Monday, 12 May 2003

Can You Recycle Me Now?

Cell phone users now have a way to recycle their old phones and support the Sierra Club in the process. About a million mobile phones are tossed out each week in the U.S. as consumers upgrade or switch to different phone service providers, and those old phones leak a bunch of toxic substances, including mercury, lead, and arsenic, into the environment. CollectiveGood, a recycling group, has teamed up with Staples, the office-supply chain, to set up bins in all Staples stores in the U.S., where people can drop off cell phones, pagers, and personal digital assistants (PalmPilots and the like) for reuse or recycling. About half of the phones are expected to be in good enough shape that they can be refurbished and put back into circulation; many will end up being sold at discounted prices in Latin America. If phones can't be put to good use, CollectiveGood will recycle them and properly dispose of toxic elements. The Sierra Club will get a portion of proceeds from sales of refurbished phones.

Canada-Do Spirit

Societies tend to measure progress in narrow economic terms -- gross domestic product, employment figures, trade deficits. Now an influential team in Canada is proposing that the country become the first in the world to measure its ecological health with the same care and precision. The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy today is releasing a government-commissioned report that calls for Canada to use six environmental indicators to assess its real wealth and the sustainability of its economy. Advocates of this approach point out that traditional measurements don't track whether a nation's natural resources, from forests to fisheries, are being depleted, and that environmental disasters are often classified as economic boosts. "You can have an oil spill that pollutes a huge area and wrecks the ecology, but the price of the cleanup is shown as a positive on GDP," said Stuart Smith, co-chair of the group that authored the report. The recommended indictors would measure air quality, fresh-water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and forest cover, among other things.

Down Under Water

The folks down under will have a lot to be down about if climate change proceeds as projected. Rising temperatures could trigger a 164 percent increase in heat-related deaths in Australia by 2050 and an increase of up to 240 percent in injuries and deaths caused by flooding by 2020, according to a study commissioned by the Australian government. Tropical diseases like malaria and dengue could also spread through the country. Worse off than the Aussies will be residents of Pacific Island nations, 60,000 to 90,000 of whom could be exposed to flooding each year by the 2050s, up from about 5,000 now. "This research strengthens the case for Australia and other countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible," said Tony McMichael of Australian National University, a lead author of the government report. Australia, like the U.S., has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

DNA-Ok

J. Craig Venter, leader of a team that successfully decoded the human genome, now has his sights set on reading the DNA of an entire ecosystem -- the Sargasso Sea, a warm swath of water in the Atlantic around the Bermuda Triangle. Working with teams he's assembled at private biotech institutes in Maryland, Venter believes his "shotgun" technique of DNA deciphering can be adapted to quickly read the genetic code of hundreds of thousands of microbes in a sampling of seawater. Even if the method is not successful at distinguishing all of the individual genomes in an ecosystem, it should still uncover whole groups of organisms and allow researchers to track genetic changes in an ecosystem. With a solid understanding of the species makeup of an ocean ecosystem, scientists may be able to spot population shifts that could be early indicators of pollution or other environmental problems. "I think it will become the No. 1 way that environments are monitored in the future," says Venter.

Dairy, Dairy, Quite Contrary

Two businessmen want to build a massive cow town in the Mojave Desert in Southern California, providing a home for 90,000 cattle and 600 dairy farmers and their families. Sounds like a recipe for environmental disaster, right? Maybe not: In this case, the plan is to make the development a model of eco-friendly large-scale farming. Methane would be extracted from cow droppings and used to fuel a power plant that would generate 50 megawatts of electricity -- enough to run the entire cow complex and a little extra that could be piped into the Southern California electrical grid. The dairy facilities would be designed with the environment in mind, up to and including solar panels on roofs. Enviros are skeptical, however, that such a huge farming operation could really be environmentally benign. Meanwhile, a number of troubling health problems have cropped up in people who live near factory farms around the U.S., seemingly caused by toxic gases, including hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, that are emitted by enormous cesspools of animal waste.