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Posts Tagged ‘pollution’

Art That Aims to Save the Sea from Trash

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 22, 2016| 2 Comments »

Video: PBS NewsHour

Not long ago, Julia Griffin of PBS NewsHour interviewed an artist who has turned plastic trash into sculptures with a message.

“JULIA GRIFFIN: Octavia the octopus, Priscilla the parrot fish, and Flash the marlin, all sculptures now on display at Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and all made of trash pulled from the Pacific Ocean. …

“Angela Haseltine Pozzi is the lead artist and executive director of Washed Ashore, a nonprofit seeking to educate the public on the plastics polluting the word’s oceans.

“ANGELA HASELTINE POZZI: We create sculptures that can teach people about the problem. And, as an artist, it is a real challenge to use everything that comes up off the beach.

“JULIA GRIFFIN: In six years, Haseltine Pozzi and her team of volunteers have created 66 sculptures from more than 38,000 pounds of debris collected from a stretch of Oregon’s coastline.

“The countless bottle caps, flip-flops and beach toys are just a fraction of the more than 315 billion pounds of plastic estimated to be in the world’s oceans.

“Such plastics not only pose entanglement threats to Marine animals, but are often mistaken for food. …

“JULIA GRIFFIN: As scientists debate how to clean the water, Haseltine Pozzi hopes her sculptures will inspire visitors to curb pollution in the first place.”

The exhibit can be seen at the zoo until September 16, 2016. More at PBS here. Check out the Smithsonian’s site, too.

Photo: Smithsonian

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Pigeons Monitoring Pollution

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 5, 2016| 2 Comments »

Pigeons are often associated with pollution underfoot, but in London, pigeons are being harnessed in the fight against another kind of pollution.

Melissa Breyer reports at TreeHugger that the ubiquitous birds are being “outfitted with light-as-a-feather backpacks that collect air pollution data and tweet back live info in an effort to track air quality.

“Putting pigeons to work was the brainstorm of Pierre Duquesnoy, creative director at the global marketing and technology agency DigitasLBi. He entered the curious concept into the #PoweredByTweets competition which was launched last year in conjunction with the London Design Festival.

“Currently there are 120 stations monitoring air pollution in London but they are in fixed locations. ‘That means there are blind spots,’ Duquesnoy tells the Evening Standard. ‘The stations are really accurate but only for the immediate vicinity, so scientists don’t have a clear idea of what is happening elsewhere.’ …

“Pigeon Patrol was one of six winning entries that was built and exhibited – and now, the patrol is actually patrolling. [They will] measure levels of nitrogen dioxide and ozone, the main gases behind harmful urban air pollution …

“For the project Duquesnoy worked with Plume Labs, a tech firm that helps citizens track their exposure to air pollution.” More here.

Video: Newsy

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Volcano That Colored JMW Turner’s Skies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2014| 2 Comments »

Red sky at night, sailors’ delight.
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
Volcano in Indonesia, Turner sunsets for years.

OK, I made that last part up. But there really is a connection between volcanoes and sunsets half a world away.

Writes Sindya Bhanoo at the NY Times, “Sunsets painted by the great masters are now providing a type of information their creators could never have imagined: important clues about air pollution.

“Polluted skies result in redder sunsets, and artists captured this redness on the canvas, said Andreas Kazantzidis, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Patras in Greece who was involved in the research.

“He and his colleagues analyzed hundreds of high-quality digital photographs of paintings done between 1500 and 2000. The period included more than 50 large volcanic eruptions around the globe.

“In each painting, they looked at the red-to-green ratio along the horizon of each sunset to estimate the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere at the time.

“When the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere, producing bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for several years. This is evident in the paintings of the British master J. M. W. Turner.” More.

 At the NY Times, an 1829 landscape by J. M. W. Turner that researchers analyzed for its sunset.

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Green Infrastructure

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I hope colleagues who saw almost the same post on the blog I contribute to at work don’t mind a repeat. I’m winging it a bit as I hold a two-day-old little girl in my left arm and type on her mom’s Mac with my right.

This post can be taken as reassurance that there are pockets of people here and there working to make the world greener for my grandkids and yours. It originates with Jim Robbins, Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network.

He begins in Seattle.

” ‘The biggest threat to Puget Sound is non-point sources [of pollution],’ says Nancy Ahern, Seattle Public Utilities deputy director.

“Blowhole samples taken from killer whales have revealed fungi, viruses and bacteria living in their respiratory tracts, some of them antibiotic-resistant and once found only on land. Health officials often have to shut down oyster beds because of fecal contamination. Salmon in streams are killed by torrents of dirty storm water.

“To lessen this deluge of diffuse pollution — a problem faced by many regions worldwide — Seattle is looking not at new and expensive sewage treatment infrastructure. Instead it is embracing an innovative solution to storm water runoff called green infrastructure … A growing number of places, from New York City to Sweden, are investing in everything from rooftop gardens to pollution-filtering assemblages of trees to reduce tainted runoff.

“Gray infrastructure is the system of pipes and ditches that channel storm water. Green infrastructure is the harnessing of the natural processes of trees and other vegetation — so-called ecosystem services — to carry out the functions of the built systems. Green infrastructure often intercepts the water before it can run into streets and become polluted and stores the water for gradual release through percolation or evapotranspiration. Trees also clean dirty water through natural filtering functions. …

“A 2012 study by American Rivers, ECONorthwest, and other groups examined 479 projects around the country. About a quarter of the projects were more expensive, they concluded, and 31 percent cost the same; more than 44 percent brought the costs down, in some cases substantially. New York City, for example, expects to save $1.5 billion over the next 20 years by using green infrastructure.” I call that having your cake and eating it, too.

More.

Photograph: Mike Di Paola/Getty Images
Plants grow on a rooftop farm in Greenpoint, New York.

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Trading Trash for Food

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 2, 2012| 2 Comments »

A website affiliated with Fast Company and called FastCo.Exist has some interesting information on sustainability.

Consider the article showing how Mexico City is promoting several public goods simultaneously. The city’s environmental agency recently launched Mercado de Trueque, a barter market where recyclable materials are exchanged for fresh food to support the city’s farmlands.

Michael Coren reports: ” ‘This innovative program is designed to show citizens directly and tangibly how what we call trash becomes raw materials. If solid waste is properly separated, it still has value,’ writes the Ministry of Environment (in Spanish). The market accepts glass, paper and cardboard, aluminum beverage cans, PET plastic bottles, and returns ‘green points’ redeemable for agricultural products grown in and around Mexico City, including lettuce, prickly pears, spinach, tomatoes, plants, and flowers.” More here.

Co.Exist also has an article by Ariel Schwartz on how you may track where the things you buy come from. For example, your canned tuna. Check it out.

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