More bad news for Nalgene

Byoliveridley

Nalgene, and other so called safe hard plastics made from polycarbonates. Read here for background and all previous Bisphenol A postings.

PLoS Genetics – Bisphenol A Exposure In Utero Disrupts Early Oogenesis in the Mouse

In the course of studies to assess the effects of BPA on the mouse oocyte, we have uncovered a novel “grandmaternal” effect: exposure to BPA during pregnancy disturbs oocyte development in unborn female fetuses. When these fetuses reach adulthood, the perturbations are translated into an increase in chromosomally abnormal eggs and embryos. Thus, low-dose BPA exposure during pregnancy has multigenerational consequences; it increases the likelihood of chromosomally abnormal grandchildren. Our studies also provide mechanistic insight, and, surprisingly, suggest that BPA acts in the fetal ovary not by mimicking the actions of estrogen but by interfering with the function of one of the known estrogen receptors. Thus, our data suggest that estrogen plays a far earlier role in oocyte development than previously suspected and, importantly, raise the possibility that a variety of substances—both synthetic and naturally occurring—that mimic the actions of estrogen or act as estrogen antagonists may affect early oocyte development.

Once again, caution is involved in the interpretation of the results, mice are more sensitive than humans to environmental exposures. The heartening part of this, and other recent studies is that work is now being carried out at doses that are more representative of ambient exposures, making results much more relevant. The part in bold is equally interesting. Estrogen is a very powerful hormone that has so many unknown effects on the body (and the mind, presumably :-;)

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    Melamine Adulteration investigation gets cracking

    Byoliveridley

    FDA agents raid pet food plant, offices – Yahoo! News

    WASHINGTON – Federal agents searched facilities of a dog and cat food manufacturer and one of its suppliers as part of an investigation into the widening recall of pet products, the companies disclosed Friday. Food and Drug Administration officials searched an Emporia, Kan., pet food plant operated by Menu Foods and the Las Vegas offices of ChemNutra Inc., according to the companies. Menu Foods made many of the more than 100 brands of pet food recalled since March 16 because of contamination by the chemical melamine. ChemNutra supplied the manufacturer with wheat gluten, one of the two ingredients tainted by melamine used in recalled pet products. Both companies said they were cooperating with the investigation.

    The initial “let’s blame China for everything” drumbeat is subsiding a little as the FDA finally begins its inspections, and we find the tangled web of the food import business unraveling just a little bit. At this point in time, the charges are flying like crazy.

    The origin within China of the wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate remains murky. For example, ChemNutra’s source for the twovegetable proteins, Suzhou Textile Import and Export Co., told The AP that food ingredients aren’t part of its business — but that employees often take on side deals. Stern said ChemNutra dealt with the company’s president.

    Side deals? How quaint? The solution is simple: Quarantine every food item from China until it has been tested for melamine. You do not know the extent of the problem yet. It only seems to get worse everyday. Make the manufacturers pay for the testing.  Tighten up the paperwork, exercise tighter control over where the ingredients come from, get everything in writing.

    Meanwhile, the manufacturers are getting their press releases out. From Blue Buffalo foods…

    We at the Blue Buffalo Company have just learned that American Nutrition Inc. (ANI), the manufacturer of all our cans and biscuits, has been adding rice protein concentrate to our can formulas without our knowledge and without our approval. This is product tampering, and it apparently has been going on for some time. The can formulas that we developed, and trusted them to produce, never contained any rice protein concentrate. It appears that only an FDA investigation of ANI’s rice protein concentrate supplies forced them to reveal this product tampering to us.

    While this activity by ANI is in itself unlawful, the situation is further clouded by the fact that ANI has been receiving rice protein concentrate from Wilber-Ellis, some of which the FDA has determined to be contaminated with melamine.

    If this is true (and we don’t know that for a fact), it’s plain ol’ cheating and food adulteration. What does American Nutrition have to say?

    The FDA has urged American Nutrition to issue a voluntary recall of pet foods manufactured using Wilbur-Ellis rice protein. None of these products is sold under an American Nutrition brand, but are sold through other independent companies. No American Nutrition brands or other products they manufacture for other businesses are affected by this recall.

    Why would I trust the word of anyone who’s accused of adding ingredients off the label? This story gets curiouser and curiouser, and it is pretty clear that between the “side dealers” in China and some greedy middlemen suppliers here, we have plenty of blame to go around.

    Stay tuned for more…

  • Recycling better than landfilling even to China

    Byoliveridley

    Sending old newspapers and plastic bottles 10,000 miles for recycling in China produces more carbon savings than landfilling it in Britain and making new goods, reveals a study from the government body charged with reducing UK waste.In the last 10 years annual exports of paper, mainly to India, China and Indonesia, have risen from 470,000 tonnes to 4.7m tonnes, while exports of old plastic bottles have gone from under 40,000 tonnes to half a million tonnes.Now the counterintuitive conclusions of the report from the Waste Resources Action Programme (Wrap) suggest that the advantage of recycling over landfilling is so great that it makes environmental sense to ship waste right round the world if it can be used again.

    Waste Resources Action Programme reveals recycling in China saves carbon emissions | Environment | guardian.co.uk

    One of the issues with carbon footprint calculations like these is that they are very dependent on the assumptions made and the calculations used. So, without going through the study line by line, I don’t know if this is true or not, but it is good to know that sending recycling waste many thousands of miles at least does not result in increased resource use. However, the environmental justice implications are still weighted against the receiving country, especially in the recycling of toxic electronic waste. This particular study only dealt with plastic and paper, so the toxic implications were fewer.

    Of course, reducing the stuff you use and reusing your stuff always beats recycling, oh ye iphone lusters, let your old phone die first!

  • Nuclear Energy not Carbon Free?

    Byoliveridley

    Who would have thunk it, turns out that uranium mining and nuclear waste storage result in significant carbon emissions…
    New Debate Over Nuclear Option

    Now, some scientists and other experts are beginning to raise a different question about nuclear power: Is it really as clean as supporters contend? A report, released on Mar. 26 by a British nongovernmental organization called the Oxford Research Group, disputes the popular perception that nuclear is a clean energy source. It argues that while nuclear plants may not generate carbon dioxide while they operate, the other steps necessary to produce nuclear power, including the mining of uranium and the storing of waste, result in substantial amounts of carbon dioxide pollution. “As this report shows, hopes for the climate-protecting potential of nuclear energy are entirely misplaced,” says Jürgen Trittin, a former minister of the environment in Germany and a contributor to the report. “Nuclear power cannot be promoted on environmental grounds.”

    The report, called “Secure Energy? Civil Nuclear Power, Security and Global Warming,” examines a number of risks from nuclear power development, including concerns over the disposal of radioactive waste and the threats from terrorist groups. But its most novel component may be the quantitative examination of carbon emissions on a comprehensive basis. “Carbon emissions are a global problem and it’s time to look at the carbon released by nuclear power globally,” says Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, author of the report’s chapter on carbon emissions. “The assumption has long been that the [greenhouse] effect is zero, but the evidence shows otherwise.”

    carbonfacts_sm.jpg“Novel component”?, well, I would not go that far, it appears that the authors performed a carbon footprint analysis and concluded that the carbon footprint of nuclear fission energy production was somewhere between renewables and fossil fuel power generation, which is not entirely surprising. Coupled with all the other issues facing nuclear energy, and the obvious environmental justice issues that impact the siting of any new plant or waste repository, nuclear energy should not be a very serious option at all. Unfortunately, it’s a great boondongle for the developers of the plants because the subsidies and power pricing mechanisms ensure profits for the developer at the expense of the general public, and waste disposal issues can forever be postponed, eventually leaving governments (and tax payers) to pick up the tab.

    By the way, go read Jamais Cascio’s interesting post about the carbon footprint of a cheeseburger. The “nutrition like label” shown here is something I wish to see in almost every product used! It would make the regulation of carbon a lot less complicated. It appears that England will take the lead on this concept, see Carbon Labelling (yes, 2 L’s, the “correct” spelling!).

  • Big Wool and Fast Fashion

    Byoliveridley

    Cute sheep or not, factory farming is always impactful

     

    According to one analysis of wool production in Australia, by far the world’s top exporter, the wool required to make one knit sweater is responsible for 27 times more greenhouse gases than a comparable Australian cotton sweater, and requires 247 times more land.

    Source: Big Wool wants you to believe it’s nice to animals and the environment. It’s not.

    This is an interesting article in Vox on the outsized impacts of large-scale factory farming wool impacts. The article goes into further detail comparing wool to synthetics on impact (Both big, but different), and why plant-based alternatives like Tencel and Hemp and recycling have not taken off. It also discusses the increasing trend of wool blends.

    Widespread cheap synthetics have enabled fast fashion, making it possible for brands to produce stupefying volumes of disposable fabrics. These are now very commonly combined with wool to create hybrid garments. According to the Center for Biodiversity and Collective Fashion Justice’s recent analysis of 13 top clothing brands, more than half of wool items were blended with synthetics, giving them in-demand properties like machine washability

    Of course when you blend a wool and a synthetic, it is now landfill material. The issue with clothing (same as the issue with most scaled up factory production) is scale and economics. Fast fashion makes clothes that fall apart in 6 months and are impossible to fix. So whatever the raw material used, this trend ensures high production, quick profit, large impact and large waste. In addition, factory-scaled animal production is not really compatible with animal welfare.

    Unless the system changes, which will require a massive re-examination and re-jigging of our financial systems and reward/responsibility mechanisms, we will always have this issue.

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    FDA cannot find anything in China

    Byoliveridley

    FDA Finds Chinese Food Producers Shut Down – washingtonpost.com

    American inspectors who arrived in China last week to investigate the two companies that exported tainted pet food ingredients found that the suspect facilities had been hastily closed down and cleaned up, federal officials said yesterday.

    “There is nothing to be found. They are essentially shut down and not operating,” said Walter Batts, deputy director of the Food and Drug Administration’s office of international programs.

    Well, we gave them plenty of warning, did we not!

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    Arsenic in the News

    Byoliveridley

    Professor wins $1M for arsenic filter – Yahoo! News

    The National Academy of Engineering announced Thursday that the 2007 Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability would go to Abul Hussam, a chemistry professor at George Mason University in Fairfax. Hussam’s invention is already in use today, preventing serious health problems in residents of the professor’s native Bangladesh.

    This British Geological Survey website provides a good primer to the problem. Some key points:

    1. Arsenic is very toxic
    2. Arsenic is naturally occurring in the shallow groundwater aquifers of Bengal and Bangladesh at a toxic level
    3. The surface water is contaminated with bacteria and was responsible for high infant mortality, so aid agencies in the ’70s encouraged the use of tube wells and other groundwater pumps. While this contributed to a decline in infant mortality from gastrointestinal infections, it also dosed unsuspecting people with disease causing levels of arsenic
    4. The technology for removal of arsenic is very well known. But most solutions require electricity/periodic maintenance/technical skills and are thus not universal or sustainable.
    5. Simplicity is the key. You can’t tell the people to not drink the water, it is the only clean water available. You can’t install water treatment plants, there is no running water, you can’t rely on solutions that are centralized.

    So with all that in mind, here’s what Prof. Hussam did:

    The Gold Award-winning SONO filter is a point-of-use method for removing arsenic from drinking water.  A top bucket is filled with locally available coarse river sand and a composite iron matrix (CIM).  The sand filters coarse particles and imparts mechanical stability, while the CIM removes inorganic arsenic.  The water then flows into a second bucket where it again filters through coarse river sand, then wood charcoal to remove organics, and finally through fine river sand and wet brick chips to remove fine particles and stabilize water flow.  The SONO filter is now manufactured and used in Bangladesh. That’s great, and easy!

    That’s pretty much freshman chemistry right there, further proof that most innovation does not need new science, only people willing to spend some time on problems that don’t necessarily get looked at.