EPA

Elizabeth Grossman: Chronic polluters also put workers at risk

November 25, 2011

Elizabeth Grossman

Today’s guest post comes from Elizabeth Grossman, a gifted environmental journalist who is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, YaleEnvironment360, The Washington Post, The Nation and Grist. I met Lizzie this past fall at the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference; she’s been writing about science and the environment for more than a decade.

She reported this story by taking EPA data uncovered by the Center for Public Integrity, and checking it against publicly-available information from OSHA. Her story got my attention because it suggests (based on admittedly limited evidence) that companies that are careless or irresponsible about air pollution also have workplace-safety issues. I wasn’t surprised to see BP among them–my FORTUNE colleagues David Whitford and Peter Elkind did a great job dissecting its culture in BP: “An Accident Waiting to Happen.’  Seeing DuPont on the list did surprise me, since the company is known for its safety culture. This story first appeared at The Pump Handle, a website about public health and the environment.

We have learned from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request and released by the Center for Public Integrity earlier this month that there are currently about 465 United States industrial facilities on what the EPA calls its “watch list.” The list is made up of businesses EPA considers chronic violators of the Clean Air Act – but against which the agency has taken no formal enforcement action. An examination of these same companies’ occupational health and safety records reveals them also to be chronic violators of Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) standards.

These “watch list” facilities are located all over the country, but many are clustered in historical manufacturing hubs in the Midwest, Southeast, and along the Gulf Coast. Nearly all can be described as heavy industry. They include petroleum refineries and facilities making chemicals, cement, paper, paint, pharmaceuticals, and metal products, along with waste treatment (landfills, recycling, and incinerators) facilities, meat processing plants, mines, pipelines, a shipyard, and automotive plants. OSHA typically inspects about one percent of the United States’ 8 to 9 million workplaces annually, but more than 70 percent of the “watch list” companies have received OSHA inspections over the past ten years. Those without inspection records included US military facilities and mines that OSHA is not authorized to inspect, as well as a number of public facilities and utilities: municipal landfills, water treatment plants, and generating stations.

Overall, the OSHA inspection reports for the EPA “watch list” companies reveal what for many of these companies appears to be a history of chronic OSHA violations. Some of these companies had dozens of violations over the past ten years; a few had more than 100. (To round out the picture of these companies’ operations, I included both the specific “watch list” facilities and the individual companies’ comparable operations in other locations.) Among the companies with the most recorded OSHA violations at their various facilities around the country was BP Products, with more than 400 at facilities nationwide – violations that included 314 in one inspection record following the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers. (The Deepwater Horizon incident does not yet appear in BP’s OSHA inspection records.) International Paper was cited for more than 295 violations, while Republic Engineered Products (part of Republic Steel) had more than 170 violations, various divisions of DuPont nationwide received more than 130 citations for OSHA violations, and the Greif company, manufacturer of packaging materials, was cited for about 100 violations nationwide in the past decade. Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel exceeded 100 violations since 2001, and Weyerhaueser‘s various divisions around the country were cited for more than 300. [click to continue…]

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Climate policy: big ideas are dead

November 16, 2011

Right, left or center, most agree that U.S. climate and energy policy today is, at best, an ineffective and inefficient patchwork.

Better get used to it, said a bipartisan panel of Washington insiders today (Nov. 16) at the Atlantic Green Intelligence Forum.

For now, and for the rest of the Obama administration, when it comes to energy and climate, the White House and Congress will use the tools at hand, and not invent new ones.

“We all agree–big bills are dead,” said Carol Browner, the former White House climate czar and a Democrat.

“I never want to hear the word comprehensive again because once you hear the word comprehensive, you know a bill is never going to pass,” said James Connaughton, the former Bush II White House environmental adviser.

What this means, unfortunately, is that the U.S. won’t get an energy and climate policy that is sufficient to deal with the threat of global warming until 2013 at the earliest, even as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise rapidly. Just a week ago, the International Energy Agency warned that it will be impossible to hold global warming levels to safe levels without dramatic shifts towards low-carbon energy sources in the next few years. [click to continue…]

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Mike Bloomberg takes on coal

July 21, 2011

Sierra Club's Mike Brune, Rep. Jim Moran and Michael Bloomberg

In a gutsy move, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg today announced that his Bloomberg Philanthropies has pledged $50 million to the Sierra Club to fight coal plants.

He didn’t do it quietly, either. Bloomberg chartered a boat to take about 100 Sierra Club activists, friends, TV cameras and reporters out onto the Potomac River for a press conference in front of an Alexandria, Va., coal plant that environmentalist have been try shut, so far without success. Fittingly, he came to D.C. on a day when the heat was sweltering and authorities declared a “Code Orange,” an alert meaning that the air is too dirty for kids to play outside.

“The burning of coal does terrible harm to mothers, children and families across the country,” Bloomberg declared, calling coal a “self-inflicted public health risk.”

Bloomberg and Mike Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director, set an ambitious goal for the group’s “Beyond Coal” campaign: They want to shut down about one-third of the nation’s coal plants and replace them with clean energy as quickly as possible.

“If we succeed, and I believe we will,” Bloomberg said, “we will save millions of lives and we will help millions of children avoid asthma and its debilitating effects.”

For those who care about climate change, air pollution and public health, this is the best news out of Washington, D.C., in some time. It comes in stark contrast to the goings-on on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans are doing everything they can to tame the EPA. [click to continue…]

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WRI: Beyond the beltway, some bright spots

January 6, 2011

“It was a tough year for the environment, and a tough year for environmentalists, especially in the U.S.”

So said Jonathan Lash, the CEO of the World Resources Institute, one of Washington’s most respected environmental groups, as he began his annual look at the state of the environment in the new year.

2010 was indeed a dismal year–marked as it was by record warm temperatures, natural disasters linked to climate change, the BP Deepwater oil spill, the Massey mine disaster and, most importantly, the defeat of  climate-change legislation in Congress.

Given today’s political realities, it was hard for Lash to summon much optimism about 2011,  at least when it comes to U.S. policy. But he was able to identify pockets of progress in the business world and elsewhere–particularly in China–that could, over time, drive the decarbonization of the global economy required to curb climate change.

Policy will be needed–specifically a price on carbon, in some form–but if and when governments finally manage to peenalize companies for their emissions,  they will  set off “an avalanche, a shift that will go much faster than policy requires” as businesses compete in a low-carbon world.

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Colgate Wisp: What a waste!

November 8, 2010

Two steps forward, one step back…

While reporting a story on the garbage industry (coming soon), I’ve run across some encouraging statistics about waste. This EPA report [PDF, available for download]  is about a year old but it says that, following year after year of steady increases, total municipal solid waste generation dropped beginning in 2008 and per-capita waste generation has  been falling slightly since 2000. Why? Well, the economy is the big factor –when we buy less, we throw away less — but other explanations also come into play. We use less packaging than we used to. (See The evolution of laundry detergent). More people carry reusable grocery bags around. And, while I’m sad to see newspaper circulation  falling, but upshot is that fewer old papers end up in the trash.

Walmart shared some impressive data with me, too. By looking for ways to recycled materials that were once headed for landfills, the company redirected more than 64 percent of the solid waste generated by its facilities in the U.S. away from landfills between February 2009 and January 2010. The company is recycling lots of carbboard, plastic, even food waste.

And then I happened upon this:

It’s a disposable toothbrush made by Colgate.  According to Colgate’s Wisp website, Wisp is “a single-use mini toothbrush with a breath-freshening bead that allows you to have a clean fresh mouth anywhere, anytime — no water or rinsing required.” Why did Colgate create the Wisp? Because “it not only combines cleaning and freshening benefits. It’s portable and discreet.” Can I use it more than once? “No. Colgate Wisp is designed for single use. Keep in mind, each pack comes with four brushes, so you can freshen up multiple times during the day.”

Crazy, no? [click to continue…]

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What’s wrong with Obama’s green team?

October 9, 2009

It’s hard not to be impressed by the people working for the Obama administration on the environment. For the most part, they’re smart, well-intentioned, dedicated. Let’s hope they can deliver meaningful results soon on the issue that matters most: climate change.

Today, I’m at the Society of Environmental Journalists convention in Madison, Wisconsin. It has attracted a parade of administration officials: Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, marine biologist Jane Lubchenko, who leads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Nancy Sutley, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality; Gina McCarthy, an EPA administrator in charge of air quality, and others. Al Gore keynoted, and we heard from economists, scientists and a CEO or two during a very full day.

tom_vilsack_1218

The boss and Vilsack

The Obama people came to sell cap-and-trade, hard. One version of a carbon regulation bill has passed the House, another’s pending in the Senate and the UN meetings in Copenhagen where a global agreement is supposed to be negotiated to replace the Kyoto treaty is just two months away.

Chances are, though, that, the U.S. won’t have legislation by then, which will make it difficult to get a global accord.

That’s because, for all the brainpower and commitment of Obama’s green team, the president has made climate change, at best, his No. 4 priority, behind the economy, health care and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Republicans haven’t helped on the climate issue, either.

To be sure, Obama & Co. have spent a  fortune subsidizing clean energy through the economic stimulus bill. But that won’t be as much help as a cap-and-trade bill with strong targets. [click to continue…]

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