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Disaster restoration workers face health risks from exposure to toxins

Disaster restoration workers face health risks from exposure to toxins

Workers in the disaster restoration industry are reporting significant health issues from exposure to dangerous substances while cleaning up after natural disasters.

María Inés Zamudio, Nour Saudi, and Roxana Aguirre report for The Center for Public Integrity, Futuro Investigates and Columbia Journalism Investigations.

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coal ash pollution widespread

Elevated levels of metals found in creek near Virginia coal ash pit

The effect of coal ash on the environment has been studied and debated for more than seven years now in Virginia. Utilities have spent those years looking for long-term disposal.

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solar energy & circular economy

Making solar energy as clean as can be means fitting square panels into the circular economy

As solar projects surge nationwide, the demand is increasing for recycling solutions that will keep photovoltaic panels out of landfills and their energy-producing elements in the sun.

Antarctic research station pollution

Pollution at Australia’s largest Antarctic research station exceeded guidelines for almost 20 years

Levels of contaminants such as arsenic and lead at Casey eclipsed international quality guidelines between 1997 and 2015, study finds.

gasoline stations leaking underground

Gas stations are leaking underground

Gas stations caused a $20 billion toxic mess — and it’s not going away, Kate Yoder writes for Grist in a story co-published with Crosscut
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Photo by Mehluli Hikwa on Unsplash

Gas stations are leaking underground

Gas stations caused a $20 billion toxic mess — and it’s not going away.
lie of a cleaner oilsands

The lie of a cleaner oilsands

In May 2022 a tailings pond at Imperial’s Kearl Lake facility started leaking toxic waste into groundwater and outside its lease boundaries. But no one reported the leak to water users living downstream of the massive oilsands project for nine months.

In a nutshell:

Award-winning journalist, Andrew Nikiforuk, writing for The Tyee, lays out a damning, but all-too-familiar chronology of ongoing hydrocarbon spills in the Alberta Oil patch that go unreported and unregulated by a seemingly complicit Alberta Energy Regulator. Indigenous leaders, their food sources and drinking water contaminated, have expressed total distrust with the state of monitoring and reporting, repeatedly castigating the Alberta Energy Regulator as a “joke” or unaccountable.

Key quote:

“All trust with the Alberta government has been broken and has been broken for a long time. They can’t be trusted to oversee the mess,” Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam told Parliament’s Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.

Big picture:

At one time the Alberta government and industry promised to control the proliferation of the mining waste stream with stiff regulations. But industry ignored 2009 rules to reduce the volume of tailing waste and then regulators abandoned them. Now government and industry propose to rid themselves of the tailings waste problem with the cheapest possible solution — by minimally treating wastewater by filtering it through petroleum coke (a bitumen byproduct) with the goal of releasing that water into the Athabasca River.

Read the full story from The Tyee.

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