"Seventy miles off the coast of Louisiana, among a maze of drilling platforms and seafloor pipelines, thousands of 55-gallon drums containing hazardous industrial chemicals litter a vast, dark swath of the ocean floor. They’ve been sitting there for nearly 50 years."
The tale of a toxic wastewater pit menacing a Florida community is a story that could be told in communities around the nation. As the latest TipSheet warns, these waste sites can turn into ticking time bombs. But in reporting the story locally, the first thing to know is which of the many kinds of wastewater ponds to look for. Here’s a rundown.
"New research suggests that living near hazardous waste is, unsurprisingly, harmful to health and longevity. The study found a clear link between lower life expectancy and living near a waste site, with residents in poorer neighborhoods possibly losing as much as a year of life."
"Thousands of open-air waste pools near power plants, mines and industrial farms can pose safety dangers from poor management and, increasingly, the effects of climate change."
"For years, European countries have built “waste-to-energy” incinerators, saying new technology minimized pollution and boosted energy production. But with increasing concern about the plants’ CO2 emissions, the EU is now withdrawing support for these trash-burning facilities."
"A Trump-era methane rule that delayed plans to control potent greenhouse gases from landfills was thrown out Monday by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C."
"Manatee County in Florida was under a state of emergency over the weekend and more than 300 homes were ordered evacuated over a leak at a wastewater reservoir."
"The scavengers wait patiently for a dump truck to tip the trash on the summit of the landfill outside New Delhi. Armed with plastic bags, they plunge their bare hands into the garbage and start sorting it."
"New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas filed a lawsuit against the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission intended to block a project to build a temporary storage facility for high-level nuclear waste in southeast New Mexico.
The project was proposed by New Jersey-based Holtec International and would be designed to hold spent nuclear fuel rods from plants across the country temporarily while a permanent repository was designed and built.
"A mine tailings dam planned for a seismically unstable area of Sumatra’s rainforest would be at high risk of failure, experts warn. The dam’s collapse would be a disaster, they say, releasing a wall of slurry that would engulf and bury Indigenous villages and their inhabitants."
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