At Least 10 Uses For Newspapers

I use the majority of our newspapers from summer reading in the garden. I soak the sections in a pale of water, and then lay them out before I put mulch down. Worms love it, it helps keep moisture in and weeds OUT.

Other ideas, not all of them good, are here
There is a new way to make newspaper logs as well, other than wetting the sections and rolling them up - which doesn't burn well at all. It presses the paper into bricks. I've not tried it, as I had tried the log roller and it failed miserably. But I may now with the recycling business going belly up due to the depressed market here and overseas. Since we have a wood burner, I might as well see if this does any better, and can at least use a few of our off-season papers this way.

Some of the better ideas found on the first website
Clean the chalkboard.
Use to cover work books.
Shred newspaper to use as packing material, for storage or moving belongings.
Keep boots upright with a roll of newspaper
Stuff smelly shoes with newspaper to absorb odors.
Stuff newspaper into wet shoes and leave them to dry overnight
When painting window trim, wet sheets of paper and stick on windows, to reduce splatters on window glass.
Use as emergency toilet paper.
Wrap around ice cream containers to keep ice cream cool
Stuff inside your coat or under blankets to keep warm in an emergency
Line the shelf of a smelly fridge with newspaper overnight to absorb the odors.
Wrap fruit it in newspaper If you want it to ripen quickly
Use for messy cleanup jobs like cleaning the oven. Use sheets of crumpled newspaper to wipe up most of the gunk before wiping down with a soapy wet sponge.
Germinate seeds for the spring garden by spreading between damp sheets of newspaper.
Make garden seed starting pots
Crumpled newspaper makes mirrors and glass shine. Just spray the surface with glass cleaner and use them as you would regular paper towels.
Line the bottom of pet cages (litter boxes, birds, rabbit, hamster...etc)
Take newspapers to the local veterinarian or animal shelter for use in the cages.
Learn origami

Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up

By MATT RICHTEL and KATE GALBRAITH
Published: December 7, 2008

The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices.

Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.

“It’s awful,” said Briana Sternberg, education and outreach coordinator for Sedona Recycles, a nonprofit group in Arizona that recently stopped taking certain types of cardboard, like old cereal, rice and pasta boxes. There is no market for these, and the organization’s quarter-acre yard is already packed fence to fence.

“Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money,” Ms. Sternberg said.

In West Virginia, an official of Kanawha County, which includes Charleston, the state capital, has called on residents to stockpile their own plastic and metals, which the county mostly stopped taking on Friday. In eastern Pennsylvania, the small town of Frackville recently suspended its recycling program when it became cheaper to dump than to recycle. In Montana, a recycler near Yellowstone National Park no longer takes anything but cardboard.

There are no signs yet of a nationwide abandonment of recycling programs. But industry executives say that after years of growth, the whole system is facing an abrupt slowdown.

Many large recyclers now say they are accumulating tons of material, either because they have contracts with big cities to continue to take the scrap or because they are banking on a price rebound in the next six months to a year.

“We’re warehousing it and warehousing it and warehousing it,” said Johnny Gold, senior vice president at the Newark Group, a company that has 13 recycling plants across the country. Mr. Gold said the industry had seen downturns before but not like this. “We never saw this coming.”

The precipitous drop in prices for recyclables makes the stock market’s performance seem almost enviable.

On the West Coast, for example, mixed paper is selling for $20 to $25 a ton, down from $105 in October, according to Official Board Markets, a newsletter that tracks paper prices. And recyclers say tin is worth about $5 a ton, down from $327 earlier this year. There is greater domestic demand for glass, so its price has not fallen as much.

This is a cyclical industry that has seen price swings before. The scrap market in general is closely tied to economic conditions because demand for some recyclables tracks closely with markets for new products. Cardboard, for instance, turns into the boxes that package electronics, rubber goes to shoe soles, and metal is made into auto parts.

One reason prices slid so rapidly this time is that demand from China, the biggest export market for recyclables from the United States, quickly dried up as the global economy slowed. China’s influence is so great that in recent years recyclables have been worth much less in areas of the United States that lack easy access to ports that can ship there.

The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.

Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too — like grocery chains and other retailers — have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.

But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.

“Before, you could be green by being greedy,” said Jim Wilcox, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now you’ve really got to rely more on your notions of civic participation.”

The impact of the downturn on individual recycling efforts varies. Most cities are keeping their recycling programs, in some cases because they are required by law, but also because the economics, while they have soured, still favor recycling over landfills.

In New York City, for instance, the city is getting paid $10 for a ton of paper, down from $50 or more before October, but it has no plans to cease recycling, said Robert Lange, the city’s recycling director. In Boston, one of the hardest-hit markets, prices are down to $5 a ton, and the city expects it will soon have to pay to unload its paper. But city officials said that would still be better than paying $80 a ton to put it in a landfill.

Some small towns are refusing to recycle some material, particularly the less lucrative plastics and metals, and experts say more are likely to do so if the price slump persists.

Businesses and institutions face their own challenges and decisions. Harvard, for instance, sends mixed recyclables — including soda bottles and student newspapers — to a nearby recycling center that used to pay $10 a ton. In November, Harvard received two letters from the recycler, the first saying it would begin charging $10 a ton and the second saying the price had risen to $20.

“I haven’t checked my mail today, but I hope there isn’t another one in there,” said Rob Gogan, the recycling and waste manager for the university’s facilities division. He said he did not mind paying as long as the price was less than $87 a ton, the cost for trash disposal.

The collapse of the market is slowing the momentum of recycling overall, said Mark Arzoumanian, editor in chief of Official Board Markets. He said the problem would hurt individual recycling businesses, but also major retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores, that profit by selling refuse.

Mr. Arzoumanian said paper mills in China and the United States that had signed contracts requiring them to buy recycled paper were seeking wiggle room, invoking clauses that cover extraordinary circumstances. “They are declaring ‘force majeure,’ which is a phrase I’d never thought I’d hear in paper recycling,” he said.

Mr. Arzoumanian and others said mills were also starting to become pickier about what they take in, rejecting cardboard and other products that they say are “contaminated” by plastic ties or other material.

The situation has also been rough on junk poachers — people who made a profitable trade of picking off cardboard and other refuse from bins before the recycling trucks could get to it. Those poachers have shut their operations, said Michael Sangiacomo, chief executive of Norcal Waste Systems, a recycling and garbage company that serves Northern California.

“I knew it was really bad a few weeks ago when our guys showed up and the corrugated cardboard was still there,” he said. “People started calling, saying ‘You didn’t pick up our cardboard,’ and I said, ‘We haven’t picked up your cardboard for years.’ ”

The recycling slump has even provoked a protest of sorts. At Ruthlawn Elementary School in South Charleston, W.V., second-graders who began recycling at the school in September were told that the program might be discontinued. They chose to forgo recess and instead use the time to write letters to the governor and mayor, imploring them to keep recycling, Rachel Fisk, their teacher, said.

The students’ pleas seem to have been heard; the city plans to start trucking the recyclables to Kentucky.

“They were telling them, ‘We really don’t care what you say about the economy. If you don’t recycle, our planet will be dirty,’ ” Ms. Fisk said.

Great Sunflower Project Report

From their emailed newsletter:

Dear Sunflower Participants,

*Happy Holidays! * I want to thank you so much for your support and participation in The Great Sun Flower Project. Together, we have launched one of the most ambitious citizen science projects ever attempted, all to help understand what is happening to our bee pollinators. Over the past twelve months, we have had over *40,000* people sign up to participate. All 50 states,
all provinces and all territories in Canada are represented. We have also had a great deal of international interest in expanding the project. (I’ve been overwhelmed by this response and touched by your enthusiasm and different perspectives on pollinators.) We have grown a ‘virtual’ community of teachers, community gardeners, nature center staff, beekeepers, pollinator enthusiasts, retirees, home schooling groups and parents interested in participating in a project with their children. If everyone plants seeds this year, we will have sunflower samples from the Arctic Circle to the tip of Florida and west to Hawaii and east to Puerto Rico! You can see a map with about 25,000 of the locations on the website.

*Results from this year.* While we are still entering the data sheets that were sent by mail, below are some preliminary numbers. (If you did mail in your bee information, please make sure to enter your garden description information online.)

We have data from just under 1200 different gardens. About 20% of the participants did not see any bees on their sunflower within our 30 minute limit! Please note that negative data are very important to our study – so if you did not see any bees, do not be discouraged. This is a very important observation. Based on what we’ve analyzed so far, 1 in 5 gardens appear to have low pollinator service. Slightly fewer than 50% of our gardeners saw 5 bees. Sarah Greenleaf and Claire Kremen researched how many seeds are produced per honey bee visit, and found that when honey bees are by themselves, 3 seeds are produced per visit. However, if native bees are also there, up to 15 seeds might result from a single visit. Native bee visits result in anything from 1 to 19 seeds per visit depending on the species. What this means is that if you have 5 bee visits per hour from 9-5 pm (bees tend to work banker’s hours!), your sunflower plant will produce between 120 and 600 seeds. That sounds pretty good until you realize that there might be 10 flowers that are each capable of producing from 800-2000 seeds. The flowers would have to last for almost two weeks each to be completely pollinated. We are finding a lot of un-pollinated flowers in the flower heads that you have sent. All these insights add up to the suggestion that many gardens are not as productive as they could be because they do not have adequate pollination.

If you want to see how your garden did relatively consider that 46% of our gardeners saw at least 5 bees in 30 minutes; 51% saw at least 4 bees in 30 minutes; 59% saw at least 3 bees and 70% saw at least 2 bees and 79% saw at least 1 bee. As we analyze more data, I’ll post more results.

*New collaborations!* Last year we partnered with the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the New York City Parks department and coordinated planting flowers in all of San Francisco’s public urban gardens with SFGRO. This upcoming year, using sunflowers as the link, we will be collaborating with the National Phenology Network (http://www.usanpn.org )
tracking how sunflowers and bees are responding to climate change and Discover Life (www.discoverlife.org) which will allow us to create an online collection of digital photographs of the insects on our sunflowers. Most importantly, we have a new partnership with Cornell called the Birds and Bees Challenge. The goal of The Birds and the Bees Challenge is to help young people between the ages of 7 and 17 rediscover nature in their own neighborhoods and become amateur naturalists, scientists, photographers, and artists. The Birds and the Bees Challenge is focused on bringing art and science to schools, after-school programs, churches, rehabilitation and recovery agencies, businesses, museums, nature centers, and parks across the United States. The majority of these participating agencies (80%) reach ethnically and culturally diverse groups as well as economically disadvantaged audiences. This project is one of 30 projects endorsed by the Forum on Children and Nature (http://www.forumonchildrenandnature.org/), a group that developed to respond to the nature deficit disorder written about in Richard Louv’s book, “Last Child in the Woods.”

*Plans for next year.* We expect to send an email out in late January asking everyone to confirm their addresses (we had a lot of letters with seed packets sent back last year). We’ll also ask you to fill out some preliminary information about your garden. We are working with Renee Shepherd of Renee’s Garden seeds and will be using Lemon Queen sunflowers (the annuals,
not the perennials) this year. They are wonderful and germinate readily!! We will send out seeds in late March or early April to everyone who is on our list. (We will send out later mailings.) We are also planning to expand the plant list to include a couple of common perennials that people indicated were important bee plants in their gardens. I’ll send more information out about
these this spring.

I am committed to supplying free seeds again this year, making participation accessible to everyone who’s interested, and to growing our collaborations and impact, but we need funds to support mailing seeds, maintain the website, and analyze and visualize the data. If you have the ability to help us fund the Great Sunflower Project, we would be very grateful. Donations can be made either
* online at: https://www.applyweb.com/public/contribute?s=sfusceng (please write Sunflower” in the “Other” box)

* or by mail at: Great Sunflower Project, Dept. of Biology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132.

In these unpredictable times, the role that pollinators play in our lives is more important than ever. With your continued support and participation, we can begin to determine where pollinators are declining and develop conservation strategies.

If you have suggestions about improving the project, we’ve set up a forum on the website to discuss ideas! Please give us your best advice. Once again, thank you for your support and “bee” well.

Happy Holidays!

Gretchen LeBuhn

Queen Bee

Utility Bill Savings

Since I moved back to my parents' house in 2001, I've been doing what I can to make the house more energy efficient. All 3 of us are on very limited incomes now and so must conserve the collective monies in any way possible.

One problem being, they are elderly and are getting cold at warmer temperatures. This means each year, the average indoor temperature goes up about a degree. And with Mom's heart/lung issues, she needs AC in the summer for air quality as much as temperature. So AC is turned on at cooler outdoor temps.

Conserving with parameters like these is a challenge! However, with a 140 y.o. house, it's not as bad as it could be. I'm getting close to maxing out on improvements, but I have about another year of major work before I'm struggling to find ways to bring the numbers down.

My natural gas (NG) and electric (E) numbers go back to 2004. Unfortunately, I've not found the bills for prior to 2004, although I'm certain my mom has kept them somewhere. It's just a matter of finding them.

2004 we added a new roof, which meant some more attic insulation, peak vents, better underlayment - the new roof is in the picture above...

So, 2004 numbers

NG total 1606 btu's

E total 12,595 kwh's

CO2 in Metric Tons - 13.07

WOW - are those horrid numbers or WHAT? Perspective - it's about 1000 sf.

In 2005, we resided it. Sorry - vinyl. We couldn't afford anything different. I believe we also got the new gas stove and furnace, which the numbers reflect...

The numbers for 2005

NG - 1127

E - 11309

CO2 - 10.37

Late in 2005, so the numbers are reflected more in 2006, we insulated an unheated space of the house, the cellarway. It went from hideous to fab (by comparison) in a month. Life can be that good sometimes!

We weren't able to add a lot of insulation, but a new window was put in, a new door, a new storm door, drywall and caulking continues as I find new cracks to fill.

This, along with the addition of CFLs to most of our lighting, was all we could do for the house. I turned my attention to landscaping for 2006.

Some of the improvements helped with the heating and cooling of the house, but mostly beautification and reducing the amount of lawn to be mowed.

2006 numbers

NG 1268 (up, but winter was brutal)
E 9377 (down!)

CO2 - 10.42

2007 turned into the year life was put on hold. Mom had her heart attack April 1, and is still undergoing stent placement 18 months later. I did little more than trying to keep the house running since she was fully unable, I'm barely able and Dad is oblivious/unable. LOL I did get some more of the attic insulated with radiant barrier, but that was it.

2007 Numbers

NG 1315

E 9832

CO2 - 10.85

More heating and more AC due to the illness.

And finally 2008 rolled around. It's been the year of weather extremes. Hot, dry, cold, snow. And that was just April. But truly, we had many more days to AC and to heat than the previous 2 years, so I was certain we'd be headed for trouble.

However, we were able to remodel Dad's bedroom, which meant ripping out the lath and plaster, insulating fully and making it look like something other than a 140 y.o. attic space.

Yes, those are plank walls.

With the added insulation all the way around, his room accounts for almost 25% of the roofline. A mighty big chunk to be insulating. And WOW did it help during the summer! The upstairs stayed cooler when I added the reflective barrier stuff to crawl spaces - by almost 10 degrees. This decreased it another 15. So rather than being 100 on an 80 degree day, it was 80 at 4 in the afternoon on an 85 degree day.

The house needed to stay as cool as before, but the AC didn't run half as much because of the house staying cooler all by itself.

This winter, I have better wood to use in the woodstove, which is poorly placed to be heating the entire house (and so doesn't). The pieces are smaller, which makes it far easier for me to control the heat output. And, I've finally installed those programmable thermostats I bought a year ago. Both factors keep Dad from playing with the heat as much - at all really.

I also purchased a spin dryer. I know solar dryers are the best, but with all of the disabilities in the house, the electric dryer is really necessary. So, by spin drying, I can remove up to 2 quarts of water from the clothes before they hit the dryer. All for 300 watts. Drying time is halved, saving us a ton in electricity.

2008 Numbers

NG 1204

E 8079

CO2 - 9.59 - WOOO below 10!

A decrease of 8% year to year for NG and 18% for E. WOW

Natural Gas Numbers

2004 - 1606

2005 - 1127

2006 - 1268

2007 - 1315

2008 - 1204

Electric Numbers

2004 - 12595

2005 - 11309

2006 - 9377

2007 - 9832

2008 - 8079

The amount of money saved for this year alone, from 2004's numbers to 2008's numbers is nearly 1G. Amazingly, electric is within 1 penny of the 2004 cost. So, even though that's seen such a dramatic decrease in use, it's not as dramatic for cost savings as the NG. But, any savings is more than worth it to me!

I also know they were paying more per month for their utilities in 2001 than I am paying now, so there has been at least a halving of the amount used over the last 7 years.

The savings are being put back into the house - we'll be redoing my room next. It's on the NW side of the house, no insulation, storm windows that don't really work, and receives the full brunt of winter wind - even with the landscaping I've done.

It should be interesting to see what savings we accrue this coming year. It makes me very excited!

Land Ethics Symposium

2009 Land Ethics Symposium
http://www.bhwp.org/educational/Symposium.htm

Date: Thursday, February 19, 2009
Location: Sheraton Bucks County Hotel, Langhorne, PA
Registration Fee - includes breakfast, break snacks and buffet lunch:
$100, or $66 for full-time student. (Registration fee includes one
dollar to purchase carbon offsets from TerraPass to make the event
carbon neutral.)

Agenda

8:00 - Registration, breakfast, book sale
8:45 - Welcome
9:00 - Making a Marriage with the Land
10:00 - Protecting and Preserving Trees During Construction
11:00 - Beverage break, book sale
11:20 - Integration of Natural Elements into the Design of Stormwater
Facilities
12:20 - Lunch, book sale
1:30 - Native Perennials for Every Season and Every Reason
2:30 - Stretch break and book sale
2:45 - Using Designed Soils to Integrate Tree Canopy, Pavement and
Stormwater Management Goals
3:45 - Closing remarks
4:45 - Symposium concludes

Some Professional Continuing Education Credits are available.

Cleaner Coal? Not for TN Town

500 Million Gallons of Sludge Flood Town
By Samira J. Simone,
CNN

(Dec. 24) -- A wall holding back 80 acres of sludge from a coal plant in central Tennessee broke this week, spilling more than 500 million gallons of waste into the surrounding area.
The sludge, a byproduct of ash from coal combustion, was contained at a retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, agency officials said.

The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, a TVA spokesman told CNN.

The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River.

"We deeply regret that a retention wall for ash containment at our Kingston Fossil Plant failed, resulting in an ash slide and damage to nearby homes," TVA said in a statement released Tuesday.

TVA spokesman Gil Francis told CNN that up to 400 acres of land had been coated by the sludge, a bigger area than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Video footage from the areas affected by the TVA pond breach showed sludge as high as 6 feet, burying porches and garage doors. The slide also downed nearby power lines, though the TVA said power had been restored to the area.

Francis said Environmental Protection Agency officials were on the scene and estimated the cleanup could take four to six weeks.

Some of the goop spilled into the tributary, but preliminary water quality test show that the drinking water at a nearby treatment plant meets standards.

"I don't want to drink it. I doesn't look healthy to me," Jody Miles, who fishes in the Clinch River, told CNN affiliate WBIR. "Do you reckon they can bring all this life back that's going to die from all this mess?"

Still, there is the potential for more sludge to enter the water supply through waste runoff.

"We're taking steps to stabilize runoff from this incident," Francis said.

Although video from the scene shows dead fish on the banks of the tributary, he said that "in terms of toxicity, until an analysis comes in, you can't call it toxic."

One environmental attorney called that statement "irresponsible." The ash that gives sludge its thick, pudding-like consistency in this case is known as fly ash, which results from the combustion of coal.

Fly ash contains concentrated amounts of mercury, arsenic and benzine, said Chandra Taylor, staff attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.

"These things are naturally occurring, but they concentrate in the burning process and the residual is more toxic than it starts," she told CNN.

Appalachian environmentalists compared the mess with another spill eight years ago in eastern Kentucky, where the bottom of a coal sludge impoundment owned by Massey Energy broke into an abandoned underground mine, oozing more than 300 million gallons of coal waste into tributaries.

The water supply for more than 25,000 residents was contaminated, and aquatic life in the area perished. It took months to clean up the spill.

"If the estimates are correct, this spill is one and a half times bigger," said Dave Cooper, an environmental advocate with the Mountaintop Removal Road Show, a traveling program that explains the effect of an extreme form of mining.

While the full scope of the TVA spill is being determined, coal critics are already concerned about its long-term effects.

Cleaning up the mess, which could fill nearly 800 Olympic-size swimming pools, could take months or years, Taylor said.

"We're very concerned about how long it's going to take" to clean the spill, she told CNN.
Cooper agreed, saying, "It's 4, 5 feet deep. How are you going to scoop it up? Where are you going to put it?"

Schools Need to Think Outside The Classroom

NYS governor Paterson recently announced major funding cuts to NYS schools.

Because of this, all of the cities and towns are just abuzz about the impending educational disaster. Not wanting to inject this particular post with the normal upstate rhetoric of removing NYC from the state, there are several things that can and need to be changed to survive this economic earthquake. NYS has been hit hard economically twice in 1 decade - 9/11 and now.

I just wrote a letter to the editor, and wish to expand upon it further here. For many of the answers lie in sustainability, conservation, and of course, common sense.

School Week
I actually don't like the idea of shortening the school week, but this will be the single largest cost effective move possible. There are also ways to make this less of a day off than most would think. I do know it adds to the burden of the parents, but with the way many jobs are going, their weeks may be shortened as well.

So, with this understanding, the school week must be shortened to 4 days, rather than the average 5. This will mean an increase in the length of the school day by a full hour, along with the use of electronic media to augment the classroom during days off.

The advantages of closing schools for 3 straight days, rather than just 2 are many.
Reduced utility costs. There are few areas in life that one can reduce the cost of anything by 15%-20% in a single move. But the truth is, it's possible. Lighting, heating, cooking energy will all be reduced by at least 15%. Cooking will be a full 20% since the kitchens will be closed for at least 1 days. Lighting and heating costs will be reduced at least 15% since there will be 3 straight days with little or none used. There is a cost to reheating to working temperatures daily, so eliminating at least one of those reheating cycles will reduce the energy more than the straight reduction of not heating for at least 1 additional day.
I keep saying at least 1 day since many schools have programs running on weekend days as well. These will need to be rescheduled for during the new school week to realize the true savings necessary.

Salaries. I do not advocate in any way, a cut in teachers' salaries. They will still be working the same number of hours. These hours, however, will be distributed in different ways, not reduced. Not Reduced. The savings will come in the form of the support staff. Cafeteria workers, cleaning crews, bus drivers and administrative staff. Because the lengthening of the school day does not fully replace the number of hours total the school would normally be open, these people will all lose hours, but should still remain full time. This will not reduce health care, unemployment, worker's comp., etc. It will, at least reduce the overall cost by about 5%.

Buses. The first reduction is from 1 fewer days running. This should reduce costs by at least 15%. The second way to reduce the cost further is to reduce the number of stops each bus makes per mile. Most districts have a limit of 3-4 stops per mile. If stops were reduced to 2 per mile, regardless of which side of the road the children lived on, mileage and maintenance per bus would be improved by a full 5%. With fuel costs having been what they were in the past few years, a 5% reduction in cost, regardless of current prices, would be welcome to any school district.
Another reduction should be in distance travel. No trip should be taken that is of a greater distance than 30 miles, round trip. It will significantly curtail many sports, but the sports will remain, band competitions will remain, and some day trips will remain. Shortening the distances regularly traveled for these purposes should reduce fuel and maintenance costs another 1-2%.

Food. The school lunch program needs to be eliminated in its current form. Except for those being surved free lunches due to family economic needs, there should be no need for a full school lunch. However, fresh fruits and vegetables should be available to augment lunches brought from home and snack times in elementary schools. This will save the family and the schools alike. It is cheaper to pack a lunch, than pay for the school program. It will allow the schools to reduce costs of operating at least 1 kitchen per school, and often multiple kitchens in larger schools or high schools. The reduction in energy and staff would see a savings of 5-8%.
Considering the school lunch program is a way to rid the agri-business of surplus foods and little else, this is not a substantial loss.

Long Term

School districts need to view this as an issue that will never go away. By taking all of the above actions will allow a possible surplus in funding, which can be spent in making each building more energy efficient/independent.
Even in NYS, solar is viable. There is a new solar technologythat would be of great use to virtually every public building in NYS - for they all have flat roofs. And since Germany is finding this technology worth the investment, NYS should consider it a perfect fit.
There is also new wind technology that makes even the lightest breeze in many of our valleys capable of producing electricity at a fraction of the cost of current turbines.
Low flow toilets, more efficient lighting, radiant heat are all within grasp of schools with the tightest of budgets, and will give huge savings in a matter of 3 years or less.
Existing technology for taking the older diesel powered buses and making them run on old frying oil can be incorporated, while buying buses that run on electric can be seen as a future investment.

The Children

I can actually see a very real benefit to the children from this current crisis. School has become little more than memorization fueled by candy bars and soda from the snack machines in the entryway.

By having slightly longer classes per day, students will have a better chance of understanding and comprehending the information being given to them. Having pod casts created either as a weekly review or of daily lectures to DL in school or through the internet, they have the opportunity to listen to the information as often as necessary, of which many children would benefit.

All communities have a public access channel that is underutilized by the community. This would be the perfect combination of technology meeting need. Create an hour-long program for each subject as a weekly review to be shown at specific times throughout the week. This way each subject would be reviewed with the parent there to assist, if need be, in explaining the topic. And with so many hours available on the channel, these could be run for literally every topic of every grade. These 2 pieces of technology, along with tutoring sites online, would give each child the opportunity for the additional review all teachers agree children need.

The reduction of the use of school buses will aid the children. A program launched recently called Walk THERE explains it very nicely. The children will lose weight, be more fit, and reports are showing they are also more attentive and less prone to outbursts in class. The parents who make the commitment to the Walking School Bus are finding they are healthier, lose weight and have less depression. What more could you ask for?

Removing the school lunch program will also aid the children. These meals are typically out of the control of the nutritionist hired by the school districts, due to the food stuffs being surplus and mandated for use by the governments. This means the meals are typically high in fat, low in fiber, high sodium, high sugar and low complex carbohydrates which all make for a very difficult afternoon in the classroom. By having the nutritionist detail appropriate lunches to be sent from home, augmented by fresh fruit and vegetables in the cafeteria, the children will be healthier and far more attentive for afternoon classes. This gives the very real opportunity to have children learn the information being taught the first time around, negating any damage done by a shortened week.

Starting a vegetable garden on site would allow the children to watch the full cycle of their food, which has been proven to improve their dietary habits - from projects 35 years ago to present day. It would also allow more control over what the children eat and what is needed by them.

A program called (Neighborhood Harvest) would also be of great assistance to school food programs by utilizing local fruit grown but not harvested by private individuals. NYS has hectares of orchards that have gone almost wild that would do very well to be trimmed up and harvested for our schools, soup kitchens and food pantries. There are other sources as well, such as NY Food Exchange that would be perfect for connecting schools with growers, families with growers, etc.

This is an incredible opportunity for NYS to seize upon, revolutionizing education in ways never before imagined in ways that are already available to all. Nothing needs inventing. Nothing needs to be created. It's waiting to be utilized.

Ask your school district what it is planning on doing to create the next generation of education - something that hasn't evolved in generations.

PS - my numbers aren't based on any study or any information other than common sense and I have kept them all conservatively based.

Products With All Chemicals Listed

Found on The Grist:
Online petitions rarely do any good, but it's worth it to try. It may get someone's attention.

If you want to know what the ingredients are in your cleaning products, DL the widget or program for your cell phone or even use it on their site:
7th Generation's Cleaning-Products-Ingredients-Guide

Laws don't regulate cleaning products in anyway, so this is of particular interest if you don't use simple things like salt, baking soda, or white vinegar for the majority of your cleaning.
And remember - the largest organ in your body is your SKIN. It can absorb just about anything.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Did you know the current law regulating toxic chemicals was passed in 1976? And it hasn't changed since, even though 20,000 new chemicals have come onto the market since then.

Go to http://www.notkidsafe.org/ to watch the video, then sign the Declaration to stop pollution newborns.

WATCH THE VIDEO: http://notkidsafe.org/
SIGN THE DECLARATION: http://notkidsafe.org/

People are polluted with hundreds of industrial chemicals. Babies are born pre-polluted with 200 industrial chemicals in their bodies when they enter the world.

We are at a tipping point, where the pollution in people is increasingly associated with a range of serious diseases and conditions from childhood cancer, to autism, ADHD, learning deficits, infertility, and birth defects.

It's time to step up and protect our children. Tell the U.S. President you won't stand for this any longer.

NYS Recycling Plastic Bags

New York Governor David Paterson signed into law a bill that requires many retail establishments to start programs to collect plastic bags for recycling.

Starting Jan. 1, 2009, large grocery stores and retailers that provide plastic bags will be required to spot bins where customers can place their returned bags.

Judith Enck, New York State’s deputy secretary for the environment, said statistics show that consumers throw away roughly 100 million of the bags nationally every year.

"The bill signed by Gov. Paterson will make it easier for New Yorkers to recycle used plastic bags and encourage greater use of reusable bags," Enck said.

New York's law applies to stores with more than 10,000-square-feet of retail space or those that are part of a chain with more than five stores, each with more than 5,000-square-feet of retail space.

With the new state law, local governments are pre-empted from adopting their own shopping-bag recycling laws.

Numerous municipalities, including New York City, already passed similar legislation and have established recycling programs. The new state law builds on these existing programs, enabling all New York residents to participate.

"This is a significant victory for New York’s citizens and the environment," said Sharon Kneiss, VP of the American Chemistry Council’s Products Divisions. "The new law creates one consistent standard statewide that all municipalities can follow, while allowing existing programs to continue uninterrupted."

According to the APC, the most recent statistics show that the recycling of plastic bags and wraps increased 24 percent in 2006 nationwide.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Read this in our local paper, but found it on "Recycling Today Magazine".

Do It Yourself

With money getting tighter out there, I'm starting a reference page for DIY sites, and will branch out as I have time to more specific items - plumbing, auto, carpentry, etc. Until then, the sites will be generalized. There are plenty out there - but if you have one you always end up going to, please let me know. I'm more than happy to spread good news...

DIY.com

DIY 4 Women

DIY Ideas

DIY Network

DIY Online

Bob Vila

Do It 101

Home Time

Google DIY Directory

e-How

You Repair

Uses For Cereal Boxes

Do NOT ask me why I thought of cereal boxes. LOL But, that's what my fingers typed when I went looking for uses and re-uses of stuff.

This came from Better Budgeting.com

* Boxes can make stylish and colorful bookmarks. When I was in second grade, my teacher gave us pretty bookmarks made from empty Kleenex boxes. I treasured that simple gift with the pretty pink design. Later, when I became a classroom teacher myself, I saved empty tissue boxes and made my students bookmarks.

* Use empty tissue boxes to store extra plastic bags. Whenever you need a plastic bag, just pull one out of the box. (See 22 Creative Ways to Use Plastic Grocery Bags for more ideas on how to reuse plastic grocery store bags.)

* Save the box and cover with contact paper, or try painting the box. After decorating the box, use it for storing school papers or other items.

* By cutting off the top and part of the side of the box, you can use it as a magazine holder.

* Some boxes can make great treasure chests for young children. Once, when I was getting ready to toss out a small empty pie box, my one son asked me if he could have it to store his treasures.

* Empty boxes are great for arts and crafts collages.

* Use empty gelatin boxes, toothpaste, or makeup boxes to make animals, trains, or other toys. For some great craft ideas see the book Just a Box? by Goldie Taub Chernoff (Scholastic Book Services,1971).

* Small boxes (such as pudding or gelatin boxes) can make great puppets. Decorate your box. Punch a hole in the bottom box and insert a stick or pencil in the hole. You can also make a hand puppet by cutting through the middle of a small individual-size cereal box. (Cut only 3 sides.) Fold the box on the uncut side. Move fingers and thumb to make your puppet "talk."

* Open an empty cereal box and let your young child have fun coloring on the inside.

* Use these boxes to protect items when mailing.

* Use empty boxes for kindling to start fires.

* You can also make a book report on a cereal box. We did this for a home school book report (although we used a large empty dry milk box for it). You will want to cover the box with construction paper or something else. Draw a picture from the story on the front of the box. You can either put your summary on the front or on the back. On the side where the ingredients are typically listed, you can list the characters, setting, plot, etc. Be creative. This is more fun than an ordinary book report!

* Save and decorate empty salt boxes for your children to use as building blocks. (Be careful about the sharp spout. Either remove or cover it.)

* Large boxes are great for mailing packages, storing items, making costumes, or even for playing. My children made play houses from a washing machine and a dishwasher box. We eventually recycled the dilapidated boxes.

* Rather than throwing boxes in the trash, recycle whatever boxes you cannot use. Open the box flat and put in a recycling bin. You may see your box later as an egg carton, construction paper, or even another box!

This wallet would be a great project for kids!

A custom gift box

12 Days of Christmas Cookies

I've pooped out at day 7. LOL Oh well.

If I had been able to keep going, what great Xmas presents! Which is, actually, the reason I make them all.

Date bars - my personal favorite. They are dates, pecans, a little flour, egg and sugar and that's it. Wonderful cookies! If you like, you can roll them in powdered sugar, but it isn't required.

London Short Bread - sort of a sugar cookie, but not that much sugar. Butter, egg, flour, corn starch and sugar.

Nut balls - folks laugh. I don't care what they're called. They're delicious as well. Pecans, butter, flour. Roll in powdered sugar.

Kiss cookies - I love them. They're a little crisp - I was tired making them. Chocolate chip cookie dough without the chocolate chips. I put regular kisses and the cherry cordial kisses on this time. I do hate the individual wrapping, which is why I don't make them every year.

Muffins - this year saw apple, cran-orange and blueberry.

Peanut Butter cookies - still have to make these.

Welsh Cakes - ahhh - another most haven't heard of. Very simple - griddle cookies. You use dried fruit - currants are the traditional, flour, sugar, egg. Roll them out, cut them with a biscuit cutter and flop onto your griddle. Simple. Not too sweet. Just right. I made blueberry, cranberry, and currant.

And while there is significant effort involved, the amount of money is minimal for the amount of joy they bring. I give them to friends and family alike, for so many don't take the time anymore.

Did you know that even doing all of this labor yourself, and using your oven daily, you are still saving an incredible amount of energy, rather than buying premade cookies? Think of the shipment of ingredients, the industrial energy consumed in preparing them, the packaging - the making of the packaging, the shipping to the store, you buying, reboxing and giving out.

Making them yourself is far better for the earth, and your soul! It's wonderful therapy to create so much joy with such simple measures.

Potato Flour

I have wheat sensitive asthma, so have been trying different flours for my morning pancakes. I've gone through rye, quinjoa, millet, brown rice (favorite so far), corn, and a couple others I can't think of their names - heirloom grains - to see what is most tasty and agreeable with my asthma. It's not as if I go into status asthmaticus, I just like to not get out of breath going up stairs.

So - the latest flour to try - potato.

LOL - it is not a 1:1 exchange. It's not a 1:10 exchange. I don't know what ratio you would use, but trust me, it isn't much. When the label says, "put a tablespoon into baked good for a moist crumb", they mean a tablespoon.

I decided to make my batch of pancakes for the week, half potato, half brown-rice. It took a QUART of milk and 2 eggs to get it so I could spoon it. As soon as I added the normal 3/4 C of milk, it turned to concrete. Uh oh. Add more milk, still concrete. Add more milk and use a whisk. Still lumpy and thick. Add more milk and use the electric beaters. Add more milk, keep beating. Add more milk. LOL

Then, there was no turning them. I had greased the skillet heavily with corn oil and they stuck like glue. My regular pancake flipper just wasn't up to the task. Change flippers. Turn the flipper upside down to get better leverage. Turn half a pancake, and scrape the other half to get it flipped. Wash flipper off. Repeat with the remaining three.

They're moist. They've got a great taste. They're nothing to look at. And I've got a lot more scraping to do on my skillet to get the remnants off.

I'm going to try making a batch of rolls out of the rest of the mix. LOL - I hate wasting that kind of volume, so it'll become an expirement.

I'll let you know. LOL

At least it's sunny out today and we got snow instead of ice, so it's not a bad day by any stretch. It just got off to an interesting start.

Factory Farms Effluent

These are exerpts of the article on Grist.com. For the entire article, please click on the title - it'll take you directly to the article...

Agriculture has long been a top source of water pollution in the U.S., but in the last two decades the scale of the problem has grown dramatically with the proliferation of large-scale pork, poultry, beef, and dairy facilities, known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). From 2002 to 2005, the CAFO industry in the U.S. expanded by about 22 percent -- with substantially more animals per facility, and ever-larger piles of their droppings

Today these facilities are responsible for some 500 million tons of animal manure a year -- three times more waste than humans in this country produce, activists say. According to a 1998 report from the Department of Agriculture and U.S. EPA, CAFO muck has fouled roughly 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and groundwater in 17 states. More recent data show that 29 states have reported water contamination from these feedlots.Last week, the EPA proposed a rule [PDF] that purports to address this problem. It would revise a set of rules issued in 2003 that revamped the permitting process required of CAFOs under the Clean Water Act, with the aim of better tracking discharge levels at each facility and holding factory farms accountable for their water pollution.

"The loophole basically renders the Clean Water Act meaningless when it comes to regulating the fecal discharge from CAFOs," says Merkel. "It says to these massive facilities, 'Hey, figure out if you need a permit to pollute, and then come and get one.' It's appalling."The agriculture industry, meanwhile, is applauding the proposed rule. Don Parish, senior director of regulatory relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, says it would lighten the regulatory burden on CAFOs. Obtaining permits, he says, is "an onerous process. When you have a permit, every 'i' that you don't dot and every 't' you don't cross is a problem, and creates substantial liability concerns."

"In 2003, EPA's position was that if you're a large-scale facility, it's nearly impossible not to have some amount of discharge," says Merkel. "Therefore all large facilities should have permits."

And yet today the vast majority of factory farms still don't have permits for this runaway pollution: Of the roughly 18,800 CAFOs currently in the United States, the EPA says only about 8,500 have permits.

Dead Light Bulb Uses

One of the links in This Old House's "green Christmas decorating" had hand painted light bulbs made into ornaments for an ungodly price.

Here are links to more uses for burned out light bulbs. As I come across more, I'll add them.

Leslie

Painting light bulbs
Put a ship in a lightbulb
Salt Shakers
A Vase
Ghastly Ornaments

Christmas Can Be Even Greener

I've got another post on a Green Christmas, but never completed it.
With more and more focus on being "green", the information is coming to me rather than me hunting it down.

This Old House remains in the former economic life with their purchase ideas for decorating.
However, most of the things they show are just as easily made at home!

One idea that I wouldn't buy, but is certainly a great idea - You can also spring for the completely awesome blooming gift wrap (shown, above): attractive biodegradable papers embedded with wildflower seeds your loved ones can literally plant come spring.

Buy Locally
It's just another facet of the "locavore" movement

Buy Nothing
A Canadian Mennonite Initiative!

More Ideas From the UK

Holiday Office Parties You may find one sentance of this article offensive, but it's a worthwhile read.

We use a lot of gift bags - and reuse and reuse and reuse...Here are some ideas for you to try

My Experience
All my life I've made at least some of the gifts I've given to people. Most of the time, I have made them all, but there are times when you just see the perfect gift and there's no way you can make it.
However, all too often, the simple things are the best.

Pot holders - every few years I give potholder that I've made out of old jeans. People love them, they're fire resistant, difficult to destroy, fun, and I'm reusing fabric that wouldn't otherwise get a second lease on life.




Quilts - this isn't something just anyone can do, but it's an idea. I am a scrap quilter - so I use mostly old clothing, but also use scraps of fabric from other quilters who hate saving the bits and pieces. It's rare that I have to buy any fabric.

Christmas Ornaments - bead them, paint them, even wax ones - they're a trick to make, but a cherished for generations.

I used to knit, embroider, and all sorts of other crafts to make useable items, but I haven't done that in quite awhile.

Food - I make pickles, jam, jelly, and applesauce which I give to folks who don't do those things. It makes for a luscious present! I also bake Christmas cookies - the old fashioned ones like macaroons, London short bread, date bars, etc. It's a classic gift that people always love.


Napkins - This year I've made napkins for some. This way they save money on buying paper ones, I get rid of a lot of fabric that I don't have room for, and no trees were cut down. They're fun because they're all different, and rather then hemming them with a basic straight stitch, I use all of the fancy shmancy ones on my sewing machine to make them all more interesting.


Stockings - last year I made 6 stockings for 2 families I'm helping to recover from Katrina. I made them in the same style my great-aunt made our family's. The children will cherish them for years, rather than buying new ones each and every year - foolish! The ones I made are the 4 on the right.

Tottering Toward Turkey Preservation

For whatever odd reason, this Thanksgiving, I got thinking about raising turkeys. Do NOT ask me how that thought sprouted in my dizzy brain, but it did.

Now, why raise an ordinary turkeys when there must be a ton of 'cool' looking turkeys out there? I started doing the research. Since seeds of antique breeds of plants are called "heirloom", I figured so must go livestock. No. Of course not. Heritage is the word. So, I looked at heritage turkeys. I found a group called the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. Oooo. Big name. But also a big group. If you want a heritage animal of any type of livestock, look there. It's very interesting!

They have 4 categories for each breed - Critical, Threatened, Recovered and Study (not sure what Study is, but I'll keep looking).

After looking at all the breeds, I decided on one called Jersey Buff. The original Buff went extinct, but since it was used to develop at least one other breed, that breed was used to develop a new Buff with similar traits of the old Buff. Calm (good!), medium size, white pin feathers (makes for a pretty carcass), good egg layers and good for the small farm.
I laugh! Farm! Ha! I'm not a farm. But, whatever.

So, any one who has known me since childhood knows this would come as something of a surprise - that I might want to raise anything with wings. Why, might you ask? Well, it's a story.

Back in 5th grade, we had a science project of hatching chicks. I was one of the lucky few who got to take 2 home. Since my dad had raised chickens before, I naturally just offered up our land for at least 2.

Fortunately, according to my mom, we only got 2. A Leggern, and what I thought was an Auracana, but now I'm thinking a Partridge Plymouth Rock just by this picture. This is him all the way. The older he got, the meaner he was. Talk about not biting the hand that feeds you - this bird didn't care. He'd spur you and peck you just as soon as have you feed him. It was awful!
To set the picture for the rest of the story, it was a calm summer Sunday morning. Next door, church had just gotten underway, doors and windows open to let the breeze waft through. I trot out in my summer nightgown to feed the chickens. The rooster - whose name was Chipmunk - his markings when he was a chick were that of a chipmunk - had somehow slipped out of their run.

I round the corner to the chicken coop and am met with wings, beak and spurs. I turn tail and RUN for my life. I probably took one breath and it was all scream all the way back to the house. The 50 yard dash, full scream, on that quiet Sunday AM, with a rooster cackling behind me, catching up. Who knew they could run that fast? Hell, who knew *I* could run that fast?!

Mom, hearing the longest scream in recorded history, came to the door, just in time to open it as I was NOT stopping for something as stupid as opening the door. I streak into the house, Mom closes the door as soon as I pass through and barely kept that damn rooster out. I didn't go out again that day. LOL

Obviously, I have been traumatized by winged things. And of course, this is a story that shall haunt me the rest of my days. However, I have been considering the idea of turkey raising. NOT breeding. That means having at least one tom. I can live with hens. But, if I want eggs, I know having a tom around is kind of necessary.

By the time I'm able to get room for a few turkeys - I'm thinking six-10 and asked a guy how many I could maintain - he says 150. Ha! Yeah. Right. I'm sticking with my number. Anyway, it'll be at least a full year, if not longer, before I'm able to house any turkeys. Mom is hoping and praying that by then, I'll be onto another obsession.
I'll keep you posted. Now, if I had help rebuilding the garden house so it could also hold a couple of turkeys, it could do it earlier....

Natural Gas Drilling Anything But

The following are exerpts from the article Scientific American November 17, 2008.
Drill for Natural Gas, Pollute Water

I have a few comments. #1 - when Halliburton is involved, expect absolutely no protection for workers or the environment. It's their legacy. #2 - anything that is underground will migrate. If it didn't, we wouldn't have earth quakes. Just look at IBM and Endicott Johnson industrial sites in Endicott, NY for proof. A ground water plume of chemicals has traveled farther and faster than scientists imagined. #3 - Until this article, I believed the industry's statements that 'closed' system frakking was completely safe. My brother has 50 acres he wishes to lease to drilling companies. I was for it, as long as they didn't use up the ground water. Well, now I'm not for it in any shape or form. Not until far more research is completed in making the process safer.

The natural gas industry refuses to reveal what is in the mixture of chemicals used to drill for the fossil fuel
By Abrahm Lustgarten and ProPublica

In July a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wy. and pulled up a load of brown oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people.

The results sent shockwaves through the energy industry and state and federal regulatory agencies.

Sublette County is the home of one of the nation’s largest natural gas fields, and many of its 6,000 wells have undergone a process pioneered by Halliburton called hydraulic fracturing, which shoots vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals several miles underground to break apart rock and release the gas. The process has been considered safe since a 2004 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water. After that study, Congress even exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Today fracturing is used in 9 out of 10 natural gas wells in the United States.

Over the last few years, however, a series of contamination incidents have raised questions about that EPA study and ignited a debate over whether the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing may threaten the nation’s increasingly precious drinking water supply.

An investigation by ProPublica, which visited Sublette County and six other contamination sites, found that water contamination in drilling areas around the country is far more prevalent than the EPA asserts. Our investigation also found that the 2004 EPA study was not as conclusive as it claimed to be. A close review shows that the body of the study contains damaging information that wasn’t mentioned in the conclusion. In fact, the study foreshadowed many of the problems now being reported across the country.

The contamination in Sublette County is significant because it is the first to be documented by a federal agency, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. But more than 1,000 other cases of contamination have been documented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania....

... It is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of each contamination, or measure its spread across the environment accurately, because the precise nature and concentrations of the chemicals used by industry are considered trade secrets. Not even the EPA knows exactly what’s in the drilling fluids...

... Of the 300-odd compounds that private researchers and the Bureau of Land Management suspect are being used, 65 are listed as hazardous by the federal government....

... “Halliburton's proprietary fluids are the result of years of extensive research, development testing,” said Diana Gabriel, a company spokeswoman, in an email response....

... The debate over water arises at a critical time. In his last days in office President George W. Bush has pushed through lease sales and permits for new drilling on thousands of acres of federal land. ...

... In September the Bureau of Land Management approved plans for 4,400 new wells in Sublette County, despite the unresolved water issues. Tests there showed contamination in 88 of the 220 wells examined, and the plume stretched over 28 miles....

... “You have intervening rock in between the area that you are fracturing and the areas that provide water supplies. The notion that fractures are going to migrate up to those shallow formations -- there is just no evidence of that happening,” says Ken Wonstolen, an attorney representing the Colorado Oil and Gas Association who has worked with the petroleum industry for two decades. “I think fracturing has been given a clean bill of health.”...

... The 2004 EPA study is routinely used to dismiss complaints that hydraulic fracturing fluids might be responsible for the water problems in places like Pinedale. The study concluded that hydraulic fracturing posed “no threat” to underground drinking water because fracturing fluids aren’t necessarily hazardous, can’t travel far underground, and that there is "no unequivocal evidence" of a health risk....

... Buried deep within the 424-page report are statements explaining that fluids migrated unpredictably -- through different rock layers, and to greater distances than previously thought -- in as many as half the cases studied in the United States. The EPA identified some of the chemicals as biocides and lubricants that “can cause kidney, liver, heart, blood, and brain damage through prolonged or repeated exposure.” It found that as much as a third of injected fluids, benzene in particular, remains in the ground after drilling and is “likely to be transported by groundwater.”...

... But one of the report’s three main authors, Jeffrey Jollie, an EPA hydrogeologist, now cautions that the research has been misconstrued by industry. The study focused solely on the effect hydraulic fracturing has on drinking water in coal bed methane deposits, typically shallow formations where gas is embedded in coal. It didn’t consider the impact of above-ground drilling or of drilling in geologic formations deep underground, where many of the large new gas reserves are being developed today....

... Much of what is known about the makeup of drilling fluids comes from the personal investigations of Theo Colborn, an independent Colorado-based scientist who specializes in low-dose effects of chemicals on human health and has testified before Congress on drilling issues. Although she opposes drilling, her research is referenced by scientists at the EPA, at the United States Geological Survey, and at state-level regulatory agencies and is widely believed to be the most comprehensive information available...

... In Garfield County there were signs this was already happening. Animals that had produced offspring like clockwork each spring stopped delivering healthy calves, according to Liz Chandler, a veterinarian in Rifle, Co. A bull went sterile, and a herd of beef cows stopped going into heat, as did pigs. In the most striking case, sheep bred on an organic dairy farm had a rash of inexplicable still births ­ all in close proximity to drilling waste pits, where wastewater that includes fracturing fluids is misted into the air for evaporation....

... New Mexico has placed a one year moratorium on drilling around Santa Fe, after a survey found hundreds of cases of water contamination from unlined pits where fracking fluids and other drilling wastes are stored. “Every rule that we have improved . . . industry has taken us to court on,” said Joanna Prukop, New Mexico’s cabinet secretary for Energy Minerals and Natural Resources. “It’s industry that is fighting us on every front as we try to improve our government enforcement, protection, and compliance… We wear Kevlar these days.”...

...As a practical matter, drilling workers in Colorado and Wyoming said in interviews that the fluids are often kept in smaller quantities. That means at least some of the ingredients won’t be disclosed.

“They’ll never get it,” says Bruce Baizel, a Colorado attorney with the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, about the states’ quest for information. “Not unless they are willing to go through a lawsuit. When push comes to shove Halliburton is there with its attorneys.”...

Abraham Lustgarten is an investigative reporter for ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces journalism in the public interest.