Alleging that the company violated federal and state water laws, The United States, the California Department of Fish and Game and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, Central Coast Region, filed a civil complaint in federal court against Greka Oil & Gas Inc. (now known as HVI Cat Canyon Inc.).
While biobased industrial performance chemicals have been around for awhile, manufacturers have made great strides in the past decade in improving their effectiveness.
DTE Energy Services Inc. recently received approval from the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District to convert an existing coal-fired power plant at the Port of Stockton to operate on biomass fuel.
Researchers at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, have together with their colleagues at the Swiss Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) and the HTW Berlin, Germany, developed an online tool to assess the sustainability of biofuel production.
The significance of climate change to the practice of agriculture, soils, and land management has led the 10,000-plus members of the American Society of Agronomy (ASA), Crop Science Society of America (CSSA), and Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) to develop a position statement on climate change, based on a review of current scientific knowledge and understanding.
Under the terms of the agreement, Kraft is also required to clean up the plant site and groundwater, and install mitigation systems in affected homes. The settlement was approved Friday afternoon by a U.S. District Court judge in Indianapolis.
It was evident at AWWA's convention and expo that meter manufacturers have responded in a number of ways to a federal mandate that will ban lead from implements that handle drinking water beginning in 2014.
This premier award recognizes those member companies that have enhanced and embraced the Responsible Care ethic of performance improvement and sustainability throughout their company.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has made public the identities of more than 150 chemicals contained in 104 health and safety studies that industry had claimed confidential.
<p>The owner and manager of a California condominium complex were sentenced for conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act’s asbestos work practice standards during the renovation of a 204-unit apartment building in Winnetka, Calif., in 2006 – work that caused asbestos to be released into the complex and the surrounding community. </p><p>
Charles Yi, of Santa Clarita, Calif., was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson to four years in prison. John Bostick, also of Santa Clarita, was sentenced to six months home confinement, 150 hours of community service, and three years probation. Yi was convicted after a two-week trial in March 2011 when a jury found him guilty of five felony offenses, including conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act. Bostick pleaded guilty in February 2011 to conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act. </p><p>
The jury also convicted Yi of failing to notify the Environmental Protection Agency and the South Coast Air Quality Management District about a renovation containing asbestos, failing to provide a properly trained person during a renovation containing asbestos, failing to properly remove asbestos and failing to properly dispose of asbestos wastes.
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Yi was the owner of the now-defunct Millennium-Pacific Icon Group and Bostick was its vice-president. Millennium-Pacific owned the Forest Glen apartment complex in Winnetka that was being converted into condominiums in 2006. Knowing that asbestos was present in the ceilings of apartments in the Forest Glen complex, Yi, Bostick, and the project manager, Joseph Yoon, hired workers who were not trained or certified to conduct asbestos abatements. The workers scraped the ceilings of the apartments without knowing about the asbestos and without wearing any protective gear. The illegal scraping resulted in the repeated release of asbestos-containing material throughout the apartment complex and the surrounding area because Santa Ana winds were blowing during the time of the illegal work. After the illegal asbestos abatement was shut down by an inspector from the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the asbestos was cleaned up at a cost of approximately $1.2 million. Yoon pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in June 2010 and is scheduled to be sentenced in July. </p><p>
The federal Clean Air Act requires those who own or supervise the renovation of buildings that contain asbestos to adhere to certain established work practice standards. These standards were created to ensure the safe removal and disposal of the asbestos and the protection of workers.
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Two carbon forestry projects have reached verification status against the climate, community and biodiversity (CCB) standards, meaning that the projects have been implemented using best practices for community engagement and have generated benefits for local communities and biodiversity as well as for the climate.
The utility could provide individuals their energy-usage information in real time, which enabled them to make informed choices to reduce their electricity demand.
The voluntary carbon market shrugged off policy failures and the closure of the Chicago Climate Exchange in 2010 to post a 34 percent surge in volume to a record 131 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) worth at least $424 million, according to a new report.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is ordering Consolidated Tire Recyclers Inc., which operates a tire recycling facility in Mecca, Calif., to remove excess stockpiled tires and improve fire prevention or face fines of up to $7,500 per day.
According to a recent report from Pike Research, despite limited production to date, the scale-up potential of algae is substantial compared to other non-food based feedstocks.
Supermarkets are among the most energy-intensive buildings around, and refrigeration uses more than half of that energy. That doesn't even include the harm that leaking refrigerants cause to the ozone layer. EPA's GreenChill program works with companies and their refrigeration engineers across the country to help program participants lower their refrigeration emissions of all kinds.
According to a survey of more than 100 senior executives in the U.S. and Canadian electric and natural gas industries, the five most critical challenges facing the North American energy industry, in order of importance, are: environmental regulation, aging infrastructure, non-environmental regulation, an aging industry workforce, and the need for new pricing mechanisms.
Nine partners from seven countries have joined in a project to show that ethanol, biodiesel and bioproducts can be produced from algae on a large scale.
A University of Sheffield professor has found a way of locking up iodine radioisotopes in a durable, solid material suitable for ultimate disposal, such as lead iodovanadinite(Pb5(VO4)3I).
The once degraded forests in the Curacautin Valley in Chile have now recovered sufficiently, after hard work over the last decades, to be able to help provide a sustainable living to the people in the area, based on fair trade and responsible forest management principles.