Industry | Environment.org

This story was originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York.

On a crisp evening last spring, nearly 100 people packed into an elementary school auditorium in the Hudson Valley town of Athens. They had shown up to weigh in on the future of the town’s largest taxpayer and recipient of one of the biggest property tax subsidies in New York: a natural gas power plant.

For two decades prior, the Athens Generating Plant had received tax breaks averaging roughly $ 25 million a year. But that deal was about to expire, and its owners argued that without the abatement, the plant might be forced to close. They were looking to renew.

While a few attendees supported the new tax agreement, most of the dozen-odd speakers asked an unelected local agency called the …

Industry Sends Recycling Philosopher into Retirement

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| Recycling

Shared with permission from Resource Recycling Inc. magazine.

Industry Sends Recycling Philosopher into Retirement

From the August 14, 2023 article:

During his decades in the recycling industry, Michael Timpane has made a huge impact on a number of companies and local recycling programs. But perhaps more important is the way he has uplifted and inspired the people around him.

Timpane, who speaks today on a markets panel at the Resource Recycling Conference in Orlando, is retiring from full-time work at the end of this year. And this morning’s session will be his final presentation at a national conference.

To mark the occasion, Resource Recycling received comments from a number of sector professionals who have worked closely with Timpane during his career – a stretch that started in the 1970s at Reynolds Aluminum Company and included tenures at BFI, Waste Management …

The hazards of gas stoves were flagged by the industry — and hidden — 50 years ago

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| Pollution

Newly uncovered documents reveal that the gas industry understood that its stoves were polluting the air inside homes 50 years ago — and then moved to conceal that information. It stands in stark contrast to the industry’s denial of the health dangers posed by gas stoves today.

In a draft report on natural gas and the environment in January 1972, the American Gas Association included a section on “Indoor Air Quality Control” that detailed its concerns with pollution from gas appliances like carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. The document showed that the trade group was in the process of researching solutions “for the purposes of limiting the levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides in household air.” But all that information disappeared from the final text, according to reporting by the climate accountability site DeSmog on Thursday.

That draft report…

California is racing to electrify trucks. Can the industry keep up?

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| Pollution

This story was co-published with KCET, part of the donor-supported community institution, the Public Media Group of Southern California. Subscribe to its newsletter here.

Before the sun rose on a cold January morning, Alex López navigated an 18-wheeler through busy traffic on the 710 freeway. He was headed to the Port of Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles, to retrieve a shipping container and haul it to a warehouse. In the eight years he’s been driving trucks, it was a process López had done thousands of times.

“There’s usually nothing new with the routine we have as truckers,” he said.

But on this day, there was something new: He was driving an electric truck.

López drives for Hight Logistics, a family-owned company that moves cargo in and out of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. …

An industry built on a fallacy of carbon neutrality

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| Pollution

Debra David has lived in Dobbins Heights, North Carolina, population 875, for more than 60 years. Though she has moved several times over the decades, she’s always lived close to the railroad and the town’s higher-traffic thoroughfares. But it wasn’t until very recently that she developed asthma.

In 2019 Enviva, a compressed wood pellet (also known as biomass) manufacturer, opened a new production plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, just down the road from David’s home. “I’d never had a problem with asthma before,” she says. “But the past two years, I started having it.”