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Cloudy skies over Beijing? Actually, no - the gray haze you see above is pollution.
NASA's Aqua satellite captured the patch of winter haze over the mega cities of Beijing and Tianjin on January 10, 2012:
One major constituent of haze is particle pollution, such as dust, liquid drops, and soot from burning fuel or coal. Particles smaller than 10 micrometers (called PM 10) are small enough to enter the lungs, where they can cause respiratory problems. The density of PM10 reached 560 micrograms per cubic meter of air on January 10, said the Beijing Environment Protection Bureau. By contrast, U.S. cities exceed air quality standards when PM10 concentrations reach 150 micrograms per cubic meter.
But most of the pollution that makes up haze isn’t PM10; it’s finer particles, smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5). These particles can embed themselves deep in the lungs and occasionally enter the blood stream. The fine particles are highly reflective, sending sunlight back into space. The Chinese government does not currently measure PM2.5, but the U.S. Embassy in Beijing reports their measurements hourly in a Twitter feed. On the morning of January 10, PM2.5 measurements were off the scale, though by afternoon they had dropped to moderate levels. The Beijing Environmental Bureau will start releasing PM2.5 measurements sometime before January 23, the Chinese New Year.
You lungs thank you for not living there: Link
An unnamed man in the town of Montmélian, France, dropped his wallet into a sewer opening in a parking garage and went to retrieve it. He then became stuck, with his head in the pipe and his legs sticking out of the manhole. The man spent the entire night like that until a passer-by called emergency services in the morning. After he was rescued, police figured out what he was doing when it happened.
Unfortunately for the man, there were yet more problems in store. Police also spotted that he had been siphoning off waste oil from his car into the sewer at the time.
Disposing of waste oil in this way is an offence in France, with serious cases risking up to two years in prison and a fine of €76,000 ($97,000).
The moral of the story: if you do something illegal, don’t get caught with your head in a sewer. Link -via Arbroath
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“Filmed in the style of a nature documentary and narrated by Academy Award-winner Jeremy Irons, this “mockumentary”, though lighthearted in tone, hammers home the stark reality of California’s plastic bag pollution situation.”
The video was created to generate support for a bill before the California legislature which will ban single-use plastic bags, limit distribution of paper bags, and encourage the use of reusable bags.
More information is available at Heal the Bay.
Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.
Chris Jordan has previously created art pieces utilizing garbage and junk to emphasize the role of consumerism in modern society. For his most recent project he has photographed the carcasses of albatrosses on Midway Island to document the deleterious effects of plastic on wildlife in the Pacific Ocean.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
There are several dozen additional photos at the artist’s website.
Recycle, reuse, rethink how we look at garbage. Tires are an especially volatile item, as they take up space and emit terrible fumes when burned. Check out Oddee‘s collection of creative sculptures made from discarded tires.
Link | Above example found at mo_metalart’s Flickr set.
Previously on Neatorama – Tired.
Update 10/15/09 by Alex: The artist is Mirko Siakkou-Flodin, and this particular tire sculpture is at the Jumeirah Beach Residence in Dubai, UAE. Oddee is a great source of many interesting things, and they usually credit their photos, so I wonder why they didn’t do it in this instance.
Great-grandmother Josephine Mandamin, an Anishinabe elder from Thunder Bay, Ontario has seen the decline of the Great Lakes due to pollution, and decided to do something to bring the world’s attention to the problem. She began walking around the lakes six years ago, and has covered 17,000 kilometers so far.
In the Anishinabe tradition, women fetch the water. So, in 2003, when Mandamin was “moved by the spirits” to speak out for the Great Lakes, it was natural for her to pick up her copper pail and start walking. She decided to circle the lakes and tell people that “the water is sick … and people need to really fight for that water, to speak for that water, to love that water.”
Every spring since, Mandamin and a small band of followers have walked around one of the lakes. Next weekend they depart from the Katarokwi Native Friendship Centre here to walk up the St. Lawrence River. Their mission will end where the lakes’ water pours into the Atlantic Ocean (bearing so much poison that a quarter of the male beluga whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence have cancer).
At every tributary, Mandamin stops and talks directly to the water, offering prayers, tobacco and thanks. “I’ve heard so many times, `You’re crazy…’” she says. “But we know it’s not a crazy thing we’re doing; we know it’s for the betterment of the next generations.”
The Great Lakes provide drinking water to 35 million people. Link to story. Link to Mother Earth Water Walk website. -via Nag on the Lake
Illustration by Brian Hughes.
People love to overlook certain things that pollute, just because we don’t have an alternative yet. We never talk about the emissions caused from cement, which produces more carbon dioxide than the entire aviation industry. Did you know that 5% of all CO2 production comes from cement?
There is finally an alternative. The British engineering firm, Novacem, has created a new cement that uses magnesium silicates, which emit no carbon dioxide when they are heated. As the cement hardens, it absorbs CO2. In all, it removes about .6 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of cement used.
