"The Chesapeake Bay does not like your lawn. That green grass is probably coated with pesticides and fertilizers and studded with pet poop. All that washes off in the rain and causes environmental problems downstream in the Chesapeake."
EPA in-house tool may be released to public within months. It will give reporters themselves the ability to estimate the cumulative impacts of pollution on water bodies.
myRTK lets you thumb in an address or ZIP code and get back a map or list of Toxics Release Inventory facilities on your feature phone or smart phone.
This new tool allows any user online to create custom study areas based on a wide range of variables: address, ZIP code, county, city, township, facility, watershed, or geographic coordinates. Other environmental data can then be mapped onto that study area.
The beta tool allows anyone to compare TRI information from a facility to air pollution data from the same facility or a related one. For example, an investigator could find inconsistencies in the amount of pollution reported by a facility under the two separate laws.
This newly powerful, easy-to-use mapping tool can help environmental journalists find and report great local and regional stories.
The new record for getting raw data reported by industry to the general public: 28 days. Nearly 95 percent of reporting companies filed their reports electronically.
"The coal industry, facing a host of new health and safety regulations, is spending millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign donations this year to influence the makeup of the next Congress in hopes of derailing what one industry official called an Obama administration 'regulatory jihad.'"
"Two chemical manufacturers are seeking an exemption from new rules in Wyoming that require public disclosure of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, a controversial natural gas drilling process suspected of polluting groundwater."
"The Canadian government [Tuesday] turned down a proposal for a gold-copper mine in central British Columbia due to environmental concerns, while authorizing a second gold-copper mine on B.C.'s northwest coast to proceed."
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