Category: Uncategorized

Trash incin­er­a­tion is incred­i­bly bad for the cli­mate, releas­ing 2.5 times as much car­bon diox­ide CO2 to make the same amount of elec­tric­i­ty as a coal pow­er plant. This is evi­denced by nation­al data com­piled by the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA) in their eGRID database. How­ev­er, the indus­try, with the sup­port of the EPA,…

I recent­ly updat­ed the Income Lay­er on Jus­tice Map to use the lat­est 2011–2015 Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey data. You can view the data by coun­ty or by cen­sus tract (rough­ly 4000 peo­ple). While cen­sus tracts pro­vide high­er res­o­lu­tion that helps us iden­ti­fy areas of envi­ron­men­tal injus­tice, unfor­tu­nate­ly the con­fi­dence inter­val is much larg­er. So there is a lot…

Lor­ton, Vir­ginia is one of the state’s most stark cas­es of envi­ron­men­tal injus­tice. Lor­ton hosts three land­fills, a sewage sludge incin­er­a­tor and one of the largest and dirt­i­est trash incin­er­a­tors in the nation. Cov­an­ta Fair­fax is the third largest trash incin­er­a­tor in the nation and is the biggest air pol­luter in Fair­fax County.  Accord­ing to…

Zon­ing Case 16–02 A Res­o­lu­tion from ANC Regard­ing the DC Unit­ed Con­sol­i­dat­ed PUD — 10–17-16 Com­mu­ni­ty Health and Safe­ty Study (CHASS) (70 pp; Aug 2016) — con­duct­ed by the Dis­trict Depart­ment of Health to look at the over­all health and eco­nom­ic vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of the community New Jer­sey Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy Review of the Vol­un­tary Clean-up…

Learn more about DC’s con­nec­tion to Lor­ton in this arti­cle on DC’s Waste and Envi­ron­men­tal Racism July 6, 2015: Let­ter from 20 envi­ron­men­tal, busi­ness, health and civ­il rights orga­ni­za­tions oppos­ing the Cov­an­ta waste incin­er­a­tion contract July 7, 2015: Let­ter from Amer­i­can Lung Asso­ci­a­tion to City Council July 8–9, 2015: Cov­an­ta’s let­ter to coun­cil and our…

Environmental Community Statement on Maryland’s “Renewable Energy” Bills Out of our uni­fy­ing con­cern for pub­lic health, social jus­tice and envi­ron­men­tal integri­ty, we urge the Mary­land leg­is­la­ture to recon­sid­er aspects of sev­er­al ener­gy and waste bills that would con­tin­ue to move our state toward increased use of bio­mass and waste incin­er­a­tion (so-called “waste-to-ener­gy”). Pub­lic opin­ion strong­ly…

Report on incin­er­a­tor pre­sen­ta­tion before con­fer­ence of Cana­di­an munic­i­pal offi­cialsby Mike Ewall, Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work & Zero Waste Canada On Feb 12th, 2015, I pre­sent­ed at the Fed­er­a­tion of Cana­di­an Munic­i­pal­i­ties’ Sus­tain­able Com­mu­ni­ties Con­fer­ence in Lon­don, Ontario.  It was the first time they held a pan­el to present both sides of a polar­ized issue.  The…

RSVP here WASTE TO WEALTH: BRINGING RECYCLING AND COMPOSTING JOBS TO BALTIMORE   Wed, March 11th, 2015 7pm – 9pm Bal­ti­more City Com­mu­ni­ty College 2901 Lib­er­ty Heights Ave, Bal­ti­more, MD 21215 (map) The Waste to Wealth = Green Jobs event is being held to present the poten­tial for devel­op­ing small minor­i­ty-owned com­pa­nies in the reuse, recy­cling and…