Category: Blog entry

  • Tulsa, OK Chooses Incineration Over Composting

    - by Jar­rel Wade, August 6, 2014, Tul­sa World Trash board mem­bers vot­ed Tues­day to begin the process of seek­ing bids for con­trac­tors to pick up curb­side green waste and take it to the city’s burn plant. The recent­ly intro­duced plan from the Tul­sa Author­i­ty for Recov­ery of Ener­gy is to send green waste to the city’s burn…

  • Covanta Incineration Deal Discourages Rival Recycling Programs

    - Kath­leen McLaugh­lin, August 4, 2014, Indi­anapo­lis Busi­ness Journal The city of Indi­anapo­lis faces finan­cial penal­ties if it launch­es alter­na­tive recy­cling pro­grams, under a pend­ing deal with incin­er­a­tor oper­a­tor Covanta. The Indi­anapo­lis Board of Pub­lic Works will vote Wednes­day on an agree­ment that’s worth more than $112 mil­lion in rev­enue to Cov­an­ta, which would become the…

  • Proposed Incinerator a Bad Choice for Island

    - Lin­da Damas Kel­ley, August 6, 2014, West Hawaii Today Just hav­ing returned from a month­long main­land trip, I found that the waste-to-ener­gy con­tro­ver­sy has reached a boil­ing point. I just read recent com­men­taries by Hunter Bish­op and Nel­son Ho; like them, I too worked for the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment dur­ing the May­or Har­ry Kim…

  • USDA Funds Genetic Engineering Research for Switchgrass Biofuels

    -  July 24, 2014, Farm­ers’ Advance Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty (MSU) plant biol­o­gist C. Robin Buell has been award­ed $1 mil­lion from a joint U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy and U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture (USDA) pro­gram to accel­er­ate genet­ic breed­ing pro­grams to improve plant feed­stock for the pro­duc­tion of bio­fu­els, bio-pow­er and bio-based products. Specif­i­cal­ly, the MSU Col­lege…

  • Chester, PA Residents Air Concerns over Covanta Trash Incineration Plan

    UPDATE: despite strong orga­niz­ing efforts, an out­pour­ing of com­mu­ni­ty oppo­si­tion and strong research we’ve com­piled to show how awful this plan is, city coun­cil vot­ed unan­i­mous­ly on Aug 13th to approve Cov­an­ta’s plan that allows 30 years of New York City waste to be brought by train to Chester for incin­er­a­tion.  In fact, it’ll go…

  • Biomass Burning Kills 250,000 People a Year

    -  by Jo Nova, August 5, 2014, JoanneNova.com.au The head­line at Sci­ence Dai­ly is that wild­fires and oth­er burns lead to cli­mate change. The paper itself asks: “As such, par­ti­cle burn-off of clouds may be a major under­rec­og­nized source of glob­al warm­ing.” For me what mat­ters are the deaths in the here and now: “We cal­cu­late that 5 to…

  • Residents Voice New Concerns on Gainesville, FL Biomass Incinerator

    -  by Mor­gan Watkins, August 5, 2014, Gainesville Sun Local res­i­dents wor­ried about the bio­mass plant showed up Tues­day evening for a pub­lic meet­ing on its draft Title V air oper­a­tion per­mit, which could be approved this fall, to make their con­cerns known. Folks milled around the Hall of Heroes Com­mu­ni­ty Room at the Gainesville Police Depart­ment…

  • Residents Voice New Concerns on Gainesville, FL Biomass Incinerator

    -  by Mor­gan Watkins, August 5, 2014, Gainesville Sun Local res­i­dents wor­ried about the bio­mass plant showed up Tues­day evening for a pub­lic meet­ing on its draft Title V air oper­a­tion per­mit, which could be approved this fall, to make their con­cerns known. Folks milled around the Hall of Heroes Com­mu­ni­ty Room at the Gainesville Police Depart­ment…

  • USDA Splurges Millions on Biomass Power Incinerators

    [More tax­pay­er mon­ey fund­ing pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions to log Nation­al Forests under the unsci­en­tif­ic guise of “wild­fire pre­ven­tion.” ‑Ed.] -  US Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture, July 23, 2014, Office of Communications Agri­cul­ture Sec­re­tary Tom Vil­sack today announced that the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture (USDA) has select­ed 36 ener­gy facil­i­ties in 14 states to accept bio­mass deliv­er­ies sup­port­ed by…

  • Behind the Colorado Fracking Betrayal

    - by Joel Dyer, August 7, 2014, Boul­der Weekly So what went wrong with bal­lot mea­sures 88 and 89? How could these pop­u­lar citizen’s ini­tia­tives writ­ten to give local com­mu­ni­ties more con­trol over drilling and frack­ing in their neigh­bor­hoods have failed to get on the ballot? Well, the first mis­take Col­orado cit­i­zens made was they trust­ed…