pollution

  • Cement, the powderized mix that is a basic ingredient of concrete, is devouring Italy, said a report published in April by italian green organization Legambiente. That statement summarizes the fact that 10.000 hectares of italian surface are covered by buildings every year: it’s like we built a new Milan every four months. Were that cement used to restructure and make safe existing buildings it wouldn’t be bad, but it mostly isn’t.
  • Hendryx is a national expert on coal’s real-world impacts. Unlike the front group operatives that the coal industry underwrites to move its claims in the court of public opinion, it’s reasonable to assume that he doesn’t make any more money if his research finds that coal’s arguments bear out in the real world - or not. That means his conclusions are worth repeating: coal’s “clean” claims are absurd coal spokespeople claiming it’s an abundant fuel supply are “simply lying”
  • According to italian newspaper Terra, Asbestos continues to kill in Italy. The current toll is 800 victims each year only in Lombardy (the northern region where Milan is) and is expected to rise, since this substance continues to be present in some areas and acts very slowly. A chilling detail of this story is that future death will also happen among people for whom current law doesn’t provide any compensation. As the Terra article puts it “the new law gives the right to claim for compensation to people who were exposed to asbestos in their work.
  • One year after the BP Deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Greenpeace needs your help to find out exactly who is to blame for what parts of that disaster: we have around 30,000 pages of memos, reports and even flight records about the worst oil spill in American history… The problem is we simply don’t have time to go through them all. But no one has the manpower to read the fine print.