On April 20, Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship exploded over the Gulf of Mexico three minutes into its inaugural launch. While the fiery spectacle caught the attention of the public, it was the eruptive ground-level portion of the launch that has been attracting more intense scrutiny from the government and environmentalists. Last Thursday’s blastoff from SpaceX’s […]
If the Donlin Gold Mine is built as planned in Southwest Alaska, it would be the largest pure gold mine in the world. It would also lead to the filling of thousands of acres of wetlands, harm salmon and rainbow smelt and risk a catastrophic spill of 20 to 40 percent of the up to 568 million tons of toxic waste that could end up stored behind a 471-foot tailings dam.
In 1926, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, a Black man named James Blaine Smith succeeded in buying 600 acres of land near Sparta, Georgia, and launched a successful farming business. Nearly 100 years later, his grandson and his family and neighbors are fighting to protect that land from the encroachment of a […]
On Friday, thousands of gallons of a water-soluble acrylic latex polymer solution were released into a tributary of the Delaware River, which supplies more than half of Philadelphia’s drinking water. The release of the chemicals into Otter Creek began late Friday night from the Trinseo Altuglas plant in Bristol, PA, according to a statement from […]
Swiss air quality technology company IQAir released its fifth annual assessment of particulate matter (PM) 2.5 pollution in cities, nations and regions around the world and found that only six countries met the World Health Organization’s (WHO) updated safe levels of the deadly air pollutant.
The Laguna Beach, California, city council has voted to ban the sale and public use of balloons — inflated with helium or not — in order to stop a major source of marine trash and reduce the risk of wildfires. Starting next year, all balloons in the community of 23,000 will be prohibited from being […]
In 2019, London Mayor Sadiq Khan established the world’s first 24-hour Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in central London to protect the city’s residents from deadly air pollution. The ULEZ imposed £12.50 fines on vehicles whose emissions exceeded certain standards. Two years later, Khan expanded the zone to include inner London within the boundaries of the North and South Circular roads.
As awareness grows of the spread and health impacts of the toxic forever chemicals known as per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), more and more U.S. states are taking steps to regulate them.