation. She had missed the community and the land, Cobell later said.



"Once we got on that ranch, there was no going back," Cobell told the AP. "We just wanted to make sure we held on to our land."



In 1987 Cobell helped found Blackfeet National Bank, the first bank established by a Native American tribe on a reservation.



A decade later she received a $300,000 "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. Surprised by the windfall, she donated most of the money to the class-action suit's legal defense fund.



The cause also received a $4-million assist from businessman J. Patrick Lannan Jr. and his New Mexico-based Lannan Foundation.



"There was something about her that really impressed us," Lannan told The Times in 2002. "I guess it was her ability to describe what it's been like to be an Indian in this sort of thing."



In a 2000 tribal ritual, Cobell was declared a warrior of the Blackfeet Nation and presented with an eagle feather, an honor reserved in modern times almost exclusively for U.S. military veterans.



Cobell is survived by her husband, Alvin; son, Turk; brother Dale Pepion; sisters Julene Kennerly, Joy Ketah and Karen Powell; and two grandchildren.

Throwing trash all in one bin works in some cities

At a so-called dirty mixed-waste materials recovery facility, equipment and workers separate paper, glass, plastic, metal and other commodities so residents don't have to sort them into different bins.


It's called mixed waste processing, and it's an alternative way some cities have tried to increase recycling rates. (Ignácio Costa)


When South Pasadena homeowners recycle, it's as easy as throwing their tuna cans and soda bottles into the trash can along with their food scraps and meat wrappers. It's called mixed waste processing, and it's an alternative way some cities have tried to increase recycling rates.



In 2000, just 6% of South Pasadena's single-family residential waste was being recycled under a voluntary program that had residents sort recycling into a separate container. That percentage shot up to 25% in 2001 after the city decided to let waste and recycling go into one bin bound for a so-called dirty MRF, or mixed-waste materials recovery facility, where sorting equipment and trained workers separate paper, glass, plastic, metal and other commodities on the back end instead of the front.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why recycling in Los Angeles is so confusing

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"We didn't do well with the volunteer system. All the recyclables that went into the trash can were being missed," said South Pasadena public works assistant Diana Harder. "Now the recycling program is automatic. Residents don't have to worry about it."



Nor do they have to pay extra. Single-family households pay $36.49 monthly for the service, about the same as single-family residents in L.A.



The stakes have been high since 1990, when California instituted AB 939, a law that required municipalities to reduce the amount of waste taken to landfills by 25% by 1995 and 50% by 2000 or be fined $10,000 a day. Recycling wasn't mandated, but the law prompted cities to institute source-separation programs similar to the one in effect in L.A., where residents are provided separate bins for green waste, trash and recycling.



"We all started the same way with a two- or three-crate system for newspaper, glass and plastic food and beverage containers. That was it," said Dennis Chiappetta, executive vice president of Athens Services, a waste collection, recycling and disposal company based in the City of Industry that serves 19 cities, including Riverside, West Hollywood and South Pasadena. For all the work that residents did, less than 5% of residential waste was diverted from landfills in 1990, he said.



Now, about 40% of what's put in a mixed-waste bin is recycled, Chiappetta said. With yard clippings separated into a green waste bin, landfill diversion in the cities that Athens services rises to at least 50%, and sometimes almost 80%, he said.



CalRecycle, the state agency responsible for regulating disposal and recycling in California, does not keep track of how many cities process their recyclables as mixed waste. But cities of radically different demographic stripes, from West Covina to Beverly Hills, have adopted the approach.



The latter used to ask its residents to sort recyclables into separate bins, but it switched to mixed-waste processing in 2004. Just 13% of Beverly Hills' waste was recycled in 1995. Now the city has a recycling rate of 35% and an overall landfill diversion rate of 78%.



Still, not everyone agrees that mixed-waste processing is a better system. Critics say higher rates of contamination can decrease the value of the recycled materials. The L.A. Bureau of Sanitation prefers its blue-bin system because contaminated materials such as soiled paper cost more to manage, transport and ultimately deposit in a landfill, a spokesman said.



"It's something we grapple with," said Coby Skye, a civil engineer with the environmental programs division of the L.A. County Department of Public Works, which implements the county's recycling program. "It's a trade-off between contamination and participation. The benefit of having everything go in one bin is you have 100% participation whether people want to recycle or not, or whether they know what goes in the right bin or not."


http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-dirty-mrf-20110813,0,971510.story

Target commits to 100% sustainable, traceable fish by 2015

The second largest discount retailer in the U.S. announced Thursday that it will sell only sustainable, traceable fish by 2015. Minneapolis-based Target Corp. operates 1,762 stores, many of which are converting to incorporate PFresh markets that sell fresh and frozen foods, including fish.



In 2010, Target stopped selling farmed salmon, Chilean sea bass and orange roughy due to various sustainability issues. It currently sells 50 different brands of fish certified by either the Marine Stewardship Council or the Global Aquaculture Alliance.



"We thought this larger commitment to fully eliminate anything that's not certified by 2015 would be the right thing to do to encourage our guests to make the right decisions," said Shawn Gensch, vice president of marketing for Target's sustainability initiatives.



Target is partnering with the nonprofit marine conservation group FishWise to reach its sustainability goals. According to FishWise executive director Tobias Aguirre, the group will assess all Target seafood products with vendor surveys to understand how the seafood is caught or farmed and will evaluate the environmental impacts associated with each product.



Aguirre said the fish species with the largest such impacts include big eye tuna caught with 50-mile fishing lines that snag high levels of unintended catch, including sharks, turtles and sea birds, and farm-raised shrimp that may have contact with natural bodies of water and spread disease.



Tracing Target's fish from the water to the store is likely to be more difficult because "there is no national traceability policy and the seafood supply chains are incredibly complex," Aguirre said. Supplier audits and a tracking system are among the tools FishWise plans to implement in partnership with Target.



The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not currently have a seafood tracking database. Just 2% of the seafood eaten in the United States is inspected, according to a seafood fraud report issued earlier this year by the Washington, D.C.-based international ocean advocacy group, Oceana.



RELATED:



Fish often mislabeled as wild salmon or red snapper, report finds



Gov. Jerry Brown signs shark fin ban, sparks protest



Genetically engineered salmon must be labeled



-- Susan Carpenter

Mercury Converted to Its Most Toxic Form in Ocean Waters

University of Alberta-led research has confirmed that a relatively harmless inorganic form of mercury found worldwide in ocean water is transformed into a potent neurotoxin in the seawater itself.


---------------------------------------------------------------------




•After two years of testing water samples across the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found that relatively harmless inorganic mercury, released from human activities like industry and coal burning, undergoes a process called methylation and becomes deadly monomethylmercury.



Unlike inorganic mercury, monomethylmercury is bio-accumulative, meaning its toxic effects are amplified as it progresses through the food chain from small sea creatures to humans. The greatest exposure for humans to monomethylmercury is through seafood. The researchers believe the methylation process happens in oceans all over the world and that the conversion is carried out by microbial life forms in the ocean.



The research team, led by recent U of A biological sciences PhD graduate Igor Lehnherr, incubated seawater samples collected from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Lehnherr says conversion of inorganic mercury to monomethylmercury accounts for approximately 50 per cent of this neurotoxin present in polar marine waters and could account for a significant amount of the mercury found in Arctic marine organisms. The researchers say this is the first direct evidence that inorganic mercury is methylated in seawater.



The research was published earlier this month online in Nature Geoscience.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110427131935.htm

Baby Mia Baptism 10/8/2011 St Catherines, Laguna Beach CA

Baby Mia 2011 Baptism

Baby Mia 2011 Baptism

Hazardous

Hazardous waste is just that – hazardous. Many states require that this type of waste is processed and disposed properly. The hazardous waste that you generate is often distinguished as household hazardous waste, or HHW, because industrial hazardous waste is handled in a different manner. Many cities have HHW facilities where you can drop off and pick up safe materials so they don’t end up in the landfill.





Find your local disposal

solution for HHW







Does Gasoline Go Bad?

BARRY ASKED: I received a call from my friend who was cleaning out his garage and came across an old can that had gasoline in it that was likely several years old and spoiled if gasoline spoils. How does he properly dispose of the gasoline and what should he do with the container?



WE FOUND THE ANSWER: It’s true. Gasoline does have an expiration date. Most ethanol-blend fuels have a shelf life of about three months, so chances are that your friend’s gasoline is definitely unusable… in his car that is.



This is because ethanol is hygroscopic, meaning that it will absorb … read more

http://earth911.com/recycling/hazardous/

Take care for your cell phone health!

http://www.nocellphoneradiation.com/