Pollution

"New research shows how toxic chemicals hitch a ride with seabirds flying from southern latitudes to the Arctic."

"When he was just 18 years old, Emmanuel Akatire traveled about 500 miles from his home in Zorko, Ghana, to Accra, the nation’s capital, to find the only work he could — sifting through vast piles of discarded electronics to find valuable scrap metal. A week’s worth of painstaking, often dangerous work, earns him the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars."

"Though utilities’ mission is to provide clean water, their trade groups for decades have often fiercely opposed initiatives to improve quality"

"The Supreme Court has its sights set on another bedrock environmental law, following recent efforts to take on Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act protections."

"Russ Lewis has picked up some strange things along the coast of Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state over the years: Hot Wheels bicycle helmets with feather tufts, life-size plastic turkey decoys made for hunters, colorful squirt guns." ... "These items aren’t like the used fishing gear and beer cans that Lewis also finds tossed overboard by fishers or partygoers. They’re the detritus of commercial shipping containers lost in the open ocean."

"On Sept. 13, Decatur, Illinois, city councilperson David Horn found out a monitoring well at a carbon capture and storage site in his community was leaking. He did not find out through an internal council meeting, nor an emergency phone call from the city manager or an alert from environmental regulators. He found out like most other people did, through an article in E&E News."

"The adoption of ship scrubbers—technology meant to clean up dirty fuel—has caused a surge in heavy metal pollution."

"The Biden administration this week restored Obama-era farmworker protections from pesticides that were rolled back under the Trump administration."

"In a novel lawsuit brought early last year, a trio of Louisiana challengers laid out a sweeping narrative that traced a direct line between the oppressive legacy of slavery and allegedly discriminatory air pollution exposure. But their bid to upend one parish’s land-use practices faltered when a federal judge threw out the suit eight months later on prosaic procedural grounds. Now, those plaintiffs are regrouping for a rematch before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals."