Bottled Water

In the documentary Tapped, the effects of bottled water and the bottled water industry were explored. While highly informative, the movie was very biased against the industry. I felt that it was blaming the big companies for everything while the people who were throwing away the bottles after finishing them were the sweet, innocent, victims. I feel that the people who buy bottled water are just as responsible for the pollution they cause as much as the big companies. And while the FDA, who should be able to control this but can't, is also responsible, the main perpetrators are the people and the companies. I know that I buy bottled water because it is convenient, it is cheap, and it is easy to access. But when I empty my bottle of water, I then fill it up again with tap water or water from other sources (thank you for the free water public school system). The image the movie gave was of the big scary dragon of the industry terrorizing the poor little innocents. But I think the image should be more that of the people and the industry both polluting the planet. The consumer makes the choice to buy the water bottle from the company, and the company makes the conscious decision to sell this product to the consumer.
In class, we discussed water pollution. This is related to the bottled water industry because when the empty bottles are thrown away, they eventually end up in the Pacific Ocean. In the ocean, the bottles poison the fish and other aquatic life. This, I think, is the fault of the people, not the industry. They are the ones throwing the bottles away (where "away" means "eventually into the ocean"), not the industry.  The average recycling rate for the United States is 20%. In states with "Bottle Bills," The return rate is higher due to a bigger incentive. This is because states with bottle bills for every bottle you recycle, you get 5 or 10 cents back. The industry has to pay a few cents more per bottle made, but the recycling level goes up. Most states don't have bottle bills due to lobbying from the companies. The movie made the extra few cents per bottle sound like it was an infinitesimal amount, but when you add in the fact that there are probably about a million bottles made every day, that infinitesimal amount? It adds up to a lot more money than you would think. If I was in charge and a decent businessman, I would try to avoid the extra cost too.
As for me, seeing how I'm not a businessman, I still drink bottled water. The only time I replace my bottle is when I lose it. It's cheap, available, and (here's the big one) reusable. I refill it every time I empty it. It's cheaper, more available, and better for the environment.

Water Pollution

I recently did a glog on legacy pollutants, with an emphasis on PCBs. (you can see it at http://s6aars4.edu.glogster.com/legacy-pollutants/ ) The basic definition of a legacy pollutant is a pollutants that is very stable, therefore it is very difficult to get out of the environment. PCBs are a family of more dangerous legacy pollutants.
While PCBs were banned in the seventies, they remain in the environment, often in bodies of water, such as rivers, lakes, and ponds. While there are options to get them out of these bodies of water, most of said options are expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, the first step to getting PCBs and legacy pollutants out of the environment is to make the opportunities to get them out of the environment (more specifically the hydrosphere, or all water on the planet) more available. If it was not such a hurdle to remove legacy pollutants, there would be less chance of legacy pollutants in a certain area.
The next step to remove legacy pollutants is to raise awareness. This would get communities more involved in the problems in their local water supply. Currently, the problem of PCBs in varying water sources across the country is being taken on almost solely by universities. There are some nonprofit groups that are working for changes in the system, but the EPA is virtually powerless in the world of water pollutants, and in my opinion this is mainly due to lobbyists trying to maintain their political goals. On Earth Day in 1970, during President Nixon's term, there were countrywide protests against the problems with the environment. These protests prompted the founding of the EPA and the Clean Water Act of 1972. Over the years, the EPA has grown weaker and has lost some of it's control over the biggest polluters.
PCBs and legacy pollutants are serious problems. In Puget Sound, PCBs are causing problems with the Orcas that live there. The PCBs stay in the sediment at the bottom of the bay, where they are eaten by microorganisms, which are eaten by small fish, to the large fish, to the orcas, where they cause problems, such as weakness, disease, and more premature deaths than is normal.

Water Conservation

Among Earth's limited resources, water is one of the most valuable. Two Hydrogen (hydro- from the latin word for water, -gen: to produce or form) atoms with a single oxygen (oxy-: sharp, or acidic, -gen: see above) atom, only 3% of all Earth's water is freshwater, and most of that 3% is in polar ice caps and glaciers. All in all, less than 1% of Earth's water is viable. Yet even with efforts in recent years, water distribution is highly uneven. The average American per capita of water is 151 gallons of water a day, where an average sub-saharan African per capita of water is 5 gallons a day.
The water conservation movement has gained some momentum in the past few years, but most are rather unaware of the purpose of water conservation. Water conservation is just that. Conserving water for future use. Some of the main ways to conserve water that are the also some of the easiest. Taking shorter showers, turning off faucets completely, washing only full loads of dishes or clothes (in their respective washers), and the like.

A water footprint in the literal sense. From http://liveearth.org/en/save/water

Literacy Glog Update

I finished my book two months ago. It was interesting, but focused more on the law side of the trials it was describing, than the science of it all. There was very little reference to any of the characteristics of arsenic, such as the metallic taste of the compound, or the chemical makeup. On the historical value of the book, it shows not only the discrimination against what were considered loose women, but the discrimination against the lower classes in the American Victorian age. In one case, the victim came from a very poor family, and already had one child. When her sister was on the witness stand, not only was the defense attorney rude, but the prosecuting attorney was as well. When the sister began crying, a member of the community sitting in the audience reportedly began smirking. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the accused man's wife perjured herself (lied) on the stand. When she gave her testimony, the defending and prosecuting attorneys were polite, and tried to avoid making her upset, because her husband, the man accused of the murder, was the town's minister.

Food Vs. Fuel: What Do I Think?

Biolfuels. According to nationalgeographic.com, Henry Ford, maker of the Ford model T, originally planned for the Model Ts to run on ethanol, a biofuel. Then cheap gasoline and diesel showed up and put an end to that. What is a biofuel you ask? A biofuel is a fuel made from plants. "But aren't fossil fuels also plants that have decomposed and fossilized," you say? Biofuels refer to plants grown more recently, such as within the last few years or so. They absorb CO2 as they grow, and emit less CO2 when used as fuels, and they're a renewable source, so they should be miracle cure to the global warming problem, right? Yes. They will help with global warming. But in the most countries where they are developed, they come from food. In the U.S., they come from food crops. More often than not, these are corn and soybeans, and growing, processing, and transporting these for biofuels puts a lot more CO2 into the environment than the biolfuels take out as well. (http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/biofuel-profile/) Alternatives are not well known or tested enough, therefore there is no way for the bioful industry to not impact the food industry at the current level. 

One reason for this is that crops used formerly for food have been converted to biofuels. According to David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, as of 2008, "the demand for biofuels ... has contributed to a rise in global food prices," but Tilman also says growing populations (like those in China or India) are also responsible. In the same year, the now-former U.N. Rapporteur Jean Ziegler called biofuels a "crime against humanity" for taking food out of the reach of the hungry (Popular Science, 2008). But more hungry people may be inevitable, biofuels or none. According to the NOVA documentary The People Paradox, the world's population can be expeced to almost double in the next 50 years (NOVA), when, if a report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization s correct, farmers will have to produce 70% more food. An article from the U.N. newspaper The Guardian also states that almost all available farmland is being cultivated, and in ways that degrade the land, leading to erosion and waste of water. With these factors already contributing to rising food prices, the production of biofuels places even more stress on the food industry to feed a rapidly growing populaton of 7 billion people (guardian.co.uk)

Another way that biofuels are affecting the food industry is that croplands that are being used for biofuels were formerly used for food crops. As stated above, all available cropland is being used, and biofuels are taking land that could be used for crops  (guardian.co.uk). Clearing more land for more cropland is not an option, because, as a 2008 study shows, land clearing releases more CO2 into the air than the biofuels make up for. The carbon debt (the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere when an action is done and the number of years it takes to get said carbon out of atmosphere) for varying biofuels ranges from 17 years to over 400. (guardian.co.uk and National Geographic)  This, in turn affects crop pollination through heat waves that reduce fertility rates for varying crops. These cause less crops to harvest, leading to higher food prices. In a heat wave in the summer of this year, 4.1 billion bushels of corn were lost and 575 million bushels of soybeans (the two main biofuel and food crops) (NBCnews.com)

While the problems with biofuels are well documented, the solutions are either unknown, untested, or expensive. For instance, according to a National Geographic article about switchgrass biofuels (switchgrass is a grass native to North America), "key criticism of the biofuel is that large amounts of fossil fuels are required to farm and refine it." Switchgrass ethanol is a better source than corn or soybeans because it:

1. Has a lower net energy calculation (how much energy it takes to farm and process the fuel minus the energy the fuel provides)
2. Can grow on infertile land, with minimal water and no fertilizers, and
3. Has a higher energy output than other biofuels.

Switchgrass ethanol also has lower input levels then other biofuel  crops. The main problem with swtichgrass ethanol (aside from virtual anonymity) is that it is expensive. (National Geographic). David Tilman and his colleagues have found that the best energy yields come from prarie grasses that are multicultural (they are grown with a number of other species of plants), whereas most large-scale farmers have monoculture crops (where a plant species is grown with just that species). (Popular Science, 2008) At the time these articles were published, these methods were still in the testing phase. 

A graph showing what biofuels were most commonly used in 2010, from  greentechmedia.com

While biofuels are potentially a fuel that may reduce the human impact on the environment, and while they are definitely more effective than fossil fuels, there are still significant obstacles to overcome so that world food sources are not negatively impacted.

Pesticides

According to the U.S. EPA (http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/about/index.htm) a pesticide is "any substance or mixture of substances intended for

• preventing,
• destroying,
• repelling, or
• mitigating any pest."

The term often brings to mind insecticides, but according to the U.S. EPA, but "pesticide" can also refer to herbicides, fungicides, and other similar substances. Pesticides are often used in an agricultural setting to get rid of weeds, bugs, and the like. The green revolution used pesticides extensively, but nowadays, some countries, like India, are suffering from the extreme use of pesticides and similar chemicals (http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2008/07/07/the-toxic-consequences-of-the-green-revolution).

Photo from usnews.com, taken in the village Bathinda 

According to U.S. News, farmers are voicing "...concerns that decades of chemical use is ruining the soil."

Porosity Permeability and Water Retention

Porosity and Permeability (hereafter Po and Pm respectively) are directly related. During the lab when the Pm for the gravel was 4.2 cm/second, the Po was 58%. When the Pm for the sand was .05 cm/second, the Po was 28%. When the Pm for the clay was 5.9 x10 to the -3 cm/second, the Po was 10%. Given this data, it is safe to conclude that Po and Pm are directly related, that is to say, when one goes down the other goes down as well, and when one goes up the other goes up as well. This is relevant to daily living because if soil has high Po and Pm, (like the gravel) it doesn't hold water, thus meaning that plant life isnt likely to thrive in that place, but if there is a medium Po and Pm, often like the kind found in loam, plant life is likely to be sustained.

Reading isn't a traumatic experience

A few days ago I started reading the book that I have to read for class (quite interesting). Today I am almost a quarter of the way through. Arsenic under the Elms is a very engaging book, balancing equal parts story, history, and forensic science. It covers the victorian murders of two women and the ensuing trials. I chose this book because it seems that it reads like another book I like that combines stories and science, The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum. The book I am currently reading is very interesting, and I am currently at the point where the trial on Herbert Hayden is starting. I look forward to the rest with anticipation.

Why I am a digital native

Back in prehistoric times, around the 1950s really, my grandfather worked at NMSU. There, he was involved with the giant room-sized computers (a constant playground for my mother and her sisters). Now, he just works with computers (my oldest aunt followed in his footsteps, and her son is doing the same). He prefers Macs. When one has so much influence from the digital side of things, it's rather like a constant seige. You fight it, and try to evade the oncoming attacks, but eventually you just give in, and start to love your captors (computers and those who manipulate them) in a sort of Stockholm syndrome. It did not help when I befriended another computer geek. Now, in my immediate family, I'm the unofficial computer guru.
This has grown to be a lifestyle of sorts to me, using the internet with little restraint, making me more introverted than if I didn't use the internet as much (a rather insignificant difference, now that I think about it).