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....the Company re-iterates the previously announced 2014 outlook that it will exceed $50 million in revenue and will surpass break-even Adjusted EBITDA1 for the year. This view is supported as follows:
The Company finished 2013 with $57 million in backlog;
Approximately $40 million of the current contracted backlog will be realized as revenue in calendar 2014; and
Other sales pipeline opportunities closing into backlog in the first and second quarters will have revenue potential for the second half of 2014.
That might be the ONE ! eom
Is the right team in place to execute such a transaction?
With sound fundamentals, a reverse is a great instrument. The problem is that many firms mis-use it to artificially inflate stock price.
The need for liquidity and supporting the supply/demand curve must be balanced with solid corporate execution.
Failure to balance these will result in the share price going way down and the shareholders left sucking air.
There is a reason the SEC enables reverses. It just needs to be properly used.
South Asia needs $2.5 trillion infrastructure investment - World Bank
Only 25 percent of people in South Asia have access to piped water supplies and more than a quarter lack access to electricity due to large gaps in infrastructure, according to the World Bank, Reuters reported. The Bank has estimated that the region needs $2.5 trillion USD in investment by 2020 to provide necessary services to the population.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/02/southasia-worldbank-idUSL5N0MU1UK20140402
Food and Water Shortages May Prove Major Risks of Climate Change
Poor people will suffer the most, unless the world exploits vanishing opportunities to adapt
Mar 30, 2014 |By David Biello
The rich play with fire and the poor get burned. That sums up a report issued March 31 by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the worsening risks of climate change. Yet even rich nations will face serious challenges. "Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by climate change," said IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri at a press conference releasing the report in Yokohama, Japan.
According to Pachauri and the hundreds of scientists who prepared the report, climate change is no longer something that will happen in the future. It is already here, and it is already impacting people on all seven continents and seven seas. The world now has a different climate than it had only a few decades ago, thanks to fossil fuel burning, forest clearing and other human activities.
As a result, the need for nations everywhere to adapt is already here, according to the report of the second team of IPCC scientists (known as Working Group II), who assessed more than 12,000 scientific papers to deliver an authoritative consensus on the impacts of climate change, the vulnerabilities of society and the natural world, as well as how we might adapt to a changed climate. "We see impacts from the equators to the poles and the coast to the mountains," noted biologist Christopher Field of Stanford University, co-chair of Working Group II at the press event.
The opportunity to prevent catastrophic global warming has not disappeared, even if the world has burned through half the fossil fuels it can, according to the first team of IPCC scientists who assessed the fundamental physics of climate change and released their report in September. But the world must drop its carbon habit soon. Since 1880, 531 gigatons of carbon have been emitted, and the IPCC scientists estimate that no more than 800 gigatons should be emitted for a better-than-even chance of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. If warming rises beyond that threshold, the scientists say, serious harm will be done to ecosystems and societies everywhere. The more warming, the greater the risk of "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts," the new report states.
Unfortunately, in just the time between this report and the last iteration in 2007, climate change has grown 40 percent stronger thanks to ever increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Already, the world has warmed 0.85 degree C since 1880. Global warming is now "unequivocal" and concentrations of CO2 have reached levels "unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years." Or as Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organzation put it at the press conference: "Ignorance is no longer an excuse. We know."
In that light, climate change becomes a risk management proposition, particularly given the uncertainty about exactly how bad impacts might become and when. The worst risks include sea level rise for small islands and coasts, flooding, the breakdown of infrastructure in the face of extreme weather, loss of livelihoods for farmers and fishers, food insecurity and heat-wave deaths. Expect a big demand for energy for air conditioning as the 21st century continues.
Some of these impacts are already here, from a meltdown of polar ice and glaciers everywhere to higher rates of sea level rise than the IPCC predicted in the past. Crops, such as wheat and maize (corn), have been hurt more by heat waves and drought than helped by higher levels of CO2, which can sometimes permit more luxuriant plant growth. Some crop yields in places like northern Europe and southeastern South America where drought has not set in have actually improved.
The bad outweighs the good to date. Reductions in yields of wheat and maize have already had an impact on food prices, and some argue on the stability of nations as well. Extreme weather—from floods to wildfires—continues to take an increasing toll, and climate change will likely exacerbate existing health problems such as malaria and heat stroke. The biggest impact may prove to be changes to the availability of fresh water. All of these hazards, laid out in detail in the new report, afflict the poorest the most, particularly subsistence farmers throughout the world who depend on consistent rains for adequate food. "They are threatened in their very existence," Pachauri argued at the press conference.
Climate change will also raise the risk of conflict, whether civil war or fights between nation states over critical resources or boundaries, according to the new report. In short, climate change will make remedying existing poverty that much harder.
Opportunities still exist for adaptation, however. Communities, cities, states and nations have begun to adapt, whether improved water management in San Diego, Calif., or planting mangroves to stabilize seashores in the island nation of Tuvalu. Cimate change can be ameliorated both by cutting back on the pollution that causes it as well as by improving society to decrease vulnerability.
Future adaptation may include, for the poorest people, moving, either voluntarily or when displaced by disaster. And how societies choose to adapt will be vital as certain choices—geoengineering with artificial volcanoes or building sea walls, for example—may prove maladaptive in the long term.
The natural world has had to adapt as well, with animals and even plants moving or shifting seasonal behaviors or migration. Some marine animals have shifted their range by as much as 400 kilometers in pursuit of equally cold climes, and ocean acidification is accelerating. As the climate continues to change, species will face even greater challenges, and many may go extinct as global warming tips them into disaster when paired with other threats such as habitat loss. Entire ecosystems will be transformed, like the march of shrubs into the former tundra of Siberia and North America. "We may already be on the threshold or over the threshold of the sixth mass extinction in earth's history," Field noted.
Undercutting the optimism for ongoing adaptation is the fact that the IPCC has consistently underestimated the speed and scale of climate change. Continuing to improve the data about impacts is an ongoing challenge for the scientific community. And, in the larger view, as co-chair Field put it in his speech to open the session finalizing the new report: "Dealing effectively with climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/food-and-water-shortages-may-prove-major-risks-of-climate-change/
Raising capital when in penny OTC land is exceptionally difficult.
Stella and Seth are doing it.
Getting out of penny land will enable new institutions to invest who can't in play in penny land.
A big board listing increases the number of potential institutions even more.
A reverse misused to artificially inflate price deserves the puke.
Used to up-list creates supply and demand parity.
The problem is perception. Reverses are usually misused. It exists for proper use.
A reverse properly done with solid fundamentals is a nice use-of-cash alternative to buying back shares.
You go into the ignore basket to join oceanslow.
Article at AZoRobotics
http://www.azorobotics.com/news.aspx?newsID=5485
No Water? No Beer
CNBC.com 03/24/14 12:00 PM ET
The ongoing drought in the West is impacting the availability of barley, a key ingredient used to brew beer.
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000260822
Cincinnati company launches million-dollar pilot to transform sewage with tiny robots
Mar 28, 2014, 12:02pm EDT
Andy Brownfield
Reporter
Cincinnati Business Courier
A Cincinnati-based company is launching a $1.7 million pilot project with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati to use tiny bacterial robots to turn sewage into electricity.
The five-phase pilot will be the first commercial test of the Pilus Energy Electrogenic Bioreactor bacterial robots.
Pilus Energy uses bacterial robots called BactoBots that metabolize wastewater and harvest direct current electricity to produce economically important gasses. The startup was recently acquired by New York-based Tauriga Sciences Inc.
The EPA learned about Pilus through the Confluence water technology cluster, which brings together local private business, government and research institutions to innovate new methods to treat and protect water. Confluence earlier this week hosted other water clusters at the EPA in Cincinnati for a first-of-its-kind conference.
“The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati is excited to be the world’s first deployment site for this innovative technology,” MSD deputy director Biju George said in a news release. “Due to our location, partners, specialized facilities and personnel, we are perfectly suited to be the pilot site. The Tauriga Sciences value proposition has the promise to change the wastewater industry.”
Much of the initial work will be performed at the EPA Test and Evaluation Facility in Cincinnati.
http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2014/03/28/cincinnati-company-launches-million-dollar-pilot.html
Today and yesterday action is exactly why meteoric rises are unhealthy.
Federal red tape ties up marijuana research
Despite drug’s legalization in two US states, biomedical science faces continued restrictions.
Helen Shen
25 March 2014
Hidden in a locked room on New York University’s campus in lower Manhattan, a half-tonne steel safe guards hundreds of vials of a drug extracted from marijuana. To the US government, the drug — Epidiolex — is one of the world’s most dangerous substances, ripe for abuse. But to Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist at the university, it is a potential treatment for tremors in children with severe epilepsy.
Although Epidiolex, made by GW Pharmaceuticals in Salisbury, UK, is not psychoactive, it took Devinsky six frustrating months to secure local and national approval for a clinical trial that began in January. “If some teenagers broke in, they’d get nothing out of it,” he says. The physical and regulatory barriers that nevertheless surround Epidiolex point to the stigma that continues to stymie research on marijuana and its derivatives, even in US states that have moved to legalize its sale and use, such as Colorado and Washington (see ‘Slow burn’).
Colorado’s legal marijuana sales began in January and are booming. The state’s legislators are weighing a proposal to provide US$7 million to study the drug’s therapeutic potential. But even if the measure is enacted, Colorado researchers might not be permitted to use locally grown plants for their studies, and would need to clear several levels of government approval before running any clinical trials. The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) still classifies marijuana alongside heroin and LSD as a substance with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”.
“It’s a terrible, terrible paradox,” says Devinsky. “The federal government is severely limiting the research that we can do.”
Currently, the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) runs the nation’s only federally sanctioned marijuana farm, producing a research supply through a contract with the University of Mississippi in Oxford. To obtain the strain, researchers — even those with private or local funding — must gain approval from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or the National Institutes of Health, as well as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The DEA and local drug-enforcement officials must also approve research facilities for secure storage and handling of marijuana. The approval process can last for years.
Suzanne Sisley, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix, knows this well. In 2011, she secured approval from the FDA to conduct a trial of marijuana to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in US military veterans. But it was not until two weeks ago — nearly three years later — that she received clearance from the HHS. Although Sisley already has plenty of volunteers for her 70-person trial, her laboratory will have to pass inspections by drug officials before it can receive limited quantities of the only federally approved marijuana strain.
That variety contains relatively high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), marijuana’s primary active ingredient, and low levels of cannabidiol (CBD), another potentially therapeutic component. Such controlled cultivation helps to maintain chemical consistency in research marijuana, explains Mahmoud ElSohly, who directs the NIDA Marijuana Project at the University of Mississippi.
Still, he anticipates imminent research demand for more plant varieties, especially some containing higher concentrations of CBD. Emerging data suggest that the chemical exhibits anticonvulsant, anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving effects, while lacking — or perhaps even countering — the psychoactive effects of THC1–3. A few highly publicized anecdotes involving the use of marijuana products for treating severe epilepsy in children have also stoked intense public interest in high-CBD marijuana. As reports surface of families moving to Colorado to gain access to CBD for their children, Devinsky and other researchers see an urgent need to accelerate scientific investigations of the substance.
ElSohly has already prepared one variety of marijuana that contains equal amounts of CBD and THC, and is hoping to grow a high-CBD, low-THC variety later this year. “With all the publicity going on right now, I’m sure somebody is going to request that,” he says.
But the diversity of recreational marijuana strains flooding the Colorado marketplace — such as ‘lemon skunk’, ‘golden goat’ and ‘bubba kush’ — will not help to fill the research void. In a memo earlier this month, the University of Colorado reminded its faculty members to pursue studies only through federally approved channels, although it acknowledged that the NIDA supply may not be representative of many marijuana strains available to people in the state. “As a university that receives federal financial aid and federal research funding, we have to abide by federal laws,” says Ken McConnellogue, a university spokesman.
One field that does seem likely to flourish in Colorado and Washington is public-health research. Officials in both states are preparing surveys and studies to track long-term rates of marijuana use as accessibility and social acceptance of the drug increase, and as large-scale data become available for the first time. “We have more people using marijuana, and people are more willing to tell you that they’re using it,” says Laura Borgelt, a clinical pharmacist at the University of Colorado in Aurora, who is interested in studying the effects of maternal marijuana use during pregnancy on child development.
Other topics of interest include possible changes associated with marijuana in the use of alcohol and other drugs, trends in car accidents and risky behaviour, and school performance. Last year, NIDA awarded more than $1 million in supplemental funding to five groups to study some of these questions in the context of the natural epidemiological experiments under way in Colorado and Washington.
Few data exist to predict the effects of legalizing the drug’s use and sale. Studies of the ‘non-enforcement’ cannabis system in the Netherlands by Robert MacCoun, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that marijuana consumption rose in the 1980s, as marijuana shops became widespread4. Overall, however, rates of marijuana use in the Netherlands are comparable to those in other European countries.
Cultural differences make it difficult to extrapolate those findings to the United States, warns MacCoun. His group has begun to study patterns of drug use in Washington, and he is looking forward to seeing data from Colorado researchers.“I’m watching quite eagerly to see what we can learn.”
Nature 507, 407–408 (27 March 2014) doi:10.1038/507407a
References
Izzo, A. A., Borrelli, F., Capasso, R., Di Marzo, V. & Mechoulam, R. Trends Pharmacol. Sci. 30, 515–527 (2009).
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Hill, A. J., Williams, C. M., Whalley, B. J. & Stephens, G. J. Pharmacol. Ther. 133, 79–97 (2012).
Show context
Niesink, R. J. & van Laar, M. W. Front. Psychiatry 4, 130 (2013).
Show context
MacCoun, R. J. Addiction 106, 1899–1910 (2011).
Show context
http://www.nature.com/news/federal-red-tape-ties-up-marijuana-research-1.14926
High time for advancing marijuana research
Nature Neuroscience 17, 481 (2014) doi:10.1038/nn.3692
Published online 26 March 2014
Marijuana use is expected to increase as its legalization spreads. With more marijuana users, we should prioritize research on this pervasive, but relatively understudied, drug.
Marijuana is now legal for recreational or medicinal use in 20 states in the United States and has been decriminalized in many others. A recent Gallup poll1 found that more than half of Americans surveyed favored legalizing the use of marijuana. Although the extent to which legalization will expand the pool of marijuana users is unknown, it seems likely that there will be a substantial increase; moreover, escalating use in even a small fraction of the US population would represent a big surge in absolute numbers of users. Marijuana has typically not been considered as high a priority for research as more addictive drugs such as opioids and cocaine. However, as marijuana stands poised to join alcohol and tobacco as a legalized drug, it is critical that we prioritize research to improve our understanding of the medicinal, toxicological, addiction and public health implications of increased marijuana use.
The largest increase in legalized marijuana use has been for medical treatment, based on research suggesting that the cannabis plant contains compounds that may have a wide variety of therapeutic applications. Those with otherwise intractable pain, nausea and glaucoma (among other ailments) are understandably eager to take advantage of this new and increasingly legal treatment. However, marijuana itself is not a medicine; it includes a large number of compounds with unknown effects, the identified components may interact or interfere when delivered in combination, and levels of active compounds may vary from strain to strain. These compounds will have wide-ranging effects, as the endocannabinoid system is pervasive in the brain; marijuana can influence mood and is known to impair memory, cognitive function, reaction time and motor coordination. It is important that we prioritize research to determine what other consequences of cannabis use there might be, particularly for long-term use and in those with ailments serious enough to consider marijuana for medical treatment. This information is critical to help the increasing numbers of people with the opportunity to use marijuana make educated decisions about the consequences of choosing to do so.
One particularly under-appreciated consequence of marijuana use is the risk of addiction. The National Institute of Drug Abuse suggests that approximately 9% of people who use marijuana may become dependent, and this number may be even higher for those who start using as adolescents. Although this rate is far lower than that reported for heroin (23%), in raw numbers, marijuana dependence is already a far more pervasive problem than heroin addiction: according to a 2012 report from NIDA, there were nearly ten times as many individuals with marijuana abuse problems as there were individuals with heroin abuse problems. This number will only grow as marijuana becomes more easily accessible and acceptable to use, so it is urgent that we increase efforts to understand what factors influence dependence and develop targeted treatments. Currently, there are a few pharmaceutical treatments for opiate, alcohol and nicotine addiction, but there is no such drug for marijuana addiction.
An important strategy for decreasing some of the negative consequences of marijuana use may be increasing efforts to develop drugs based on specific components of cannabis. By narrowing the number of active compounds administered, it may be possible to target particular aspects of the cannabinoid system and avoid some of the side effects. For example, cannabidiol, a non-psychotropic ingredient of marijuana, has shown some promise as an anti-psychotic treatment for schizophrenia. The development of FDA-approved drugs will be particularly urgent as marijuana legalization becomes widespread, as this will also open up opportunities for manufacturers of over-the-counter remedies. As has happened in the weight-loss drug market, these manufacturers will be eager to sell supplements made of entirely legal over-the-counter ingredients, but which have limited evidence of efficacy or safety, and which will be largely unregulated.
Although it is imperative that we advance the marijuana research agenda, there are currently many obstacles that make it difficult for researchers. A key point of pain, as always, is the need for more financial support. US government funds for research have largely stagnated during the continuing budget crises, so scientists are under pressure to do more with less. Pharmaceutical companies may participate in some drug discovery work, but have shown little interest in addiction research and have no incentive at all to examine the negative consequences of medical marijuana use. Government resources will need to be channeled to addressing these critical research questions in order to make progress.
A major impediment to marijuana research is that the substance is still classified by federal law as a schedule I drug (the same category that contains heroin and LSD), making it very difficult for researchers to work with. Acquiring the permissions necessary to do marijuana research can take years and require an enormous burden of paperwork2. Legalization is occurring on a state-by-state basis, but the federal policies that govern researchers have not been updated. In light of mounting evidence that marijuana has potential for medical use, it would make sense to reclassify it to a less restrictive category, a change that would dramatically ease constraints on cannabis research.
As the use of marijuana appears to be headed toward wide acceptance in the United States, it is urgent that we support a comprehensive research program addressing the critical gaps in our understanding. If the harmful aspects of marijuana use outweigh the therapeutic benefits, we need to find out now, not far in the future. If there are components of cannabis with specific therapeutic value, we need to develop drugs that target them. Ultimately, we need data and hard facts in hand to responsibly regulate the use of marijuana and educate consumers about their choices.
References
Swift, A. Gallup <http://www.gallup.com/poll/165539/first-time-americans-favor-legalizing-marijuana.aspx> (2013).
Show context
Anonymous. Nat. Neurosci. 8, 971 (2005).
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n4/full/nn.3692.html
WTF?!?!? Wow!!!!
What is the summary of what's going on with SEC, etc?
I disliked spending the $0.00038 cents in electrons reading this post.
I hated spending the $0.0007 cents in energy responding to it.
I am anxious to use my crap to power reading and responding to this waste.
I want my EBR!
Until then, I'll not waste bandwidth with such spew. Ignore is a superb function. No more attention for your seeking.
IP and test results?
It is not healthy for it to go straight up. eom
An expanded therapeutic pharmaceutical product opportunity?
TAURIGA SCIENCES (NASDAQ:TAUG)
Smart Scan Chart Analysis continues positive longer term. Look for this market to remain firm. Strong Uptrend with money management stops. A triangle indicates the presence of a very strong trend that is being driven by strong forces and insiders.
The Trade Triangle are generated using a proprietary algorithm that is comprised of weighted factors that include, but are not limited to - price change, percentage change, moving averages, and new highs/lows.
MarketClub’s Trade Triangles for TAUG
The long term trend has been UP since Feb 19th, 2014 at 0.026000
The intermediate term trend has been UP since Jan 22nd, 2014 at 0.008700
The short term trend has been UP since Feb 28th, 2014 at 0.018800
Smart Scan Analysis for TAUG
Based on a pre-defined weighted trend formula for chart analysis, TAUG scored +90 on a scale from -100 (strong downtrend) to +100 (strong uptrend).
http://club.ino.com/trend/analysis/equity/NASDAQ_TAUG/trendanalysis?ticket=7abea8f97dg06a07808c06a06608e&id=29C20D
Tauriga Sciences, Inc. (OTCMKTS:TAUG) Targeted by Xtremepicks Email on Monday
Watch the video to learn about the probability of Tauriga Sciences, Inc. (TAUG) Chart Signal as of Mar 19 2014
Tauriga Sciences, Inc. (OTCMKTS:TAUG, TAUG message board) shares the Monday enthusiasm with other newly discovered marijuana stocks. TAUG is headed to break through to a higher range, as it grew by more than 42% on the day. Now, the ticker hovers at $0.0998, as buying volumes reached $3.25 million.
TAUG would not have survived that well without an extra push from Xtremepicks, sending out a free email with the intent to boost its record. The main hook in the email is that TAUG is at a 52-week high, but the pumpers also mention that the company is a rather solid pharmaceutical producer, which would easily join with its subsidiary in supplying medical cannabis creams or other topical treatments.
Unfortunately, the solid activity and future interests do not make TAUG well-off financially, as it is burdened by the costs of development, holding:
cash: $57 thousand
current assets: $109 thousand
current liabilities: $1.38 million
no revenue since inception
quarterly net loss: $1.6 million
And TAUG is having days when volumes slacken significantly.
The market for this ticker needs a constant influx of news to support the activity. The weak days made investors' forum commenters to term this phenomenon "The Desolation of TAUG".
Unfortunately, TAUG has not proven it is a dragon sitting on a large treasure, but yet another pharmaceutical contender that tried its luck and had a few good days. Also, Honeywood, LLC is listed as a holding company with the main aim of securing intellectual rights, posing a question on how exactly the real side of the cannabis business would be achieved.
Xtremeleaders is indeed fond of extreme movers, though it may be wise to stay away from the peaks. Turbine Truck Engines, Inc. (OTCBB:TTEG) was taken up as well, only to end the day in the red, as the stock price starts to deteriorate from the peak levels.
An older alert, Singlepoint, Inc. (OTCMKTS:SING) rose sharply both as a marijuana company and a ticker under alert. But only days after it had peaked at $0.065, the ticker slid down to $0.03, now making a bit of a recovery, but preserving a burden of volatility. SING was until recently Carbon Credits International, Inc. (CARN), when it decided to switch tracks to another sector promising to be hot- only this time, the stock was unable to hold onto the price gains.
TAUG is interesting in its ability to gap upward, but we have to wait and see if the new week is one of the better periods for the marijuana sector as a whole. The Marijuana index is currently on a downward slope that is erasing the gains made since the middle of February. Still, in contrast to last week's pessimism, most tickers in the index had a day of net gains.
The pot stock sector remains in boom conditions, so you have to be ready at least for a temporary bust, if you still like the potential of TAUG.
http://www.hotstocked.com/article/79132/tauriga-sciences-inc-otcmkts-taug-targeted-by.html
The landmark Superfund program is supposed to clean up the country’s toxic waste. But as one site in Silicon Valley shows, it’s leaving behind its own legacy of environmental problems.
By Susanne Rust and Matt Drange, The Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Guardian US Interactive Team
Below some of the world’s most expensive real estate, in the heart of Silicon Valley, pipes and pumps suck thousands of gallons of contaminated water every hour from vast underground toxic pools.
Giant industrial filters trap droplets of dangerous chemicals at the surface, all in the hope of making the water drinkable again and protecting the workers of tech giants such as Google and Symantec from toxic vapors.
But that costly journey to the surface is only the start of a toxic trail with no clear end.
Once it leaves Mountain View, California, the toxic waste gets shipped, treated and burned in places like Oklahoma and Arizona, discharging waste in small towns and on a Native American reservation, and in some cases creating even more harmful chemicals, The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
Along the way, waste treatment plants rack up environmental violations, records show. Byproducts created during treatment are shuttled from one plant to another. And then another. After crisscrossing the country, the waste even can end up right back where it started – at a treatment plant just a few miles away in Silicon Valley.
It’s a shell game in which one environmental danger appears to be addressed, yet is moved somewhere else in the form of a new problem.
“There’s really no such thing as throwing something away,” said Environmental Protection Agency spokesman Rusty Harris-Bishop. “You’re always throwing it somewhere.”
The EPA pays close attention to the more than 1,300 toxic sites that constitute its landmark Superfund program. But the toxic trail highlights a key gap: After the waste-hauling trucks rumble out of town, the EPA considers the job to be finished.
As a result, the country’s environmental regulators are creating their own legacy of unintended consequences as they grapple with the mess left behind by a previous generation. Along the trail, contained toxic waste is turned into an array of uncontrolled and potentially worse problems that fan out across the U.S.
Often the original mess is almost untreatable. In Silicon Valley’s case, it would take 700 years of continuous treatment to make the groundwater drinkable.
The EPA recognizes that the trail exists but says it’s too difficult to follow.
“It’s not that we don’t care about the material,” said Carlos Pachon, who leads the EPA’s green cleanup efforts. “We just don’t have control over it.”
CIR constructed a composite picture of the trail’s environmental toll by piecing together hazardous waste shipping documents, company records, environmental violations and scientific studies. It’s a first-of-its kind accounting of the hidden impacts of a widely lauded cleanup effort, and it highlights the challenges facing the nation’s Superfund program.
Among the findings:
Waste begets waste. At every step along the trail, treatment leaves behind a new batch of waste that needs to be shipped somewhere else. At one stop, a plant in Wisconsin creates more waste than it takes in.
Treatment creates new hazards. The superheating used to release toxic chemicals gives way to an equally alarming danger that isn’t monitored: dioxins. After they escape the plants, dioxins can build up in the food supply and have been linked to cancer and birth defects.
The system is highly inefficient. For every 5 pounds of contaminants pulled from the ground, roughly 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are produced from continually running pumps, cross-country treks and treatment plants that produce as much greenhouse gas as municipal power plants.
Cleanup at the Silicon Valley site, and others like it, isn’t working. Over the past decade, pollution levels there have remained stagnant despite constant pumping. In some cases, the treatment is actually increasing the pollution in the water.
The costs of treating the waste are enormous. To continue cleanup at sites like this, the EPA estimates taxpayers will spend up to $1.2 billion for every 10 years of ongoing treatment. That doesn’t include the untallied billions more spent by private companies tasked with cleaning up their past messes.
The Silicon Valley site is not an anomaly. There are more than 450 other Superfund sites like it. They have contaminated groundwater, and the cleanup is complicated by different types of soils that contain hard-to-clean chemicals. Experts have lost faith in the technology used to clean them up.
That means that as many as one-third of all Superfund sites could be causing more environmental harm than good.
“Sometimes you say, ‘We don’t have a good solution for this,’ ” said Sarah Stafford, a professor at The College of William and Mary who has researched the effects of environmental regulations on hazardous waste management. “So, let’s minimize the problem, monitor it and wait to figure out what in the world we’re going to do with this waste.”
The Superfund next door
There are more than 1,300 Superfund sites across the United States. How close is one to where you live?
Genesis of toxic groundwater
The evolution of the tech industry can be traced through the Mountain View site’s inhabitants.
First, Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor made computer chips in the 1960s and ’70s, giving Silicon Valley its name. Then AOL and Netscape moved in and helped shape the Internet during the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, Symantec calls it home. Google has a satellite campus here, just a few miles south of its headquarters down Silicon Valley’s main artery, Highway 101.
Back when Intel and Fairchild were making the first mass-produced computer chips, they used solvents such as trichloroethylene, or TCE, and benzene to degrease the chips. The cancer-causing chemicals leaked into the ground and polluted the soil and water below. The companies now are responsible for cleaning it up.
Today, a swimming pool is being constructed alongside shiny new buildings and massive outdoor sculptures. Tree-canopied walkways lead from one high-tech campus to the next, and the only indication as to what lies below is the steady whir of pumps, strategically placed around the site to suck the polluted groundwater out of the earth. This is known as “pump and treat,” a pillar of Superfund cleanup efforts.
Cleaning with carbon
Contaminated water is filtered through activated carbon – which is then shipped off to be burned – in a process called “pump and treat.”
The Superfund program began in 1980, after a valley of leaking chemicals in the small upstate New York community of Love Canal drew attention to the dangers of living near toxic waste. The program provided funding and the infrastructure to clean up toxic sites across the country.
In most cases, the companies responsible for the pollution pay the tab. Intel, Raytheon and Fairchild are long gone from the Silicon Valley site, for example, but are still footing the bill for cleanup. They don’t have to disclose how much they spend. But one internal presentation from the companies noted that the costs to clean the site surpassed $100 million from the early 1980s to 2003.
To tell this story, CIR followed one route taken by one stream of waste after it left Silicon Valley.
The first stop on the trail: the Calgon Carbon Corporation’s Big Sandy plant. It’s a rusty, incongruous complex of smoke stacks, conveyor belts and sheet metal sitting along the western bank of the Big Sandy River in Kentucky, more than 2,500 miles from Mountain View.
Once a shipment of hazardous waste arrives at Calgon, it’s unloaded into a pit. From there it’s fed into a towering furnace that burns day and night, every day of the year. The extreme heat inside approaches 2,000 degrees, separating the toxic chemicals from the filters.
The process leaves behind toxic ash and other newly contaminated filters.
For every 5 pounds of hazardous waste that arrives here, an additional pound of waste is created that needs to be shipped to a different plant.
There are also the pollutants that escape into the air and water.
One of those is a class of chemicals called dioxins, which are on the EPA’s list of “dirty dozen” dangerous chemicals.
Dioxins form during the superheating process and can escape the plant through vents and openings. They eventually trickle down into water, soils and plants. People are exposed as the chemicals build up in the food supply. Animals such as cows, chicken and fish eat contaminated grass or feed, and then people eat those animals.
Dioxins have been linked to cancer and reproductive harm in humans and animals and are prevalent in the environment and food supply. For instance, one study showed that women in Seveso, Italy, who were exposed to high levels of dioxins after a chemical explosion were significantly more likely to have cancer. Other studies have shown higher levels of tumors in the liver, lung, tongue and thyroid in animals that ate food contaminated with dioxins.
People don’t need to live near an incinerator to be exposed to dioxins, which can be carried great distances by the wind. For instance, the Inuit, people native to the Arctic Circle, live thousands of miles from most dioxin sources. But they have some of the world’s highest concentrations of the contaminants in their bodies because their diet is rich in animal fat.
The handful of treatment plants that handle waste like Silicon Valley’s are significant sources of dioxins, the EPA says. But it’s difficult to measure precisely how much dioxin they contribute to the environment. The plants aren’t required to report releases of dioxins and regulators haven’t researched the issue since 1987.
Bart Schaffer, supervisor of the corrective action section of Kentucky’s hazardous waste branch, said the state’s regulators don’t focus on dioxins released by facilities like Calgon, but they could soon. He compared it to the lack of attention once given to the chemicals that are now being removed from Silicon Valley.
“It’s just not something we are familiar with,” Schaffer said. “It’s like TCE in the 1970s.”
Environmental violators
To clean up places like Silicon Valley, waste gets sent to plants that have violated the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws.
Last year, Calgon agreed to pay $1.6 million to settle charges that it sold hazardous waste byproducts instead of disposing of them properly. The company did not admit to wrongdoing.
On top of that, facility operators dumped 540,000 gallons of hazardous waste into the Big Sandy River in 2011. Between 2009 and 2011, Calgon polluted the river with oil, grease and fecal coliform, state records show. On four separate occasions, the company was cited for exceeding its pollution limits. In each case, state regulators found no direct harm to people or the environment.
Marv Church, Calgon’s environmental and safety director, said the company didn’t conduct follow-up testing.
“There was nothing to test. There was a black streak in the river, and once it was gone it was gone,” he said.
The Big Sandy plant is one of four carbon regeneration facilities licensed to treat hazardous waste in the United States. Two other plants are in Pennsylvania – one in Darlington and another on Neville Island outside Pittsburgh. The fourth is on Native American tribal land outside Parker, Arizona. They all accept and treat Superfund waste from across the country.
Back in Mountain View, the companies have their pick of which facility gets their waste. The companies don’t have to disclose where they send it, but company records shed some light on the flow.
Since 2009, Calgon’s Big Sandy plant has accepted 25 tons of hazardous waste from the site. Calgon said it doesn’t know exactly how much of the waste it receives comes from Superfund sites as a whole, but current and former employees estimate it’s about 10 percent of all waste that arrives there annually.
Calgon has accumulated more state and federal environmental violations in the past five years than its competitors. But these plants are just the first stop in this trail of waste.
The Arizona plant accepts the bulk of hazardous waste from the Silicon Valley site. It has only minor violations. But it sends the waste it generates to the Clean Harbors Aragonite Incineration facility in rural Utah, which has a lengthy track record of environmental violations.
Since 2003, Aragonite has paid the state more than $1 million in fines for routinely losing track of waste shipments, failing to address problems that led to 15 fires in one year and a slew of other violations.
"Yes, from time to time we have violations. We're humans, and humans make mistakes," said Phil Retallick, senior vice president of regulatory affairs for Clean Harbors Environmental Services, which runs Aragonite. "There are some problems, but we try our best to fix them."
Calgon sends most of its waste 300 miles north to the Detroit suburb of Belleville. The Michigan Disposal Waste Treatment Plant was on the EPA’s Watch List for suspected chronic violators of environmental laws from October 2012 through last June. Then, owners paid the federal agency nearly $400,000 to settle violations of its hazardous waste permit. Inspectors found the facility disposed of hazardous waste without properly treating it.
Such violations, while not desired, are a natural consequence of the waste treatment industry, a spokesman for Michigan Disposal said.
“We’re trying to do a good thing for the environment,” David Crumrine said. “There’s no way to snap your fingers and make this waste go away.”
Road to toxic cleanup
Every month, blue tanker trucks with Calgon’s logo emblazoned on the side begin a northward journey, through the main streets of Ashland, Kentucky, past its pawnshops, vacant apartment buildings, dingy negligee shops and fast-food restaurants. Once across the state border, the road winds through central Ohio’s expanse of rest stops, agricultural fields, mega-porn shops and arena-sized churches.
Nestled between Interstate 94 and the Willow Run Airport, the 500-acre Michigan plant and landfill sit just off a rutted asphalt drive warped by the constant stream of 18-wheelers trampling over it. On Monday mornings, trucks idle outside the facility waiting to dump waste.
Here, the ash and dirty filters from Calgon undergo the next round of treatment. In some cases, the waste is infused with chemicals that break it apart. In others, it’s put in a hot furnace and blasted with oxygen to create less harmful chemicals.
The waste is mixed with thousands of other loads of hazardous waste, including some laced with mercury.
These methods, in turn, create their own hazardous byproducts. Just as Calgon’s superheating process can release dioxins, so, too, does the heating used in thermal oxidation.
In addition, for every 5 pounds of waste that arrives at the Michigan plant, 2.75 pounds gets created. The amount of waste is reduced. But it’s not eliminated.
Some of those leftovers are sent to another plant in Union Grove, Wisconsin, which then sends its own waste somewhere else. For every 5 pounds of waste that arrives in Wisconsin, nearly 6 pounds of new waste leaves, according to federal documents.
The plant specializes in mercury removal. It’s an energy-intensive process that only removes a small amount of the material. Because mercury is so toxic, anything that comes into contact with it becomes hazardous. Things like workers’ aprons get added to the stream of hazardous waste.
“They are reducing the toxicity of the waste. Even if they end up increasing the volume of waste that came in, as long as they are reducing the toxicity we’re OK with it,” said Mike Ellenbecker of the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
Ultimately, the trail doesn’t have a single end point. Plants continually accept, treat, generate and then ship waste elsewhere to any number of different destinations. The result is a weblike network that spans the United States. On a map, it looks like fireworks bursting from treatment plants, igniting new sparks as it moves along the trail.
Some of the waste takes a meandering path right back to Silicon Valley. The Aragonite plant in Utah sends some of its waste to a treatment plant in San Jose just down the highway from the Silicon Valley site.
The waste often ends up being buried back in the ground at a landfill. Even then, landfills give off their own byproducts, such as toxic runoff, that must be treated and shipped to plants similar to Calgon’s in Kentucky.
That starts the whole process over again.
“We’re talking about a toxic merry-go-round that spins around and around,” said Stephen Lester, a science director for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. The group was created by a resident of the Love Canal neighborhood in New York whose advocacy helped spur the Superfund law.
Winding trail of carbon footprints
Each step along the trail comes with its own carbon footprint.
First there is the energy required to pull the waste out of the ground. For all the pump-and-treat cleanup systems nationally, the EPA estimates that more than 356,000 tons of carbon dioxide are produced each year. That’s about the same amount emitted by 16,000 U.S. homes annually.
Then there’s the shipping footprint of all that waste once it’s removed.
For every shipment of waste sent from Mountain View to Kentucky, for example, more than 3 tons of carbon dioxide are generated, according to Art Hirsch, president of TerraLogic, an engineering consulting service.
It’s unknown how many shipments leave Superfund sites. Company records provide a glimpse of one small part of the Silicon Valley site.
In 2010, at least 12 cross-country shipments of waste were sent from one area at the Silicon Valley site, resulting in roughly 40 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
It doesn’t end there. Greenhouse gas emissions also are created once the waste gets to the treatment plant.
The cost in carbon
The carbon emissions generated in a year by one section of the cleanup at the Silicon Valley Superfund site is dramatic.
The Arizona carbon regeneration facility produced the annual emissions of an oil or gas-burning power plant, according to an analysis compiled for the EPA’s Superfund division. It concluded that for every 5 pounds treated, 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide are produced.
In total, the effort of pulling about 900 pounds of contaminants from one area at the Silicon Valley site, shipping it thousands of miles and treating it contributed to more than 4 million pounds of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere in 2010.
That’s roughly equivalent to 12,500 cars idling for a day and a half, said Jack Clayton, president of BlueSkyModel, a climate-change consulting firm.
This could be an acceptable risk, if it were actually making the water cleaner. But it’s not.
Pump and treat works well at first, but its effectiveness eventually peters out.
Since cleanup began in the early 1980s, the pumps at the Silicon Valley site have pulled out more than 100,000 pounds of contaminants from the ground, in some cases reducing chemical concentrations by up to 75 percent. But cleanup has stalled.
A CIR analysis of the past decade’s worth of data found that cleanup isn’t improving the situation. There are more than 500 wells at the Mountain View site for which monitoring data exists. At the majority of them, chemical concentrations remained stable or, in a small number of cases, increased.
Just trying to remove the chemicals can actually make things worse. Eventually, contaminants embedded in the surrounding soils and bedrock can leach into groundwater as a result of the pumping.
For instance, between 2002 and 2006, roughly 80 percent of the contaminants pulled from the groundwater at the Silicon Valley site came from surrounding soil and rock, a report by environmental consulting firms Geosyntec and GSI found. If those chemicals had been left alone, bacteria and microbes would have broken them down eventually, experts say.
The same pattern holds for tens of thousands of contaminated groundwater sites across the country, a 2012 study by the National Research Council found. The conclusion: Available technology is incapable of doing the job at these sites.
“Over the next 30 years, you’re looking at $200 billion to clean these complex sites,” said Michael Kavanaugh, a Geosyntec scientist and chairman of the National Research Council study panel. “I think we have to ask ourselves whether this is a reasonable cost for a process that could take 50, 100 or many hundreds of years to complete.”
In many cases, he said the best thing would be to halt treatment and make sure the contamination is contained.
Challenging the status quo
The EPA has had concerns for the past two decades about whether pump-and-treat systems work in the long run.
It’s also aware of the unintended consequences of the toxic trail. But the agency doesn’t know how to deal with them, its own documents show.
Of its more than $8 billion annual budget, nearly $1.2 billion goes to the Superfund program. That includes funding for roughly 3,000 full-time jobs.
In a 2012 report, the EPA issued guidelines to minimize the environmental footprint of Superfund cleanups. The agency now measures the toll a cleanup has on water, energy and air at each site. But agency officials said it was too difficult to get their arms around all the different side effects once the waste leaves.
They don’t take these consequences into consideration when looking at the cleanup’s environmental costs.
The system continues to run on inertia. The EPA is concerned about toxic vapors harming residents and workers. Companies already have invested heavily in the systems in place.
The agency takes a passive approach when it comes to what kind of treatment gets used. It’s up to the companies to push for change, which is often a long and arduous process.
Overseeing a cleanup
Cleaning up a Superfund site involves many participants with different responsibilities. A typical cleanup involves the responsible party, the EPA and the state.
Some do take that initiative. At the Silicon Valley site, Intel abandoned pump and treat years ago in favor of trying bioremediation, which injects chemical-eating microbes into the ground.
Others prefer sticking with a status quo that complies with the decades-old EPA’s plan.
“They may not wish to rock the boat with something new because it may not work,” said Harris-Bishop, the EPA spokesman. He added that changing the EPA’s cleanup plans “is a long, bureaucratic process.”
Some of the companies cleaning up the Silicon Valley site claim their work continues to reduce contamination.
“The remedy is performing as intended,” stated company officials for Schlumberger Ltd., in its 2012 annual report to the EPA. The company assumed responsibility for the site when it took over Fairchild. Schlumberger officials didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.
There’s also an active community of residents that continues to put pressure on regulators to clean up sites by any method available.
Soon after Google set up a satellite campus in Mountain View in 2012, toxic vapors from contaminants underground infiltrated the company’s offices, exposing employees to potentially dangerous levels of TCE.
The vapors are especially harmful to pregnant women. If exposed to low levels of the chemical during a crucial three-week period in their first trimester, women face an increased risk of having a baby born with holes in the heart, an EPA analysis found.
Most of the site doesn’t pose a health risk because contamination levels are so low. But even if treatment stopped at most of the site, there are three hot spots that would likely still need some treatment to protect people above.
Lenny Siegel, the executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, has organized an effective and vocal group of fellow residents to lobby for cleanup.
“At a recent meeting, I compared the technical challenges of groundwater cleanup to rocket science,” Siegel said. “Then, looking around the room, I noticed that a large fraction of the community representatives actually were rocket scientists.”
People like Siegel encourage the EPA to try alternative treatments that don’t contribute to the toxic trail. But more than anything, he wants the EPA to focus on the hot spots. He and his allies want cleanup to continue, regardless of the method.
That means the waste will continue to go somewhere else.
Stephen Hill, head of the San Francisco water board’s toxics division, said that shouldn’t be the only answer to solving the problem.
“Ideally, regulators are thinking holistically about how to reduce the waste and make problems go away,” Hill said. “Not just how to move them around like a shell game.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of carbon dioxide produced by cleanup at a Silicon Valley site.
Edited by Andrew Donohue and Mark Katches. Copy edited by Sheela Kamath and Christine Lee.
This story was produced in a collaboration between The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Guardian US. Contact the reporters at srust@cironline.org and mdrange@cironline.org. Contact the Guardian U.S. interactive team at @GuardianUS.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2014/mar/-sp-toxic-waste-silicon-valley-trail
Ignoring Water Risks in India Will Imperil Business: CDP
By Natalie Obiko Pearson Mar 18, 2014 8:13 AM ET
Businesses in India are underestimating water-related risks as depletion and pollution threaten to deprive millions of safe drinking water and stifle economic growth, according to a report published today.
Most companies are increasingly aware that the lack of water could disrupt businesses yet aren’t equipped to assess the risks or remedy the problems, according to the CDP, a nonprofit group formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project.
“No water means no business,” the CDP said. “Water tables are falling and water-quality issues are increasingly coming to the fore.”
India is expected to become “water-scarce” within six years following a steady decrease in supplies available per person, according to the report. Per capita water availability in India fell 15 percent in a decade while the second-most populous nation expanded nearly three-fold in 50 years.
The CDP compiles environmental performance data for investors. For its first India water report, it surveyed 29 companies including Tata Chemicals (TTCH) Ltd., Oil & Natural Gas Corp., JSW Steel (JSTL) Ltd., ITC Ltd. (ITC) and Sesa Sterlite (SSLT) Ltd.’s iron-ore division. More than half consider themselves exposed to water risks. None reported paying any penalties for breaching discharge regulations, CDP said.
Businesses such as Baker Hughes Inc., Pernod Ricard SA (RI) and Croda International Plc (CRDA) source raw materials like guar gum, castor oil and sorghum from areas in India subject to water risks and anticipate worsening procurement challenges, according to the report.
To contact the reporter on this story: Natalie Obiko Pearson in New Delhi at npearson7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net Randall Hackley, Alastair Reed
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-18/ignoring-water-risks-in-india-will-imperil-business-cdp.html
My adrenal glands were running over time. I'm glad to breath again!
With a cross of the two moving averages, we might have cross hairs!
I am excited with the Company's progress.
I will remain focused on the Company and the PPS will reflect progress. No stock goes straight up.
I might splurge on an ice cold green beer.
Join me in a warm round of cheers and toast to Seth and Stella?!
Waste to real energy: the first MFC powered mobile phone
Ioannis A. Ieropoulos, Pablo Ledezma, Andrew Stinchcombe, George Papaharalabos, Chris Melhuisha and John Greenmanb
Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2013,15, 15312-15316
DOI: 10.1039/C3CP52889H
Received 18 Jun 2013, Accepted 10 Jul 2013
First published online 16 Jul 2013 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
This communication reports for the first time the charging of a commercially available mobile phone, using Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) fed with real neat urine. The membrane-less MFCs were made out of ceramic material and employed plain carbon based electrodes.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2013/CP/c3cp52889h#!divAbstract
Nutrient recovery technology adoption needs change, says new report
Despite technology advances over the past half-century, effluent from water treatment plants still continue to pollute waters with nutrients and change is needed to achieve a “new utility model”.
This is according to a new report – The Road Towards Smarter Nutrient Management in Municipal Water Treatment – from the Johnson Foundation, part of the Charting New Waters series. It was put together with the Water Environment Federation and Environmental Defense Fund.
The report explores opportunities for the water utility sector to continue providing clean effluent, while also examining the opportunities for recovering nitrogen and phosphorus and returning it to the agricultural cycle.
It said that “too much phosphorus in our waters contributes to toxic algal blooms and eutrophication in lakes and other aquatic environments, causing significant environmental damage, particular in freshwater systems”.
The Foundation said: “Given the dual challenges of increased nutrient loads at wastewater facilities and the growing need to preserve and recycle these nutrients, many members of the wastewater sector believe the time is right for a sector-wide shift away from basic treatment and toward nutrient recovery and removal.”
A renaming of “wastewater treatment plants” to “water resource recovery facilities” is already taking place by utilities, the findings said, which reflect a new focus of capturing energy, nutrients and water.
Two case studies were presented in the report, including a modification for nutrient removal and cost savings.
The Long Island Sound Total Maximum Daily Load is currently being reevaluated, it said. This has prompted the New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission to deploy U.S. Environmental Protection Agency funding for a study of the feasibility of low-cost retrofits to 29 treatment plants in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, to enable nitrogen removal without any major capital investments.
Twenty-four of these plants are candidates for low-cost nitrogen removal, and the plant operators have expressed interest in learning about these new processes. The retrofits could include:
• Process control changes
• Cyclic aeration
• The addition of mixed liquor recycle pumps and piping
• The creation of an anoxic zone.
These plants present a good example of operations that stand to substantially benefit from guidance offered by the Nutrient Management Roadmap, the Johnson Foundation said.
http://www.waterworld.com/topics/device/mobile/t/88670799/nutrient-recovery-technology-adoption-needs-change-says-new-report.htm
My thoughts, in case it matters to anyone...
An era shift is upon us.
Seth and Stella's professionalism through the transition is remarkable.
Seth carried TAUG when minnows were swimming to shallow water. Instead of allowing ego to intervene, he recognized a different skill set was required for the next stage of growth.
I admire Seth. George Washington stepped aside in spite of being asked to stay by many. Putting the needs of the many over the needs of the one, is one trait I respect over many.
Recognizing the time for departure is the rarest of introspective leadership traits.
In spite of Stella selling at the low, Seth embraced her as the leader for the next stage.
Leading a public company is difficult. Superb leadership is a rare trait in public firms. It is easier to run a clean firm. It is special to clean-up a firm, turn it around, and THEN step aside to for new leader. Washington did this. Adams, and then Jefferson, got to build the Country. This ego-less transition made America special.
Stella has a potent pedigree. The downside is greater for her than it was for Seth. She is intellectually brilliant. That creates opportunities; and risks.
Stella's challenge might not be intellectual, rather "humanness."
Business is about human relationships; not logic machines.
Stella inherits an IP and revenue-generating portfolio. A number of firms would like to have, and are jealous to have not acquired, these assets.
How she leverages those assets will be the measure of her tenure.
Seth's contribution is written.
Stella is an exciting new legacy opportunity. In the future, I hope she can identify and recruit the Jefferson...
MasterCard, Visa form group to push for better card security
By Aman Shah and Siddharth Cavale
Fri Mar 7, 2014 2:41pm EST
By Aman Shah and Siddharth Cavale
(Reuters) - Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc said they had launched a cross-industry group to improve security for card transactions and press U.S. retailers and banks to meet a 2015 deadline to adopt technology that would make it safer to pay with plastic.
The move follows several data breaches at U.S. retailers, including one at Target Corp late last year involving the theft of about 40 million credit and debit card records.
The new group - which includes banks, credit unions, retailers and industry trade associations - will initially focus on the adoption of 'EMV' chip technology, MasterCard and Visa said in a statement on Friday.
EMV cards, already used in Europe and Asia, store information on computer chips rather than on traditional magnetic strips, making them harder to counterfeit.
They can also require - depending on the issuer - that users enter a personal identification number, or PIN, to make purchases, adding an extra layer of security.
However, the National Retail Federation, the world's largest retail trade association, said it had not joined the group because there were no plans to immediately implement the PIN option, making for a "half-baked solution."
"They're not serious about reducing fraud, unless they put a pin on," said Mallory Duncan, the NRF's general counsel.
"We remain insistent that U.S. retailers' customers be given the same protections as consumers in more than 80 countries who have both a chip and a PIN securing their credit and debit cards," Duncan said in a statement.
Visa and MasterCard declined to provide details on specific proposals for the technology to be used in the cards or the make-up of the cross-industry group.
The American Bankers Association did not respond to requests for comment but Patrick Keefe, a spokesman for the Credit Union National Association, confirmed that the trade association was part of the industry group.
"The recent high-profile breaches have served as a catalyst for much needed collaboration between the retail and financial services industry on the issue of payment security," Visa President Ryan McInerney said in the statement.
STRIKING WHILE IRON IS HOT
MasterCard and Visa had already set a deadline of October 2015 for U.S. retailers to adopt the new payment technology.
"Probably about 80 percent plus of the larger retailers were going to be able to make the deadline anyways," said David Robertson, publisher of payment industry newsletter The Nilson Report. Robertson said the formation of the group would help push small and mid-size retailers to adopt the new technology.
Banks and retailers have been dragging their feet over the upgrade, at odds over how the costs would be split.
The NRF has said it could cost the U.S. retail industry about $30 billion to upgrade to chip-based cards, including equipment, training and software.
"Banks and retailers want to make sure that if they invest in new infrastructure, they'll get the return in reduced fraud," Wedbush Securities analyst Gil Luria told Reuters.
MasterCard and Visa said the group would also address security issues with mobile and online transactions. One proposed solution is for traditional account numbers to be replaced by a unique digital payment code.
Target said last month it was accelerating a $100 million program to implement the use of chip-enabled smart cards to protect against cyber threats, with a goal to have the technology in place by early 2015.
"In the aftermath of the Target breach, security is on the minds of executives in the way it hasn't been in a very long time," Robertson said. "This is a classic example of trying to strike while the iron is hot."
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2615520140307
Waste not want not: The Rise of Resource Recovery
With funding for wastewater treatment infrastructure in the US increasingly stretched, the idea of recovering valuable nutrients and even precious metals such as silver is gaining momentum. In addition to the recent EPA blueprint aimed at encouraging the integration of such technologies, scientific organisations such as the Water Environment Research Foundation are working to bring such technologies to commercial fruition.
by Carrie W. Capuco
WERF's energy program aims to support net energy neutrality at all wastewater treatment facilities, starting with those that treat flows of 18,900 m3/day or more
In its most recent infrastructure report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the state of US water infrastructure, encompassing dams, levees, wastewater and drinking water infrastructure, an average grade of a D.
According to the report, as of 2008 the US has approximately 14,780 wastewater treatment facilities and 19,739 wastewater pipe systems.
Although access to centralised treatment systems is widespread, the condition of many of these systems is reported to be poor, with aging pipes and inadequate capacity leading to the discharge of an estimated 900 billion gallons (3.4 billion cubic metres) of untreated sewage each year.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that the cost of the capital investment required to maintain and upgrade drinking-water and wastewater treatment systems across the US in 2010 was $91 billion. However, only $36 billion of that was funded, leaving a capital funding gap of nearly $55 billion.
Blueprint for innovation
In March this year the EPA published its Blueprint for Integrating Technology Innovation into the National Water Program.
The Blueprint highlights the EPA Office of Water's plans to advance and promote technology innovation across various water programs.
"Technology innovation can accelerate progress toward our goals of clean and safe water. EPA and many stakeholders will strive to support technology innovation to solve water resource problems…cheaper, faster and using less energy," explains Nancy Stoner, acting assistant administrator for water at the EPA.
To this end, the blueprint notes that the 150,000 drinking water and 15,000 wastewater facilities nationwide account for as much as 4% of the country's electricity consumption - approximately 56 million MWh at a cost of around $4 billion. As such, energy conservation and recovery are said to hold significant promise for reducing energy consumption and treatment costs, while certain technologies may even turn some of these facilities into net energy producers.
Wasted not wastewater
According to the EPA's blueprint, wastewater facilities in the US process approximately 9.5 trillion gallons (36 billion cubic metres) of wastewater per year. However, the agency says that due to a combination of drought and increasing water demands, wastewater should be viewed through a new paradigm - as 'water that is wasted'.
With this in mind, the blueprint explains that there are significant needs for technologies and approaches that foster substantially greater water reuse, which in turn can reduce pollution and conserve energy. Further to the potential to reduce the energy consumption of certain wastewater treatment processes, as well the as ability to recover energy from others, the blueprint also notes the impact being felt from nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, which is threatening surface water quality and drinking water supplies. New techniques are needed to reduce nutrient pollution at substantially less cost and with reduced carbon footprint.
To this end the agency also highlights a number of emerging technologies which can recover nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, from water/wastewater for use/reuse elsewhere.
Resource recovery
With wastewater being increasingly recognised as a valued source of renewable resources, the EPA is urging wastewater treatment facilities, which treat human and animal waste, to be viewed as Renewable Resource Recovery Facilities that produce clean water, recover energy and generate nutrients.
This view is backed by not-for-profit organisation, the Water Environment Federation (WEF), which believes that wastewater treatment plants are not waste disposal facilities, but rather water resource recovery facilities that produce clean water, recover nutrients. Such facilities, it argues in a position statement, have the potential to reduce the nation's dependence on fossil fuels through the production and use of renewable energy.
The potential to transform these facilities exists because wastewater contains potentially marketable products. However, technical, social, and economic challenges remain before treatment plants can realise the full potential of nutrient recovery from wastewater.
Numerous individual products can be recovered from wastewater treatment plants, including biodegradable plastics, adhesives, and enzymes useful in biomedical applications. Additionally, several carbon based materials such as biopolymers, PHAs and others, are present in domestic wastewater and perhaps biosolids.
There are however, lingering questions about the quality, product yield and technological requirements, as well as the practicality of recovering these products at a municipal facility.
Markets value and demand for these products are also not well understood. In addition, there is a need to better understand the relevant trade-offs and consequences, including those that may directly affect discharge permit compliance.
Research needed
Many scientific papers have been published on the availability of these products in wastewater. However, the industry needs to get an objective and unbiased view of the value and current and future demand for these products.
This will help the industry to position for the both the medium and long term in its attempts to become energy neutral and environmentally and economically sustainable. One of the critical knowledge gaps is a comprehensive technical and economic review of existing and emerging technologies which can produce carbon-based and/or non-nutrient products from wastewater or wastewater by-products.
The Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF) hopes to support projects that can fill these vital knowledge gaps while also providing practical information for water utilities interested in expanding their investment in resource recovery.
WERF is seeking answers to resolve several resource recovery questions with its current funding research on the recovery of three resources: macro-Nutrients, Energy and Water. The organisation has also funded research on appropriately treated sewage sludge (biosolids), as a resource in the form of a nutrient rich soil amendment.
The overarching goal of the Resource Recovery program is to transition the wastewater treatment industry to one focused on resource recovery (starting with nutrients) with the vision that most, if not all, materials in wastewater can be commoditized.
In the area of energy, WERF is seeking to advance processes/practices with potential for energy recovery/efficiency or which address barriers to energy recovery in the wastewater treatment process. The overarching goal of WERF's Energy program is to develop information that will support net energy neutrality at all wastewater facilities starting with those that treat flows of five million or more gallons per day (18,900 m3/day).
Transition
To initiate a transition toward nutrient recovery, in 2012, WERF selected a global research team to begin to understand and guide the acceptance and implementation of nutrient recovery from wastewater. This research (WERF project # NTRY1R12) also focuses on extractive macro-nutrient recovery technologies for phosphorus.
In the last few years, the potential to recover phosphorus has increased dramatically. This represents an emerging frontier for utilities to address both nutrient load limitations and to develop alternative revenue streams.
The international team, led by Hazen and Sawyer, has collaborated with other consulting firms, utilities, technology providers, and academic experts to achieve three main objectives:
• Characterise factors influencing the adoption of resource recovery systems (primarily on macro-nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus)
• Provide a guidance tool for the implementation of resource recovery technologies for water resource recovery facilities (previously known as WWTPs)
• Experimentally evaluate phosphorus recovery technologies.
Then, WERF's newest research will build upon the prior and on-going research by focusing on additional resources: value-added commodities or groups of commodities that are likely to be used by utilities (e.g., methanol or other specialty chemicals or precursors, carbon-based compounds, etc.).
It will also focus on commodities that can be produced in quantities that can be effectively marketed and/or used regionally - such as hydrogen peroxide, high-quality 'designer' biosolids products with specific N-P-K ratios, or other products that can be sold, etc.
Additional commodities that could be recovered may also be studied if they are determined to be economically viable, such as metals including silver, micro-nutrients, biodegradable plastics/polymers, etc., while having no detrimental impact in the overall final effluent quality.
Despite the promise of abundant products in wastewater, market value and demand are not well understood
This effort seeks pioneering research that will advance knowledge and understanding on the generation or recovery of a particular commodity, or group of commodities, that can be recovered from wastewater. It will complement WERF's ongoing initiatives in evaluating and demonstrating new technologies to accelerate the adoption of innovative treatment technologies.
Rationale
This research is needed because as various new technologies and processes that could be used to recover potentially valuable commodities intrinsically present in wastewater are currently being researched and developed. Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRFs) that would benefit from these new technologies need a scientifically sound view of the new technologies that can be adopted as part of their standard processes.
It is hoped WERF's research results will help the Water quality community position itself for both the medium and longer term in its strategic attempts to transform WRRFs to be energy neutral, environmentally, and economically sustainable.
Ultimately, in order to promote WRRFs as product recovery facilities, the water quality community must demonstrate that these facilities can generate or produce high quality value-added products. These must be able to be used to either enhance facility operations and economics or more generally meet the needs of our communities and economies. WERF's newest portfolio of research seeks to accomplish that task.
Conclusions
Water and wastewater treatment infrastructure is facing a significant, and growing, funding gap in the US. The prospect of reducing the cost of treatment, or increasing the revenue generated through the production of additional marketable energy, nutrients and commodities is an appealing one.
The idea of recovering valuable products from wastewater may once have seemed fanciful, but encouraged by the noises coming from federal government, it's a prize that many in the water quality community are working towards.
Of the wide variety of innovative projects underway not all will succeed, but those that do may just hold the key to plugging the funding gap for US wastewater treatment infrastructure.
Carrie W. Capuco is director of communications at WERF. For more information on resource recovery, email: ccapuco@werf.org.
http://www.waterworld.com/articles/wwi/print/volume-28/issue-5/regional-spotlight-us-caribbean/waste-not-want-not-the-rise-of-resource-recovery.html
Global stationary fuel cell revenue will grow from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $40.0 billion in 2022...
Stationary Fuel Cells
Fuel Cells for Prime Power, Large CHP, Residential CHP, and UPS Applications: Global Market Analysis and Forecasts
The stationary fuel cell industry continues to be the poster child of the entire global fuel cell sector. Focus on grid stability is increasing and the costs associated with natural disasters are rising. As a result, the use of fuel cells as small distributed power plants for grid stabilization or backup is moving forward faster than any other sector in terms of megawatts.
The principal drivers for adoption continue to be focused on the shifting economics of adoption and the increased need for more reliable power, as well as increased financing options. Since different countries are facing different pain points, in terms of power and power availability, the adoption costs of distributed generation (DG) technologies, including fuel cells, are also different. The core application segments of prime power, large combined heat and power (CHP), residential CHP (resCHP), and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) continue to grow, albeit at different paces. In addition, the stationary fuel cell industry is still led by a small number of companies, as just 20 key system players accounted for over 95% of revenue at the end of 2013. Navigant Research forecasts that global stationary fuel cell revenue will grow from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $40.0 billion in 2022.
This Navigant Research report analyzes the global market opportunity for stationary fuel cells across four key application segments: prime power, large CHP, resCHP, and UPS. The study provides a comprehensive assessment of the demand drivers, business models, and policy factors associated with the rapidly developing market for stationary fuel cells. Global revenue and capacity forecasts, segmented by application, region of manufacture, and electrolyte type, extend through 2022. The report also examines the main technology issues related to stationary fuel cells and includes in-depth profiles of key industry players.
http://www.navigantresearch.com/research/stationary-fuel-cells
Global stationary fuel cell revenue will grow from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $40.0 billion in 2022...
Stationary Fuel Cells
Fuel Cells for Prime Power, Large CHP, Residential CHP, and UPS Applications: Global Market Analysis and Forecasts
The stationary fuel cell industry continues to be the poster child of the entire global fuel cell sector. Focus on grid stability is increasing and the costs associated with natural disasters are rising. As a result, the use of fuel cells as small distributed power plants for grid stabilization or backup is moving forward faster than any other sector in terms of megawatts.
The principal drivers for adoption continue to be focused on the shifting economics of adoption and the increased need for more reliable power, as well as increased financing options. Since different countries are facing different pain points, in terms of power and power availability, the adoption costs of distributed generation (DG) technologies, including fuel cells, are also different. The core application segments of prime power, large combined heat and power (CHP), residential CHP (resCHP), and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) continue to grow, albeit at different paces. In addition, the stationary fuel cell industry is still led by a small number of companies, as just 20 key system players accounted for over 95% of revenue at the end of 2013. Navigant Research forecasts that global stationary fuel cell revenue will grow from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $40.0 billion in 2022.
This Navigant Research report analyzes the global market opportunity for stationary fuel cells across four key application segments: prime power, large CHP, resCHP, and UPS. The study provides a comprehensive assessment of the demand drivers, business models, and policy factors associated with the rapidly developing market for stationary fuel cells. Global revenue and capacity forecasts, segmented by application, region of manufacture, and electrolyte type, extend through 2022. The report also examines the main technology issues related to stationary fuel cells and includes in-depth profiles of key industry players.
http://www.navigantresearch.com/research/stationary-fuel-cells
Water Scarcity Can’t Be Solved Alone
Written by Richard Tomlinson
By 2025, 48 of the world’s nations will face water stress or scarcity. In just the next four years, 30% of U.S. cities will experience a water crisis. As the world population continues to grow, water will become an ever-more-precious resource.
If we don’t work together to address them now, the challenges we face today will be the same challenges we face tomorrow—but on a much larger scale.
In some growing cities, water usage has risen 800 percent. Rapid urbanization puts stress on our water resources, but the loss of fresh water around the world only adds to the pressure. In some parts of the world, desertification is quite significant. And where fresh water goes scarce, access can become limited.
In his recent video blog, Richard Tomlinson, managing partner of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, says we can’t let politics get in the way of the larger issue. We have to make water conservation a priority if we expect our available resources to sustain us well into the future.
“You can’t solve it individually. You have to erase the boundaries; you have to erase the borders; you have to erase the jurisdictions; you have to erase politics,” Tomlinson says.
http://www.ourwatercounts.com/blog/index.php/2014/02/19/water-scarcity-cant-solved-alone/
Global Water Technologies welcomes Indianapolis Water Technology Roundtable
INDIANAPOLIS, March 3, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Water Technologies (OTC Pink: GWTR) is supporting a water technology roundtable in Indianapolis on Tuesday, March 11 that is being coordinated by the German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest.
The event will be held at Barnes & Thornburg in downtown Indianapolis and includes remarks from Mayor Greg Ballard, Mario Soos, Deputy Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Chicago and Michael Huber, president & CEO of the Indianapolis Chamber.
The roundtable will discuss water technology opportunities including efficient water infrastructure as a driver for a healthy local economy and opportunities for collaboration between innovative companies in Europe and the Great Lakes region. It is part the German American Water Technology Initiative that was established in 2011 to increase know-how, technology and economic exchange among water experts, policy makers, organizations and private businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.
"This event is a perfect example of the regional efforts that Global Water Technologies has been supporting, with Indiana overlapping two of the leading water technology clusters in the United States," said Erik Hromadka, CEO of Global Water Technologies. "Indianapolis has a vibrant tech community and water technologies is an emerging opportunity for our city, state and region."
Global Water Technologies has been working with Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) to create a living laboratory for water technologies and addressed those efforts last year at International Water Week in Amsterdam.
The event is open to the public and registration information is available at:
http://www.gaccmidwest.org/events
More information about Global Water Technologies is available at: www.gwtr.com
FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENT: Statements in this press release relating to plans, strategies, economic performance and trends, projections of results of specific activities or investments, and other statements that are not descriptions of historical facts may be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking information is inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors, which include, but are not limited to, risk factors inherent in doing business. Forward-looking statements may be identified by terms such as "may," "will," "should," "could," "expects," "plans," "intends," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "forecasts," "potential," or "continue," or similar terms or the negative of these terms. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. The company has no obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
SOURCE Global Water Technologies, Inc.
/CONTACT: info@gwtr.com
/Web site: http://www.gwtr.com
Two-hundred-year drought doomed Indus Valley Civilization
Monsoon hiatus that began 4,200 years ago parallels dry spell that led civilizations to collapse in other regions.
Emma Marris
03 March 2014
The decline of Bronze-Age civilizations in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia has been attributed to a long-term drought that began around 2000 bc. Now palaeoclimatologists propose that a similar fate was followed by the enigmatic Indus Valley Civilization, at about the same time. Based on isotope data from the sediment of an ancient lake, the researchers suggest that the monsoon cycle, which is vital to the livelihood of all of South Asia, essentially stopped there for as long as two centuries.
The Indus Valley, in present Pakistan and northwest India, was home to a civilization also known as the Harappan Civilization. It was characterized by large, well-planned cities with advanced municipal sanitation systems and a script that has never been deciphered. But the Harappans seemed to slowly lose their urban cohesion, and their cities were gradually abandoned.
The link between this gradual decline and climate has been tenuous because of a dearth of climate records from the region. So Yama Dixit, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues examined sediments from Kotla Dahar, an ancient lake near the northeastern edge of the Indus Valley area in Haryana, India, that still seasonally floods.
The team assigned ages to sediment layers using radiocarbon dating of organic matter. In various layers, they collected the preserved shells of tiny lake snails (Melanoides tuberculata), which are made of a form of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) called aragonite. The team also looked at the oxygen in the argonite molecules, counting the ratio of the rare oxygen-18 isotope to the more prevalent oxygen-16.
Two-hundred-year hiatus
Kotla Dahar is a closed basin, filled only by rain and runoff and without outlets. Thus precipitation and evaporation alone determine its water volume. During drought, oxygen-16, which is lighter than oxygen-18, evaporates faster, so that the remaining water in the lake and, consequently, the snails' shells, become enriched with oxygen-18. The team's reconstruction showed a spike in the relative amount of oxygen-18 between 4,200 and 4,000 years ago. This suggests that precipitation dramatically decreased during that time. Moreover, their data suggests that the regular summer monsoons stopped for some 200 years.
The result, reported last week in Geology1, supports the idea that monsoon failure led to the civilization’s decline, although David Hodell, a co-author of the study and a palaeoclimatologist also at the University of Cambridge, hastens to add that uncertainties in the shell and archaeological records mean that the dates could be off by some 100 years in either direction.
Anil Gupta, the director of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun, India, says that the work fills a gap in the geographic record of ancient droughts. But large questions remain. “What drove this climate change 4,100 years ago? We don’t see major changes in the North Atlantic or in the solar activity at that time.”
Recently, another team, led by palaeoclimatologist Sushma Prasad of the German Research Centre for Geoscience in Potsdam, Germany, did a similar analysis on a sediment core from Lonar Lake in central India2. They found that in that area, drought began as many as 4,600 years ago. But the results are consistent with those of Dixit’s group, Prasad says. “We see a drying event starting earlier, but at about 4,200 years ago it became very intense.”
If a lack of monsoons did spell the end of the Indus Valley civilization, says Hodell, “it is an example — and there are other examples of this — of how ancient societies have had to contend with climate. There are some lessons for us and our future, in which we will have to deal with anthropogenic climate change”.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2014.14800
http://www.nature.com/news/two-hundred-year-drought-doomed-indus-valley-civilization-1.14800