Volunteers collect garbage from the Nile in Egypt’s capital Cairo in a clean-up campaign, on March 7, 2020. Entrepreneurial young Egyptians are helping combat their country’s huge plastic waste problem by recycling junk-food wrappers, water bottles and similar garbage that usually ends up in landfills or the Nile. At aContinue Reading
Try going without plastics for a full day and see if you can do it. Chances are it might not be possible, should you choose to undertake such an odd endeavor — as one ambitious New York City man just tried to do (and lived to tell the tale). EvenContinue Reading
Staffing shortages and infighting among a dwindling number of decision-makers are hampering investigations of chemical fires, explosions and other petrochemical industry accidents in Louisiana and across the country, according to a new federal inspector’s report. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, commonly known as the CSB, has yetContinue Reading
Guns are the virus Again, we are faced with children and teachers dying in the assumed safety of their school. And, again, we hear the NRA and those with the most extreme interpretation of the Second Amendment say guns don’t kill. Please consider a pandemic analogy: A deadly virus entersContinue Reading
The way we think of fire informs how we manage it. For a long time, we considered it physics, but perhaps fire is a biological phenomenon, like a virus. What is fire? Usually, it’s defined as the physical chemistry of combustion. The definition matters because it prescribes howContinue Reading
The main entrance to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Mississippi Department of Corrections An investigation by NRDC and our partners at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reveals persistent and continuing drinking water and wastewater violations at the notorious Parchman prison in Mississippi. Individuals incarcerated at Parchman have longContinue Reading
An ongoing China-backed high-speed railway project in Indonesia has worsened air quality, clogged canals, and damaged homes of many people who live along the 89-mile stretch of the future line, residents told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. The Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail project’s cost has shot up as well –Continue Reading
Jin Haiyan probably was not trying to break any records at her job over the roughly four months starting in late September last year, but she somehow still managed to compose twice as many environmental impact assessment (EIA) reports as the next most productive EIA engineer in China. At leastContinue Reading
What could be more natural than the rain? Only farmers, drought-hit gardeners, and losing cricket teams truly welcome it, but we all know, even when soaked, that it is vital to life on Earth. So it was a shock to learn late last week that the soft, refreshing rain weContinue Reading
Feb 16, 2021 John Naylor eased his 16-foot fiberglass canoe into the Susquehanna River near a small archipelago of forested and ever-changing mudflat islands known as the Conejohela Flats, once the domain of Native Americans and still a vital stop for migrating shorebirds. It’s a placid and beautiful spot onContinue Reading
