"Seventy-nine thousand tons of plastic debris, in the form of 1.8 trillion pieces, now occupy an area three times the size of France in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, a scientific team reported on Thursday."
Decades after the nation’s capital began its historic cleanup, sanitary sewage still occasionally swamps the Potomac River. Are sewage systems also dumping human waste and other pollutants into waterways near you? This week’s TipSheet has the background on the problem of combined sewage overflow, as well as resources for finding out what’s happening near you.
They count in the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, and each one is a potential story. This week’s TipSheet looks at abandoned mines spread across the United States, many of them polluted, and with few cleanups underway. Find out what’s at stake, and get reporting resources.
Infrastructure is much in the news these days, with battles over politics and funding yielding stories for environment reporters. In play are a Trump plan, who gets to pick projects, who pays and much more. But in an election year, how likely are infrastructure plans to move forward? The backstory, with angles for environment and energy, plus what to watch for in 2018, in our Backgrounder on infrastructure.
Covering local infrastructure projects often means covering energy and the environment. This week’s TipSheet offers a companion to our special backgrounder on the national infrastructure story emerging out of Washington. We’ve got dozens of resources and links for finding infrastructure news and information from Congress, executive agencies, infrastructure organizations and environmental groups.
Somewhere near you is a toxic waste site. And as the EPA brings the Superfund cleanup program back into its sights, TipSheet helps you cover this perpetual problem. Info on cleanup funding and priority-setting, resources to locate nearby sites, questions to ask to dig into your Superfund story and more.
"The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday ordered a long-awaited cleanup of a Superfund site northwest of St. Louis, saying residents living near the landfill contaminated with World War II-era nuclear waste deserve action after waiting 27 years for federal regulators to issue a decision."
"Seven years after Dynegy Inc. scrapped one of the last coal plants in downstate Illinois, environmental groups are accusing the company of failing to prevent toxic waste stored nearby from seeping into the state’s only National Scenic River."
"Hong Kong boasts glittering skyscrapers, seamless transportation and billion dollar infrastructure projects, but it is struggling with a much more mundane problem: disposing of its trash."
"Joleah Lamb began her career as a coral biologist on the Great Barrier Reef. Every now and then she’d note a scrap of plastic as she swam through. But when she started studying reefs in Asia, she came across a completely different level of detritus."
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