Chemicals

Honolulu's Board of Water Supply (BWS) shut down the Halawa Shaft, Oahu's largest water source, on Thursday after the Navy said it found "a likely source of the contamination," the Navy said in a virtual town hall meeting."

"Janis Elliott started testing the private well water that comes out of the faucets in her home for nitrates after she attended an environmental meeting more than five years ago. Elliott lives in the small unincorporated town of Avon, Iowa not too far south of Des Moines."

"America needs to rethink and reduce the way it generates plastics because so much of the material is littering the oceans and other waters, the National Academy of Sciences says in a new report."

"Dangerous mining conditions plague Congo, home to the world’s largest supply of cobalt, a key ingredient in electric cars. A leadership battle threatens reforms."

"Key players in the long-dormant effort to make companies pay for toxic site cleanups notched a big win in the recently enacted infrastructure bill. Now, they’re hoping for a similar payoff in the massive reconciliation package."

"Billions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardous".

"The EPA can shield some records regarding a former official’s role in pesticide policymaking from a conservation group, a divided Second Circuit ruled Monday. Messages between staff about how the agency should communicate its policies are protected by the deliberative process privilege, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit."

"The Biden administration’s oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico last week doesn’t just lock in decades of future drilling and greenhouse gas emissions, it also opens up more extraction in an area where chemical companies dumped tons of hazardous industrial waste."

"A smelting company has poisoned rivers, killed off boreal forest and belched out more sulfur dioxide than active volcanoes. Now it wants to produce more metal for the “green economy.”"