Chemical Lawn Care Products Face Ban in NJ

By Scott Fallon
North Jersey - NJ, September 8, 2010
Straight to the Source

Lawns may turn more brittle and yellow, but lakes, bays and marshes could become a lot cleaner under a bill making its way through Trenton that would ban many lawn care products on the shelf today. A bill in the Legislature would limit the nitrogen in turf fertilizers to a level exceeded by nearly every product on the market. It also would regulate when and where fertilizer could be used.  A bill in the Legislature would limit the nitrogen in turf fertilizers to a level exceeded by nearly every product on the market. It also would regulate when and where fertilizer could be used.

Called the most comprehensive and prohibitive legislation of its kind in the nation by supporters and opponents alike, the bill calls for a sea change in the way New Jerseyans apply fertilizer to their lawns. The bill comes out of a package of legislation intended to restore Barnegat Bay, heavily polluted by fertilizer runoff, but its impact would be statewide.

The most contentious part of the bill limits the amount and type of nitrogen in fertilizer to a level that can't be met by any of the products currently offered by the world's largest lawn care retailer.

"For that standard to be met, every product on the market would need to change," said Chris Wible, director of environmental stewardship for Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, which is lobbying against certain provisions in the bill.

The bill also bans phosphorus to maintain lawns, a move that has already been made by many lawn care companies. It would also ban anyone from applying fertilizer to turf:

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Will Trader Joe's Finally Do Right by Farmworkers?

By Leslie Hatfield
Grist, September 3, 2010
Straight to the Source

Before you head over to Trader Joe's to stock up on cheap snacks for your Labor Day weekend festivities, stop and consider shopping somewhere else. Labor Day was enacted not as a general holiday to rest in honor of laborers, but in response to the tragic deaths of striking workers. And good old cheap Joe -- which just agreed to stop selling eggs from Jack DeCoster's vile operations -- is one of the remaining holdouts in this decade's most high-profile, life-or-death farmworkers' rights campaign.  

Two weeks ago, my coworker Karen and I left the office a little early and walked across Manhattan to the Trader Joe's store in Chelsea, where a small group had gathered making signs and chatting. Among them were members of the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a grassroots group working to improve wages and working conditions for farmworkers. Over the course of about 45 minutes, dozens more people filled the sidewalk in front of the store, including labor activists from the Jewish Labor Committee, Just Harvest USA and the Farmworker Solidarity Alliance, as well as local youths and a handful of musicians from the Rude Mechanical Orchestra.

Trader Joe's, along with Publix, Kroger, and the Dutch-held Ahold grocery chain (which includes Giant, Stop & Shop, Martin's, and Peapod), are the most recent targets of CIW's Fair Food Campaign. Over the last nine years the Coalition, together with partner organizations like the Student/Farmworker Alliance, has managed, through well-organized consumer campaigns and sometimes boycotts, to convince some of the food industry's largest corporations (including Taco Bell/Yum Brands, McDonald's, Subway, Whole Foods, and Compass -- see Grist's Tom Philpott's coverage) to agree to the tenets of Fair Food: an extra penny a pound for tomatoes (nearly doubling the wages for pickers, who've not seen a raise since the mid-1970s), a labor Code of Conduct, greater transparency in the supply chain, and incentives for growers that respect human rights.   

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Children's Products Contain Hazardous Metals

Report: Children's products may contain hazardous metals
By CNN Wire Staff
CNN, SEpt. 7, 2010
Straight to the Source

Report: Children's products may contain hazardous metals

September 7, 2010

(CNN) -- Rain coats, hair barrettes and jewelry seem harmless. But Consumer Reports magazine says a series of tests uncovered "worrisome levels" of potentially hazardous metals in such children's products currently on store shelves.

 In its October 2010 issue, which hits newsstands Tuesday, the magazine says a metal-and-rhinestone hair barrette, a clover-shaped cell phone charm and a vinyl children's rain coat contained heavy metals.

 Cadmium and lead levels are the focus of the magazine's report, which is based on tests of more than 30 products using an initial screening method called X-ray fluorescence and outside laboratory analyses.

 While lead has drawn attention from product safety advocates for years, cadmium -- a metal commonly found in paint and batteries -- has become a larger concern recently. And the magazine argues that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission needs to develop regulations to limit its use.

 "We're concerned it's going to start showing up a lot in other products, such as children's jewelry, or hair barrettes or other products," said Don Mays, Consumer Reports' senior director of product safety and technical policy. "The problem here is that young children in particular have a tendency to put jewelry in their mouth, a necklace, a little pendant, they have a tendency to suck on it."

 The magazine says lead levels in a green clover-shaped cell phone charm sold at the retailer Claire's "caused the greatest concern." The charms tested by the magazine contained 100,000 parts per million of total lead -- a quantity that would be illegal if it were considered a children's product.

 "Although the charm is not marketed specifically to children 12 and under, it could appeal to that age group or it could be accessible to them if a parent or older child has one," the magazine's analysis says.

 Messages left by CNN Tuesday at the Florida and Illinois offices of Claire's were not immediately returned. However, in May, Claire's issued a voluntary recall of a charm bracelet following reports of high levels of cadmium, according to statements posted on its website. The bracelet had been removed from Claire's stores in January.

 "Within weeks of these reports, Claire's Stores added procedures requiring all of its suppliers to test for cadmium in children's jewelry," the company said. Testing requirements were already in place for lead and nickel content, according to the statement.

 Claire's noted there are no U.S. standards addressing the presence of cadmium in children's jewelry, and said it encouraged the development of such standards.

 Consumer Reports says samples of a Revlon Couture Hair Accessory Barrette tested positive for high levels of total cadmium, though potential for significant cadmium exposure through normal use is low.

 Even so, Mays says, children could put the barrettes in their mouths.

 "The barrette is not marketed to children, but it could interest and be accessible to them," the magazine claims.

 Representatives from Revlon did not immediately return calls from CNN seeking comment.

 Even when companies change their products to comply with lead limits, older versions the company has replaced might remain on store shelves, the magazine says, suggesting that may have happened with a Kidorable bumblebee raincoat marketed to toddlers and preschoolers.

 The company told "Consumer Reports" that it reformulated the coat in 2008 to comply with a new consumer product safety law and began labeling its raincoats and backpacks as lead-free in January 2009. And versions of the coat purchased by the magazine's testers in January and May 2010 contained trace levels of lead well below federal limits.

 But the magazine's testers were still able to purchase older versions of the coat in December 2009 and found lead levels that were higher than the legal limit.

 The magazine says consumers should look for the newer products and "take a pass on non-labeled hand-me-downs or coats from yard sales."

 The magazine also advises consumers to use do-it-yourself screening kits, stop children from playing with cheap metal jewelry and check children's toys against government recall lists.

CNN's Karin Caifa contributed to this report.

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Farm Land Grabs in Poor Countries Set to Increase

By Hilaire Avril
IPS, September 8, 2010
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After weeks of rumors sparked by the leaking of a draft World Bank position paper on so-called land grabs in poor countries, the international financial institution has officially released its report on the surge in farmland purchases and leasing which have elicited controversy for over two years.

Acquisitions of vast tracts of fertile land in Africa by foreign governments and companies eager to secure affordable food resources in highly volatile commodity markets stirred public attention when the South Korean company Daewoo bought more than a million hectares of farmland in the east African island state Madagascar.

The World Bank report, titled "Rising Global Interest in Farmland. Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits?" and released on Sep 8, cautions that "an astonishing lack of awareness of what is happening on the ground" exists -- even by the public sector institutions mandated to control this phenomenon.

It estimates that 2009 saw 45 million hectares of farmland deals going through and predicts that, "given commodity price volatility, growing human and environmental pressures, and worries about food security, this interest will increase, especially in the developing world".

At the beginning of Sep 2010, riots over steep increases in the price of bread left seven people dead and hundreds injured in Maputo, the capital of the southern African country Mozambique, sparking fears of another food crisis like the one that affected several African countries two years ago.

That same week, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation announced that, "surging wheat prices drove international food prices up five percent (in Aug 2010) in the biggest month-on-month increase since November 2009."

Several huge farmland investment deals have been decried for bringing uncertain benefits to recipient countries, and sometime for leading to smallholders' eviction from their land and adversely affecting local livelihoods.

The World Bank report reckons that "one of the highest development priorities in the world must be to improve smallholder agricultural productivity, especially in Africa". 


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Who Dares Question the Industrial Food System Over GM Salmon?

By Dan Kennedy
Guardian - UK, September 7, 2010
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Click here to take action on this issue! For related articles and more information, please visit OCA's Resource Center on Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology or our Millions Against Monsanto Campaign page.

With fish stocks around the world depleted by overfishing and disrupted by climate change, farm-raised salmon stands as a viable if not entirely appetizing alternative.

Last Friday, though, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took a potentially dangerous step. The agency ruled that salmon whose genes have been altered so that they grow more rapidly than their wild counterparts are safe for human consumption. In so doing, the FDA opened the door for salmon to become just another unhealthful cog in the industrial-food machine. And it may have foisted upon the public yet another cancer risk.

According to a report in the New York Times, FDA scientists found that the altered fish, developed by AquaBounty Technologies, based in the Boston area, were unlikely to escape into the environment and cross-breed with native schools of Atlantic salmon. The agency also found that even though the genetically altered salmon carry elevated levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), a suspected carcinogen, those levels are so minute that they pose no health risk.

Precautions aside, it requires considerably more than the customary level of naivety to believe wild salmon wouldn't be contaminated by their laboratory-designed cousins. If AquaBounty's progeny ever come to market, it would only be a matter of time before some unforeseen accident undid everyone's best intentions.

But it is the IGF-1 about which we truly ought to be concerned, because the FDA's finding is evidence of an unacceptably narrow focus. The substance occurs naturally in salmon and other animal products, and the agency tells us that the genetically altered fish contains only a tiny amount more. Yet, by considering such matters one at a time, the FDA may well be introducing us to many tiny risks that start adding up to a very real risk. 


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Meat Eating Can be an Environmentally Friendly Choice

By Bonnie Azab Powell
Grist, September 7, 2010
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As a meat-eater, I've long found it convenient to categorize veganism as a response to animal suffering or a health fad. But, faced with these figures, it now seems plain that it's the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue. -George Monbiot, "Why vegans were right all along," Dec. 2002

Guardian columnist and well-known environmentalist George Monbiot ate the above words yesterday -- with a dash of salted crow, one imagines. In a column titled "I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat -- but farm it properly," he tells how a book released in England this week has persuaded him that meat eating per se isn't environmentally irresponsible, it's the current industrial farming model that is.

Cows on grassMonbiot himself is not vegan. In 2008 he wrote that he gave up all animal products "for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans, and I admire them immensely."

We all do. Vegans have long been the ornery saints squatting cross-legged at the intersection of the food and environmental movements; only recently have things like vegan cupcakes crossed over to widespread, Food Network-validated success.

But now those who have been arguing for a more moderate, catholic approach, one that sees pasture-based livestock raising as an equally green choice to eschewing meat altogether, have new ammunition.        


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A Call for Direct Action in the Climate Movement

By Bill McKibben, Philip Radford, Rebecca Tarbotton
Grist, September 3, 2010
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For related articles and more information, please visit OCA's Environment and Climate Resource Center or our Food Agenda 2020 Campaign page.

Dear Friends,

God, what a summer. Federal scientists have concluded that we've just come through the warmest six months, the warmest year, and the warmest decade in human history. Nineteen nations have set new all-time temperature records; the mercury in Pakistan reached 129 degrees, the hottest temperature ever seen in Asia. And there's nothing abstract about those numbers, not with Moscow choking on smoke from its epic heat wave and fires, not with Pakistan half washed away from its unprecedented flooding.

But that's just the half of it. It's also the summer when the U.S. Senate decided to keep intact its 20-year bipartisan record of doing nothing about global warming. Global warming is no act of God. We're up against the most profitable and powerful industries on earth: the companies racking up record profits from fossil fuels. And we're not going to beat them by asking nicely. We're going to have to build a movement, a movement much bigger than anything we've built before, a movement that can push aback against the financial power of Big Oil and Big Coal. That movement is our only real hope, and we need your help to plot its future.

We've got some immediate and crucial priorities. For instance, groups around the world are joining together on 10/10/10 for a Global Work Party, demonstrating that we already know many of the solutions to the climate crisis. That will be a good day not just to put up solar panels, but also to shame our political leaders, to say to them, "We're getting to work. What about you?" Meanwhile, around the country, lawyers and community groups are doing yeoman's work fighting off new coal plants, activists are persuading banks to stop loaning to corporate villains, city councils are figuring out how to make their towns more efficient and resilient. This is the basic work of any movement, the foundation on which hope for long-term progress rests.


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