Better Living Through Chemistry?

Worth reading for the reporting and the perspective, regardless of your own conclusion.

Downstream From 'Silent Spring'

By Robert L. Wolke
Wednesday, June 6, 2007

SPRINGDALE, Pa.

Local beekeepers sold organic honey, bakers displayed artisanal loaves, and some of Pittsburgh's best chefs offered dishes made with products from nearby organic farms, including the renowned lamb from Jamison Farm, an hour away. Under small tents, representatives of the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Slow Food Pittsburgh and Whole Foods Market handed out materials about environmental conservation.

It was a birthday party: the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson, held at her birthplace, a 30-minute drive from my home in Pittsburgh. How could I not go?

Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," changed the world. By exposing the devastation being wrought upon nature's flying and walking creatures by the undisciplined spreading of powerful chemicals to kill the crawling ones, she awakened the world to the harmful environmental consequences of human activity. Among her legacies are the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species acts.

But how far have we come since "Silent Spring"? Walking around the event, I asked a dozen or so people whether they think we are better or worse off today regarding the hazards of pesticides. Among those who, like me, were around in the 1950s, the predominant view was a split decision: America is better off because scores of highly toxic pesticides have been banned (remember DDT, chlordane, dieldrin?), but the Third World is worse off because those same chemicals are still in use there. Most poor, food-strapped countries have tropical or semitropical climates in which insects flourish, and pesticides may offer the only hope of an adequate harvest.

My younger interviewees, though, tended to think we are worse off today than in Carson's time. Why? Because, they say, today's factory farms are using not only pesticides but also herbicides, chemical fertilizers and animal hormones with little restraint, compromising the wholesomeness and safety of our foods as never before.

Let's examine that train of thought.

It is hard for today's environmentally conscious generation to realize how naive and primitive we were in the 1940s and 1950s. I can remember being shooed indoors by my mother when the fogging trucks came by, spraying mosquito-control DDT on the New York City beaches. I can remember movie newsreels (tell the kids what newsreels were) showing crop-dusting airplanes spraying 2,4-D over acres of farm fields; that chemical, when combined with 2,4,4-T, is the notorious Vietnam War-era Agent Orange. And I can remember (mea culpa) using black-market chlordane to fight the cockroaches when I lived in Florida. Are things really worse now?

The EPA, created eight years after "Silent Spring," sets "tolerance limits" for pesticide residues in food and water, based on each chemical's degree of risk to human health. All amounts are measured in parts per million (ppm). To illustrate, one ppm would be equivalent to one inch of a 16-mile-long carrot.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture enforces the EPA tolerance limits for meat, poultry and some egg products, while the Food and Drug Administration enforces the limits for all other foods. From 1991 to 2006, the USDA tested 118 types of food products for the presence of more than 440 different pesticides. Regardless of what one might think about the effectiveness of our politicized and lobby-driven federal agencies, that's an awful lot of watching over our foods.

According to the FDA, more than half of the samples of produce tested do not even show measurable toxic residues. Fewer than 1 percent of tested samples exceed the tolerance limit of a given pesticide plus the chemicals it breaks down into in the environment. Moral: The fact that a pesticide was used in growing your fruit does not mean pesticide residue will still be there when you buy it. But wash it anyway.

We still have a long way to go, and slip-ups can occur, in part because of the inadequate number of inspections of our gigantic cornucopia of American and imported foods, a shortage the agencies will be quick to ascribe to inadequate leadership and funding.

But better off than in 1962? You bet your bananas.

Robert L. Wolke (http://www.robertwolke.com) is professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh and author of "What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained" (W.W. Norton, 2002). He can be reached atfood@washpost.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/05/AR2007060500382.html

Flywheels

At the Goddard College Social Ecology program during the mid to later 1970's, flywheels were used in a device powered by a Savonius Rotor. The device aerated fish farm tanks using low speed wind power and a flywheel to power an aerator.

Reinventing the (fly)wheel

By Ben Harder, Published: April 18

Reinventing the wheel is considered such an unnecessary act that the phrase itself connotes pointless effort. But it’s a good thing James Watt, the pioneering 18th-century Scottish engineer, was willing to tinker around with that ancient technology.

By using a wheel to convert the up-and-down thrusts of steam-powered pistons into a continuous rotational motion, Watt invented the modern flywheel. That and other improvements he made to the steam engine helped spawn the Industrial Revolution (and earned him immortality as the namesake of the watt).

Now, it seems, the time has come to reinvent the flywheel.

Today’s engineers are repurposing Watt’s device into a promising alternative to batteries and other high-tech means of storing energy. Among their aims: using flywheels to make renewable energy more useful, and turning trains and buses into hybrid vehicles.

In its simplest form, a flywheel is a wheel, disk or cylinder that spins around a stationary axis. It works on the same principle as the potter’s wheel, which has been used to mold clay vessels since the dawn of civilization.

A flywheel’s momentum, which depends on how heavy the wheel is and how fast it’s spinning, can contain an impressive amount of energy. And if something acts as a brake on the wheel, this energy can be released — in the form of electricity, for example — with impressive suddenness.

Finding new, improved ways to store energy is crucial partly because of the growth of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. The former is available only when the wind is blowing. The latter, only when the sun shines. Unless some of that energy can be stored for later use, renewables will never be able to power the world’s needs around the clock.

Better energy storage methods could also improve fuel efficiency and curtail costs at conventional power plants, reduce their carbon emissions and prevent blackouts.

Even though conventional plants can often increase or decrease energy production as needed — by throwing more coal in the furnace, for example — they can’t adjust their output instantaneously.

Energy demand, however, often comes in sudden surges. A large factory powers up its equipment all at once. A rush of commuters arriving home almost simultaneously turn on all their air conditioners and TVs. A baseball stadium’s lights blink on. These and other daily occurrences cause sharp and not entirely predictable spikes in demand for electricity.

Consequently, power plants routinely generate more electricity at a given moment than their customers are expected to consume. The excess goes to waste. But that’s more acceptable than being overwhelmed by an unexpected spike in demand, which can rapidly lead to a blackout.

If a standby supply of stored energy is available for rapid deployment, plant operators can use it as a buffer against demand surges. They could then get away with less overproduction, minimizing waste and emissions. Starting in 2009, financial incentives from the federal government and some states have encouraged companies to seek ways to store energy and release it to the grid quickly when demand spikes.

In January, Massachusetts-based Beacon Power Corp. began serving the New York state electrical grid with the nation’s largest flywheel plant. When fully operational, the Stephentown, N.Y.-plant’s array of 200 flywheels, each weighing more than a ton and rotating up to 16,000 times per minute, will be able to provide 20 megawatts of power. That’s enough energy to meet about 10 percent of the state’s daily needs, the company says.

Having that extra juice around could help prevent blackouts such as the one that plunged New York and parts of other states and Ontario into darkness in August 2003.

Beacon already has a smaller flywheel plant operating in Massachusetts, and last month it announced a deal to build a plant in Montana.

Technological improvements since Watt’s day have made flywheels about 90 percent efficient at storing energy, meaning that all but about 10 percent of the energy put into them can be retrieved later. Some batteries, by comparison, can rapidly lose a tenth or more of their charge, with further losses as time goes on.

The flywheel’s efficiency is a product of the fact that once a body is in motion, it tends to remain in motion. As long as a flywheel maintains its rotational speed, it retains its stored energy. To eliminate air resistance that could slow down the spin, engineers have enclosed flywheels in vacuum chambers. To prevent friction, they’ve dispensed with physical bearings, instead using “magnetic bearings” that levitate the spinning wheel and permanently suspend it in place.

Other improvements in materials and manufacturing have increased flywheels’ durability and capacity.

Previously made from steel, flywheels are now mostly constructed from lighter carbon-composite materials. Steel’s density gave a flywheel a lot of momentum at a given rotational speed. But the outer edge of a spinning flywheel is under tremendous centrifugal force. As strong as steel is, it has a tendency to explosively disintegrate under such a strain. A flywheel made of composites, however, can spin many times faster than a steel counterpart without coming apart. That extra speed more than makes up for its relative lack of heft.

The power grid isn’t the only place where flywheels can be useful. Because they’re able to produce powerful bursts of electricity, flywheels have various industrial applications, from powering lasers to testing circuit breakers.

Vehicle makers see the technology as promising, too. Some Formula One race cars have been equipped with flywheels that help boost their acceleration. But past efforts to use flywheels in commercial vehicles never got far off the starting line.

In today’s hybrid cars, large batteries capture and store the energy generated when the driver brakes. But batteries are too heavy and inefficient to be optimal for that purpose in larger vehicles such as trains and buses. Now that composite materials can make flywheels lighter, flywheels could replace batteries in hybrid mass-transit vehicles.

With all the stopping and starting that commuter trains and buses do, that could give fuel efficiency a real boost. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin estimate that a hybrid locomotive with an onboard flywheel could use 15 percent less fuel than a standard train along the nation’s busy Northeast Corridor.

The train has long been an iconic symbol of the Industrial Revolution. With the help of the flywheel, it’s poised to come full circle.

Harder is the general manager of Health and Science at U.S. News & World Report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/science/reinventing-the-flywheel/2011/04/11/AFfd1J1D_story.html

Stand Up to Big Plastic (and little plastic too) - Worthwhile Editorial from Green America

Stand Up to Big Plastic
May 16, 2011

What will our grandchildren think of the disposable plastic bag?

Will they see it as a relic of a bygone era?

It depends on the winner in a number of battles now playing out both in state and local governments, and between the bag manufacturers themselves.

If Oregon succeeds in passing the nation's first statewide ban on plastic bags, it will be over the strenuous objections of the plastics industry, led by South Carolina-based bag manufacturer Hilex Poly. Opponents in the plastic industry have waged an all-out campaign to deny that plastic bags pose a threat to the environment, even raising fears about the safety of reusable bags, breathlessly pointing to studies that show that unwashed bags — like any unwashed fabric — can carry bacteria.

Plastic-bag manufacturers using similar tactics helped defeat a previous statewide bag-ban bill in California last year, and have taken on local initiatives all across the country.

In each case — both in Oregon and in California — state legislators have sought not only to protect their local environments, but also to standardize retail practices across two states already dotted with city- and county-level bans. Nationwide, 21 local communities have taken action to ban plastic bags, with Evanston, IL currently debating whether to become the 22nd. Other communities have chosen to tax the bags instead, with Montgomery County, Maryland, passing a five-cent plastic-bag tax on May 3.

Why all the fuss?

In Montgomery County, officials cited pollution to local streams and rivers that lead directly to the Chesapeake Bay, and from there, to the Atlantic Ocean, where scientists have identified a collection of plastic debris comparable to the better-known "Pacific garbage patch" that's widely described as being twice the size of Texas.

There are other good reasons to avoid plastic bags — from the petroleum products used in their manufacture to their effect on wildlife when ingested — which is why many shoppers choose to carry their own reusable bags, whether their local community taxes or bans them or not.

But now, the forces behind the current misinformation campaign in Oregon and others aimed at bag bans at the community level are even attacking companies that offer green-minded shoppers a reusable bag option.

A lawsuit making its way through the U.S. Circuit Court in South Carolina targets California-based reusable-bag manufacturer ChicoBag. Led again by Hilex Poly (along with Superbag Operating Ltd. and Advance Polybag), the suit alleges that ChicoBag "deceptively communicates that ChicoBag's products are superior to plastic bags, such as those sold by Hilex, with regard to environmental impact" and seeks to end all advertising suggesting that reusable bags represent an "alleged environmental superiority."

It's a move that smacks of desperation.

The plastic-bag facts used on ChicoBag's Web site to promote reusable bags over disposable plastics are clear and verifiable. They're collected from the Environmental Protection Agency, The Wall Street Journal, NOAA, the United Nations, and the Ocean Conservancy.

"I welcome the opportunity to engage with these corporate giants in a fair and impartial courtroom," says Andy Keller, president of ChicoBag. "Plastic bag manufacturers…have spent millions of dollars trying to persuade voters and elected officials against single-use bag legislation…[A]nd now they are trying to sue a small entrepreneurial company into silence."

So, if Hilex Poly has its way, our grandchildren will still be pulling plastic bags out of trees and streams long after we're gone, and our oceanic garbage patches will only continue to grow.

Don't let them win. Take your reusable bags every time you shop. Wash them like you wash the rest of your linens to keep them clean. And like Andy Keller and the leaders in Oregon, stand up to Big Plastic if they ever try to tell your town how to run its business.

--Andrew Korfhage

http://www.greenamerica.org/about/newsroom/editorials/stand-up-to-Big-Plastic-ChicoBag-lawsuit-reuseable-bags.cfm

Obstacles To Buying Healthy Food - Availability

Kids meals bust calorie, fat, sodium targets -- August 5, 2008 -- Sacramento Bee

By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg - cpeytondahlberg@sacbee.com

Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, August 5, 2008

After analyzing kids' items offered by 13 of the nation's 25 largest restaurant chains, the Center for Science in the Public Interest concluded that 93 percent of the meals provide too many calories.

Nutrition guidelines suggest that a moderately active child age 4 to 8 should get no more than 1,290 calories a day (430 calories per meal). Every single kid's option exceeded that at five chains. "These meals are really calorie time bombs," said Dr. Harold Goldstein, head of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy.

The best ranking went to Subway, with 12 children's meal combinations below 430 calories – and six above.

Adults should also make sure kids get plenty of fruit, vegetables and fiber, while staying away from too much salt or fat, Goldstein said.

Kids consume almost twice the calories in a restaurant meal than in one served at home. But it's tough for a parent to be vigilant, the study said. Few might realize, for example, that Chili's Chicken Crispers, at 590 calories, are a much heftier choice than the Rib Basket at 370 calories.

The groups urged restaurants to make sure kids meals "default" to the most nutritious alternatives, such as nonfat milk instead of a soda, and fruit or low-fat vegetables instead of fries.

Disney theme parks have found that more than 70 percent of parents will stay with healthy default options, the study said.

The California Restaurant Association has told lawmakers that it would be impractical to insist on having calorie counts on menus.

http://dist20.casen.govoffice.com/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={A610B593-D5ED-462E-853A-ECEB5C5714E1}&DE={0117AB49-D215-4AB7-9209-234EE49E6551}

Car Companies Show What They Could Have Done Long Ago

Industry in general and the auto industry with note, have maintained that "retooling" is a massive undertaking that is oh so complicated. Never mind that we went to the moon....
Articles like this show me that when industry wants to, it can do things quite fast thank you. And with some simple design solutions the weight of the car and wind drag can be reduced resulting in higher MPG. The article explains that "One of the biggest barriers to smaller fuel-efficient cars has been consumers" - excuse me - just how did consumers prevent auto makers from designing better cars? Consumers want to spend more for gas is the implication.

Conventional gas-powered cars starting to match hybrids in fuel efficiency

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 9, 2011; 8:56 PM

The new Chevrolet Cruze Eco can reach eye-popping fuel economy levels of more than 50 miles per gallon on the highway, which even in this era of hybrid-electric cars stands among the best.

But here's the real trick: The Cruze Eco is neither a hybrid nor electric. It runs on that "old" technology, the conventional gasoline engine.

Although hydrogen, electric and other alternative cars have garnered more hype and significant federal subsidies, the best immediate hope for restraining the nation's fuel consumption might be some new vehicles that, although powered by conventional engines, run efficiently because they have been stripped of unnecessary weight, streamlined to move smoothly and equipped with gas-sipping engines.

This year, General Motors, Ford and Hyundai began selling cars with conventional engines that achieve 40 mpg or more on the highway, exceeding the fuel efficiency of some hybrids, because their mechanics and shapes have been optimized.

To achieve the efficiency of the Cruze Eco, for example, engineers dropped its weight by 200 pounds, installed shutters to close off part of the grill at higher speeds to reduce wind drag, added a rear spoiler, cut the car's height by one centimeter and adopted an efficient turbocharged engine.

The result is a car that, with a manual transmission, is rated at 42 mpg on the highway by the government but can achieve more than 50 mpg under the right conditions, reviewers say. Likewise, the new Ford Focus, with its "super fuel economy" package, is rated at 40 mpg and the Hyundai Elantra gets the same fuel economy, standard in all models.

With the recent spike in gas prices reawakening consumer interest in fuel economy, the new cars are expected to be particularly appealing, in part because they are typically less expensive than their hybrid counterparts.

"The buzz has been all about electric vehicles and hybrids, but to me, the real buzz should be about the old internal-combustion engine," said Jeremy Anwyl, chief executive of Edmunds.com, an automotive Web site. "It ain't dead yet."

At least since the oil shocks of the 1970s, American politicians have been infatuated with developing alternative sources to power the nation's auto fleet. The George W. Bush administration pushed a hydrogen car; now Congress and the Obama administration are laying out billions of dollars for the development of electric cars.

But the new fuel-efficient gasoline cars, critics say, raise doubts about government efforts that favor any one technology over another. If subsidies are to be made, they argue, they should go to efficient cars, no matter what their power source. Moreover, when the fuel economy of a best-selling gas car is improved even incrementally, it can have much larger effects on the nation's oil consumption than an alternative-technology model that doesn't sell well.

Experts expect alternative fuel technologies to take hold eventually, but hybrid cars still represent only about 3 percent of U.S. car and truck sales. And the latest generation of electric plug-in vehicles hit the market only recently.

"When you take some of the most popular vehicles in the U.S. - say, the Ford F-150 pickup - and improve them by just a few mpg, the effects can add up very quickly," said John DeCicco, a faculty fellow at the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute at the University of Michigan. "Much more so than with a niche car."

The new crop of energy-efficient vehicles springs in many ways from the last time gas prices spiked, in 2007. Sales of small cars jumped. Support for higher fuel economy standards gathered momentum. And then during the automobile industry bailout, congressional critics demanded to know why U.S. car companies weren't selling more fuel-efficient cars.

It takes about three or four years for a car to be developed, and the results of those tumultuous times are now coming to market.

"The near-death experience of the auto companies when they got hit with the last gas-price spike finally convinced them to get off the gas-guzzling business model," said Roland Hwang, the transportation program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. As a result, "we're seeing 40 mpg become the new 30."

One of the biggest barriers to smaller fuel-efficient cars has been consumers, who just a decade ago were embracing sport-utility vehicles. But according to automakers and other researchers, the instability in gas prices has created an appetite for more efficient cars.

Even so, the auto companies are still wrestling with how to make money on their fuel-saving enhancements, or as some analysts put it, "how to bring green to the bank."

The most efficient Cruze Eco costs about $1,900 more; the super fuel economy package at Ford costs $495.

Hyundai, by contrast, offers a 40 mpg highway standard on the Elantra. It dropped 62 pounds from its predecessor and made engine improvements to get the higher fuel economy number.

"As a company, we are focused on getting high mpg across our lineup," said Mike O'Brien, a vice president at Hyundai Motor America. "We think it's what consumers want."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/09/AR2011030903313.html

War - Plenty Good Bizmess

Arms deals still made amid Middle East crackdowns

By Janine Zacharia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 24, 2011; 9:01 PM

ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - As Libya's Moammar Gaddafi ordered attacks on his own people this week, thousands of arms sellers from the United States and other countries hawked their aircraft, riot gear and rifles to Middle Eastern buyers at the Persian Gulf's preeminent arms show.

The decisions by Britain and France to suspend weapons sales to Libya and Bahrain, where security forces also fired live ammunition at protesters, did little to dampen the fervor of the vendors packing the sprawling Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center for the biennial convention, known as IDEX.

The business-as-usual, big-ticket fighter jets and armored vehicles on display drew plenty of attention. But interest also appeared to be up this year in less dazzling "nonlethal armaments" of the kind put to overwhelming use recently in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere.

A sales representative for a Beijing-based maker of anti-riot gear noted that all her wares were attracting more attention - especially a fire-resistant police uniform.

Condor, a Brazilian company, displayed tear-gas grenades alongside rubber-coated bullets, but was gun-shy about speaking to the media. "I can talk to you about soccer, Rio De Janeiro or Carnival," a company executive said apologetically. "But not this."

Amid all the change sweeping the region, the multibillion-dollar business of arms sales to the Middle East may remain the one constant. The rich Persian Gulf states - particularly the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia - are scooping up as much weaponry as they can. Some of it could, in theory, be turned on their own populations. But diplomats and defense industry representatives say the goal is to defend against Iran and to secure energy infrastructure that has become even more valuable with oil topping $100 a barrel.

The potential profit is enormous: The UAE alone is planning to spend $6 billion on defense over the next eight years. The United States sells more than a third of its arms to the Middle East, and increasing numbers of manufacturers want a piece of the sales: This year's arms show is 30 percent larger than the previous one.

But some at the convention worried that the wave of regional uprisings, which has led leaders from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to announce new subsidies to appease disgruntled populations, could shift resources to domestic spending.

"They'll have money to do everything" if oil stays above $100 a barrel, said one U.S. arms contractor with long experience in the region. "But there will still be the political sensitivity of people saying to their governments, 'Even if you can afford it, why are you putting money into airplanes or helicopters? You should be putting it into education.' "

The convention drew an array of VIPs, from Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, to top generals of Persian Gulf militaries. Few, if any, representatives were to be seen from the North African nations rocked by revolution, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. But Jordan, which has had domestic disturbances, sent a huge delegation led by King Abdullah II's brother.

Selling arms might seem inappropriate when weapons are being used to crush civilians. But major rethinking is seen as unlikely in the United States, whose strategic priority remains to help allies protect their oil and defend themselves against Iran.

"Governments change all the time, but the security threats that the new government faces don't change as rapidly," said retired U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Charles W. Moore, a former commander of the Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet who is now president of Lockheed Martin's Middle East division.

At the display mounted by the U.S. firm Meggitt, which specializes in shooting instruction, a Saudi from the national oil company, Aramco, screamed at a reporter to take his picture as he and several colleagues grabbed rifles and took aim during a simulated terrorist attack.

The Meggitt representatives were happy to let them play: Saudi Arabia is expected to spend a quarter of a billion dollars over the next five years on shooting ranges and simulators alone.

They know "they need to increase their anti-terrorist capability" with al-Qaeda in the area, said Stuart Westlake-Toms, Meggitt's regional director. Kuwait also wants the training for its police, he added, and Bahrain made deals, as well.

All of the countries in the region are aware, Westlake-Toms said, "that internal security needs to be improved."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/24/AR2011022404838.html