"When you live on what’s essentially a sandbar, pollution, septic systems, and political roadblocks add up to one tough challenge."

"When the sickening odor swept across Matt Heissinger's farmstead, his daughter would sprint from their home to the car. Clinging to the girl's clothes and hair, the smell drove her to tears as she feared becoming a high school outcast."

"A tiny South Texas town is continuing to fight plans for an oil and gas waste site half its size, even after state regulators gave developers the go-ahead to build it."

"TVA is closing and capping 10 coal ash ponds at power plants in Tennessee and Alabama, against the urging of environmentalists who want the ash dug up and removed."

"In Texas, there were more than 2,700 spills at oil and gas sites last year. But the state tracked only about half of those."

"The auto industry will need to step up introduction of fuel-saving technology to help the U.S. meet aggressive goals to combat climate change despite manufacturers’ requests for relief from existing rules, the Environmental Protection Agency’s top transportation official said."

"Rio de Janeiro's air is dirtier and deadlier than portrayed by authorities and the Olympics' promised legacy of cleaner winds has not remotely been met, an analysis of government data and Reuters' own testing found."

"Beneath the streets of Boston, two robots named Mario and Luigi inspect the flow of human waste, collecting data on city residents."

"The EPA has already spent $100 million to remediate decades of mining."

"A major part of Rio’s winning Olympic bid was a plan to capture and treat 80 percent of the sewage that flows into Guanabara Bay, something organizers now admit will not happen — certainly not by August, if ever."