Waste

"Families near battery recycling plants face “dangerous" levels of lead in their blood and in soil, testing shows."

"West Virginia’s fund to clean up abandoned coal mines is in such dire shape that it threatens to stick taxpayers with hundreds of millions — perhaps even billions — of dollars in cleanup costs. And yet, little is being done to turn things around."

"Plastic trash produced by the company PepsiCo has become a “persistent and dangerous form of plastic pollution” for residents of the Buffalo River watershed in upstate New York, according to a new lawsuit filed Wednesday."

"Thirteen years after a kayaker reported stepping into a stinging patch of muck in the Congaree River, contractors have cleaned up the toxic mess that covered a stretch of the river bottom below the Gervais Street bridge in Columbia, South Carolina."

"As the world's nations enter another round of talks this week on creating a first-ever treaty to contain plastic pollution, officials are bracing for tough negotiations over whether to limit the amount of plastic being produced or just to focus on the management of waste."

"In what was once a proud and neighborly community where residents sat on their porches and looked after kids playing in the streets, the noxious smell and degraded air quality attributable to the Covanta waste incinerator — the largest in the country, burning as much as 3,500 tons of trash a day — have driven residents indoors or out of town."

"It’s a billion-dollar decision. Probably many billions. And people all around Alabama are waiting anxiously for the feds to decide what happens next. Can Alabama leave its 100 million tons of coal ash where the utilities dumped it, in unlined ditches along the rivers across the state?"

"Revelations by a watchdog group reinforce doubts about chemical recycling, a technology promoted by the city in a collaboration with ExxonMobil and other companies."