Put a Stop to Offshore Drilling

Given the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last month, isnt it high time the government put a stop to offshore oil drilling once and for all? Short of banning it altogether, what can be done to prevent explosions, leaks and spills moving forward? –

Eco-Friendly Train Travel Boycotted by U.S. Car Makers

If train travel is so much less polluting than driving or flying, why are passenger rail options in the U.S. so limited compared to Europe? And is anything being done to shift more travelers over to American rail lines from cars and planes? — Jeffrey Orenstein, Bradenton, FL

Its true that train travel is one of the lowest impact ways to get from point to point short of walking, jogging or bicycling. In the early part of the 20th century, with car and air travel both in their infancies, taking the train was really the only practical way for Americans to get from city to city. And take the train they did: By 1929 the U.S. boasted one of the largest and most used rail networks in the world, with some 65,000 railroad passenger cars in operation across some 265,000 miles of track.

But a concerted campaign by U.S. carmakers to acquire rail lines and close them, along with a major push in Congress to build the worlds most extensive interstate highway system, combined to shift Americans tastes away from rail travel and toward cars. As a result, while Europe focused on building its own rail networks, the U.S. became the ultimate auto nation, with more cars per capita than anywhere else in the world. By 1965 only 10,000 rail passenger cars were in operation across just 75,000 miles of track.

In response to the declining use of Americas rail network, the U.S. government created Amtrak in 1971 to provide intercity passenger train service across the country, running mostly on pre-existing track already in use for freight transport. Today Amtrak runs some 1,500 rail passenger cars on 21,000 miles of track connecting 500 destinations in 46 states. In 2008, upwards of 28 million passengers rode Amtrak trains, representing the sixth straight year of record ridership for the publicly-owned rail line. Despite this growth, the U.S. still has one of the lowest inter-city rail usage rates in the developed world.

But that may all change soon. In the spring of 2009, President Obama allocated $8 billion of his stimulus package toward development of more high-speed rail lines across the country, citing the need to reduce both greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on foreign oil. Currently only one high-speed rail line exists in the U.S., Amtraks Acela Express, which can reach speeds of 150 mile per hour on its Washington, D.C. to Boston route. The success of high-speed, high-efficiency “bullet” trains in Asia and Europe-where train rides can be as fast as flying but without the long waits and security hassles-has helped convince American transportation analysts that the U.S. should also take the high speed rail plunge.

The first round of federal funding will go toward upgrading and increasing speeds on existing lines, but the majority of it will be used to jump-start construction of new high speed lines in 10 corridors across the country, including in northern New England, across New York State, across Pennsylvania, in and around Chicago, throughout the Southeast, and up and down the length of the west coast.

A 2006 study by the Center for Clean Air Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology concluded that building a high speed rail system across the U.S. (similar in scope to that proposed by Obama) would likely result in 29 million fewer car trips and 500,000 fewer plane flights each year, saving six billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions-the equivalent of removing a million cars from the road annually.

CONTACTS: Amtrak, www.amtrak.com; Center for Clean Air Policy, www.ccap.org; Center for Neighborhood Technology, www.cnt.org.

Oil Shale No Solution to Global Warming

Are the United States vast oil shale resources a potential source of energy? – Larry LeDoux, Honolulu, HI

Oil shale is a fine-grained sedimentary rock that contains significant amounts of kerogen, a solid mixture of organic chemical compounds that can be converted into synthetic liquid fuel similar to oil, or into shale gas similar to petroleum-derived natural gas. Geologists believe there is more oil shale out there in the rocks of the world-three trillion barrels worth of fuel-than there is oil in existing reserves globally.

Oil shale has been mined extensively in Brazil, China, Estonia, Germany, Israel and Russia, but up to two-thirds of the worlds supply lies in the Green River basin of the western United States, including parts of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. To date, these American oil shale resources remain virtually untapped, but an 11th hour executive order by the Bush administration in 2008 put two million acres of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land across Wyoming, Utah and Colorado up for lease to oil shale extractors.

Other nations with oil shale reserves have been mining them for decades for power generation and other uses, but American enthusiasm has run hot and cold, depending on oil prices. The U.S. was bullish on oil shale during the 1970s oil shocks, but when gas prices fell again, so did the enthusiasm for oil shale.

American companies didnt look into mining domestic oil shale again until 2003-again, thanks to spiking oil prices. George W. Bushs Energy Policy Act of 2005 officially opened federal lands to oil shale extraction. But then once again lowered oil prices, along with environmental concerns and growing enthusiasm for renewable energy sources left oil shales future in the U.S. again uncertain.

For their part, environmental groups are unequivocally against oil shale extraction. For one, extracting operations destroy affected landscapes, forcing plants and animals out, with regeneration unlikely for decades. Another big issue with oil shale extraction is water usage. The process requires as much as five barrels of water-for dust control, cooling and other purposes-for every barrel of shale oil produced.

Oil shale extraction is also very energy-intensive, and as such is no solution to our global warming woes. Researchers have found that a gallon of shale oil can emit as much as 50 percent more carbon dioxide than a gallon of conventional oil would over its given lifecycle from extraction to tailpipe.

Due to these concerns and others, 13 environmental groups, including the Wilderness Society, Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council, teamed up in January 2009 to file suit against the federal government for opening up all that western U.S. land to oil shale development. The suit contends that the BLM failed to properly consider air quality and endangered species impacts in the region. The groups also contend that the development would require the construction of 10 new coal-fired power plants in order to get at and process the oil shale, significantly upping the carbon footprint of the entire region.

Green groups hope that the Obama administration will overturn Bushs decision to lease development rights on the land, which is near three national parks in one of the least developed parts of the U.S.

CONTACTS: Bureau of Land Management, www.blm.gov; Wilderness Society, www.wilderness.org; Sierra Club, www.sierraclub.org; Natural Resources Defense Council, www.nrdc.org.

EarthTalkTM
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine
SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com.

Yes, You Can Recycle Your Mattress

How can I recycle my old mattress if the place I buy a new one from doesnt take it? What do mattress companies do with old mattresses when they do take them? Do they recycle any of the material? – J. Belli, Bridgeport, CT, USA

A typical mattress is a 23 cubic foot assembly of steel, wood, cotton and polyurethane foam. Given this wide range of materials, mattresses have typically been difficult to recycle-and still most municipal recycling facilities wont offer to do it for you. But along with increasing public concerns about the environment-and a greater desire to recycle everything we can-has come a handful of private companies and nonprofit groups that want to make sure your old bed doesnt end up in a landfill.

In the United States, the Lane County, Oregon chapter of the charity St. Vincent de Paul Society, for example, has spearheaded one of the nations most successful mattress recycling initiatives via its DR3 (“Divert, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”) program. “Keeping [mattresses] out of landfills is a matter of efficiently recycling them so their core materials can be reincarnated into any number of new products,” reports the group, which opened a large mattress recycling center in Oakland, California in 2001. (Why hundreds of miles away in Oakland? To “go where the mattresses are,” says Chance Fitzpatrick of the group.) The facility has been processing upwards of 300 mattresses and box springs per week ever since.

During the recycling process, each mattress or box spring is pushed onto a conveyor belt, where specially designed saws cut away soft materials on the top and bottom, separating the polyurethane foam and cotton fiber from the framework. The metal pieces are magnetically removed, and the remaining fiber materials are then shredded and baled. The whole process takes one worker just three to four minutes per mattress.

On a slow day, the DR3 facility recycles some 1,500 pounds of polyurethane foam, which totals a half million or more pounds over the course of a year. “A well-oiled recycling factory can reuse 90 percent of the mattress,” reports Josh Peterson of Discoverys Planet Green website. “The cotton and cloth get turned into clothes. The springs and the foam get recycled, and the wood gets turned into chips.”

While the DR3 facility only takes mattresses from a small group of waste haulers and individuals around the San Francisco Bay Area, other mattress recyclers are popping up around the U.S. and beyond. Some examples include Nine Lives Mattress Recycling in Pamplico, South Carolina; Conigliaro Industries in Framingham, Massachusetts; MattCanada in Montreal, QuÃ

Workplace Wellness in a Box

It’s time to have a word with your boss: looking after your employees through workplace wellness programs improves employee morale, reduces company healthcare costs, and increases productivity.