Chemistry for a sustainable world

Green issues are sometimes complex. We need to recycle many things, like electronics, but we certainly don’t want to poison others in the process. Efforts to protect the environment and conserve valuable resources must be coupled with proper health and safety procedures. Unfortunately, just saying this doesn’t make it happen. Developing countries are becoming a dumping ground for much toxic waste and proper environmental health and safety is being ignored, both by local opportunists and suppliers of e-Waste from developed nations.

The story about the Basel Action Network (BAN) vs. 1-800-Got-Junk is supplemented by the following to give a snapshot of where we stand with “good” and “bad” recycling

The EPA should be contributing to public health, sustainability, education on complex environmental concerns, and related issues. I know that its members work hard to do so, but they are often thwarted by management. Bob Grant of The Scientist.com wrote about criticism from Congress over the EPA shutting down or limiting access to [...]

Note: a slightly different version of this article was published previously at BlogCritics Magazine under Sci/Tech.
China is suffering from many environmental disasters in its rush to industrialize, but some of its environmental problems are being addressed. Which is leading the race, industrialization or the environment? I provide some examples that contrast environmental practices [...]

CTSI, the Clean Technology and Sustainable Industries Organization, is organizing CTSI Policy Day in Washington D.C. on March 5, 2008. CTSI is a non-profit organization that acts in support of sustainable technologies and “reduced footprint” technologies, including a wide range of topics.

Under sustainable technologies, CTSI lists the obvious renewable energy sources, but goes much [...]

Steven Chen has started a discussion on Treehugger.com that encourages people with environmental blogs to write in and describe their sites. I recommend that you take a look at the wide variety of blogs represented.  My blog roll also has a list of relevant sites, but it isn’t comprehensive. OneWorldUS is well worth a [...]

Researchers found dangerous levels of mercury and arsenic in Lake Baiyangdian, the largest lake in North China, a source of both food and drinking water. First reported by David Kagan in Sunstroke and his latest, book, Doomwatch–the Legacy. Submitted to DIGG by internjack.
read more | digg story
Technorati Tags:toxic waste, china, mercury, arsenic, toxic elements [...]

Brandon Keim reports for Wired on a Corporate Code of Conduct announced by Climos, a climate engineering firm involved in using iron to “seed”, or fertilize, growth of carbon dioxide-fixing plankton in oceans. This code of conduct, while voluntary and non-binding, is a welcome step in an R&D area that reminds one scientist of [...]

Peaks Island in Casco Bay, off Portland, Maine. Photo by S. R. Shray, used with permission, some rights reserved, 2007
Please check out Treehugger.com for a huge collection of articles, discussion forums, practical tips and wildly utopian but stimulating ideas for helping the environment.
The site also has treehuggertv for video reports (haven’t watched any yet).
As [...]

I have discussed biofuels, and especially bioethanol from corn, in quite a few posts so far. Some of the discussion has centered on promising (old and new) approaches to biofuels, which I believe include:

Biodiesel from waste (fish oil, cooking oil and other sources)
Ethanol (bioethanol) from agricultural waste (specifically not from food products)
Metabolic engineering [...]