May first is World Asthma Day and the start of Asthma Awareness Month. Each year EPA takes this opportunity to amplify its public awareness campaign, strengthen its partnerships with community level asthma organizations, and further the discussion on the asthma epidemic.

Asthma is a serious issue. It’s a chronic respiratory disease that affects the quality of life for almost 26 million Americans, including over seven million children. It can also sometimes be deadly. Environmental irritants such as smog, smoke, and chemicals in the air–affect our health and trigger asthma attacks. So, the cleaner our air, both indoors and out, the easier it will be to manage this disease.

While the Clean Air Act has provided numerous health benefits, including the prevention of millions of asthma attacks per year, community level organizations that deliver asthma management and care also deserve special recognition. Each year EPA honors exceptional health plans, health care providers and communities in action as they integrate evidence-based best practices into effective public health programs. The National Environmental Leadership Award in Asthma Management is the highest recognition a program and its leaders can receive from the federal government for delivering excellent environmental asthma management as part of their comprehensive asthma care services.

This year, EPA honors four winners for their outstanding efforts to improve the lives of people with asthma in under-served communities. We recognize:

• Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Hartford, Conn., for its Easy Breathing Program, which includes patient education and environmental interventions. The program is implemented across the state of Connecticut helping ensure that comprehensive asthma care is available to the 105,000 children with asthma now enrolled in the program.
• L.A. Care Health Plan, Los Angeles, Calif., which serves Medicaid members in low-income communities in Los Angeles County. The program has developed strong community ties, and collaborates with the local housing authority. This health plan reimburses for home visits, environmental management supplies, and asthma education.
• Michigan Department of Community Health’s Asthma Prevention and Control Program, Lansing, Mich., for its state-wide program that supports local interventions and builds community capacity across Michigan. The program improves outcomes for underserved children and adults dealing with asthma. This program has been able to secure health plan reimbursement for several of its initiatives, while others are supported through state and local state asthma partnerships.
• Mission Health, Asheville, N.C., which addresses health disparities in minority children, including Native Americans, with asthma in rural western North Carolina. Mission Health works with communities, health care providers, clinics, families and schools and provides interventions that address both indoor and outdoor environmental exposures.

EPA thanks these and the thousands of other organizations that are working to combat asthma in communities across the United States. Please read more about Asthma Awareness.

About the author: Gina McCarthy is the Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.  A brief bio

I never really gave much thought about medicine until now. Now I need medicine. Now I am a mother and my kids take medicine. Now I study how medicine is disposed of as part of my job as an environmental scientist. And now, I know just how serious a problem unintentional poisoning can be. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 142,000 children were seen in emergency rooms in 2004 and 2005 because of medication poisonings, and more than 80 percent of those poisonings were because an unsupervised child found and consumed medications.

I used to keep my medicine in the bathroom under the sink or in the medicine cabinet. I now know that is not a good idea. Besides being subject to steam and heat, the medicine can be reached by my kids if I store it in the bathroom cabinet. Being the little explorers that they are, my kids see cabinets as perfect treasure boxes – all of this little stuff to play with and potentially ingest.

Additionally, pharmaceutical compounds have been detected at low concentrations in our nation’s rivers, lakes, streams and drinking water, leading to concerns that these compounds may affect aquatic life. For these reasons, EPA initiated a study of unused pharmaceutical disposal practices at health care facilities with the goals of understanding one way in which pharmaceuticals enter our waterways and also understanding what factors contribute to pharmaceuticals entering through water. While EPA understands that there are many factors influencing the handling and disposal of pharmaceuticals by the health care industry, the focus of EPA’s study is on disposal into water. EPA decided to study medical facilities because the Agency believes that these facilities dispose of a large quantity of unused pharmaceuticals.

If you have not already done so, take a thorough look at your medicine cabinet. Find a new location to store your medicine that is not in the bathroom and is up high and out of reach of kids. Properly dispose of the medicine that you no longer use. Don’t dump it in the toilet or down the drain – if possible, take it to a prescription drug take-back event this weekend. Chances are there’s a drop-off location in your neighborhood. To find a drug take-back drop-off point, visit the Drug Enforcement Administration’s web page.

About the author: Meghan Hessenauer is an environmental scientist in EPA’s Office of Water. She is writing guidelines for the health care industry on how to manage their unused pharmaceuticals.

Last week, I visited the San Juan Bay National Estuary Program office in Puerto Rico and took a tour of the estuary with the program’s director, Dr. Javier Laureano. San Juan Bay was the first tropical island estuary to become part of the National Estuary Program and, it contains coral communities, seagrass beds and mangrove forests – all habitats designated critical areas. The San Juan Bay program also faces some significant environmental challenges, but Dr. Laureano and his team are making tremendous progress through their partnerships with commonwealth and municipal officials, the local water and wastewater utilities, and dedicated community groups.
We started the day with a boat tour of the waterways that connect to San Juan Bay. It’s an oasis in the Puerto Rico’s largest urban center with almost no development and lots of wildlife, but with significant contamination issues from sewage and stormwater. The National Estuary Program has requested $1.2 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund to track all of the sources of untreated sewage into the waterway. We also saw a number of new eco-tourism businesses that the National Estuary Program has helped get off the ground.

A hallmark of this program is its focus on developing economic opportunities for many of the communities located within the National Estuary Program study area because of the poverty they face. In this case, many of the local neighborhoods lack sewage treatment and have clogged stormwater drains as well, so the storms flood the streets, homes and even schools with sewage-laden water.

The trash in the Martin Pena Channel that flows into San Juan Bay and is so deep that you can walk across the former stream at many points. It is a health hazard that EPA is working in partnership with many, including effective community leaders, to address, but it’s a big job and presents a significant financial challenge for this impoverished community.

I also joined EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck and Assistant Administrator Craig Hooks for a meeting and walking tour with representatives of community groups, a visit to a community garden where university students tutor children in the neighborhood and a trip to eroded coastal areas where the National Estuary Program is planting mangrove trees to stabilize and protect the coastline. These projects are a few examples of the great work underway to restore and protect one of the country’s most unique ecosystems in the United States.

About the author: Nancy Stoner is the Acting Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Water

Solar PV array at Brockton Brightfields installation in MA

As a solar person, I am always on the look-out for prime sites for solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. In addition to solar resources, I look for a few simple things: clear southern exposures, flat or gentle grades, and close proximity to power lines. In general, I am looking for space, whether it is an open rooftop or an abandoned rail yard.

With over 13,000 sites and nearly 22 million acres of EPA-tracked potentially contaminated and underutilized properties nationwide, I see an untapped potential for large-scale deployment of renewable energy. That acreage receives a whole lot of sunshine and, in some cases, gets its fair share of wind. For communities interested in renewables, these sites offer a unique value proposition.

In many cases, these properties have blighted the community for years. From the perspective of a renewable energy developer, these sites are attractive due to their proximity to existing distribution or transmission lines, favorable zoning, and potentially lower land costs.  With this redevelopment approach, I see the potential to turn these liabilities into community assets by remediating the site and deploying pollution-free energy facilities.

Wind-Turbines-at-Steel-Winds-facility-in-NY

Partnering with DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and remediation experts here at EPA, the RE-Powering team converted our collective knowledge into new tools to guide state and local governments, site owners, clean-up project managers, and other stakeholders through a process for screening potentially contaminated sites and landfills for their suitability for future redevelopment with PV or wind energy.

This knowledge is now bundled in a simple decision-tree format to enable communities to screen sites without needing renewable energy expertise. We built the screening tools to provide quick feedback on whether or not a site could be viable based on technical or economic criteria. The tools provide a thorough check than my quick check during a site walk. Throughout the process, we provide context for each of the criteria and point to additional tools and references to work through the evaluation process. Our goal is to empower communities to bring their vision of a solar array or wind farm one step closer.

While site walks at brownfields and landfills don’t always offer inspiring views, they are the next step in an inspired approach to expanding our American-made, renewable energy generation. Screen your sites. Take a walk. RE-Power America’s Land.

About the author: Katie Brown is the AAAS Science & Technology fellow hosted in the Center for Program Analysis in the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. Prior to her fellowship, Katie worked in the solar industry in product development and at NREL on device design and government-industry partnerships.

When I was a teenager, we used to play touch football in the neighborhood. Whoever was around would be allowed to play, regardless of ability or age. Super Bowl Sunday brought me back to those memories of what seemed like a simpler time.

But maybe it wasn’t so simple. In those days, we used to drive trash over to the “town dump” and toss it into a former gravel pit. Things have changed and the NFL has changed with the times.

The NFL worked to minimize the environmental impact of Super Bowl activities. And in reading what they were doing, I saw that the NFL’s activities and actions were so easy we can scale them to our personal actions.

The first activity they listed dealt with trash. NFL event facilities diverted trash by recycling and reusing potential waste materials. The Lucas Oil Stadium, the Indiana Convention Center, and hotels serving as team headquarters, as well as the NFL headquarters and the Motorola Super Bowl Media Center all participated. The JW Marriott hotel also took part in a composting pilot project during Super Bowl week. Food waste scraps were collected in compostable bags and taken to a facility to be converted into nutrient-rich compost.

Massachusetts has extensive recycling programs and so, like the NFL Superbowl Committee, we can divert waste from the trash through our recycling and our composting programs. Inspired by the NFL, I put my recycling bin out for my guests on Superbowl Sunday and collected cans, bottles and plastics. And I composted paper and food scraps.

The NFL even launched a Superbowl Climate Change Initiative with steps taken to reduce the overall greenhouse gas impact of Super Bowl activities and events. The organization used renewable energy certificates to provide “green” power for major Super Bowl XLVI event venues and is planting several thousand trees in neighborhoods in partnership with ‘Keep Indianapolis Beautiful’ as part of the “greening” of Super Bowl XLVI. Again following the NFL, I plan to participate in a local tree donation program this spring and contribute to the greening of my community, too. There are so many ways to participate locally in NFL’s greening efforts. Let us know your ideas.

About the author: Gina Snyder works in the Office of Environmental and Compliance Assistance at EPA New England and has been a volunteer river monitor on the Ipswich River, where she also picks up trash every time she monitors the water quality.

I recently visited Three Mile Creek in Mobile, Alabama to see projects involving EPA’s Mobile Bay National Estuary Program. Like all of our NEPs, Mobile Bay focuses on partnership with state and local officials, utilities, universities, environmental groups, and many others. This was apparent when our boat trip up Three Mile Creek was overbooked with local partners eager to participate.

Three Mile Creek used to be the drinking water source for many Mobile residents, but is now severely polluted from a wastewater treatment plant and stormwater. The result is muddy water and lots of trash. But restoration prospects are bright. First, the land along the waterway is undeveloped and much is owned by the city or by a church, and is managed in its natural condition as a floodplain. The sewage treatment plant is moving its discharge to a larger waterway, eliminating the largest single source of pollution. And the Alabama Department of Environmental Management is keeping the City of Mobile moving forward to reduce stormwater that carries trash from streets, parking lots, and other public areas into the waterway.

The talk on the trip was about making improvements and getting more people out to enjoy this potentially lovely amenity for residents, including those in underserved neighborhoods who are close enough to walk to the creek to fish or boat – and maybe eventually to swim.

Our second stop was at Joe’s Branch, the site of an innovative stormwater management project, paid for in part by EPA Section 319 funds, which will address one of the most severe cases of streambank erosion many of us had ever seen. The design incorporates a state-of-the-art approach – a series of step pools to slow down the flows, let the pollutants settle out and infiltrate water into the ground. It will be the first of its kind in Alabama and engineers evaluated prototypes from across the country to devise this design.

This project is another example of the economic benefits of environmental protection. Nearby retirement homes previously had beautiful views.  But now there is a 40 foot-wide chasm that fell dozens of huge trees and washed tons of sediment to Mobile Bay.  As a result, many apartments went unoccupied – in 2011 the retirement community had 100 months of unoccupied homes, costing over $300,000 in revenue.

Whether in urban Mobile or in the rural area across the Bay, partnership is making improvements possible.

About the author: Nancy Stoner is the Acting Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Water

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!” This phrase has taken on new life in Cleveland, which has been plagued by these nasty parasites. Many families in the city are ill-informed about bedbugs, and some people have endangered their health trying to combat infestations with dangerous pesticides.

To address this growing public health concern, the EPA Environmental Justice Small Grants Program awarded the Cleveland Tenants Organization (CTO) $25,000 to educate tenants and landlords about how to prevent and safely control bedbugs. By the time the project is complete, CTO plans to help educate more than 10,000 residents on how to prevent infestations before they start, which, Mike Piepsny, Executive Director of CTO says, “can save a landlord tens of thousands of dollars.”

The CTO grant is one of the 47 awarded in October 2011 by the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice that is already making a big difference in communities across the country.

Far to the north of Ohio, a grant was awarded to The Zender Group in Anchorage, Ala. to educate and engage tribal leaders and villagers on effective ways to manage solid waste. For many Alaskan tribal communities, open dump sites are the only option for household and commercial wastes. These sites are a threat to public health and increase communities’ risks of contamination from hazardous materials and pathogens.

Since the grant was awarded, the Zender Group has reached almost 100 tribal/native organizations and hosted a tribal summit on solid waste, which was attended by representatives from 20 different tribes.

And, in New York City, WEACT is using their grant to educate residents about the dangers of lead exposure, a toxic metal that is especially dangerous for children and is prevalent in older housing, which is often in low-income communities. The project goal is to provide more than 600 families with information about how to ensure their homes are healthy and safe. The project, explains WEACT’s Ogonnaya Newman, “is an opportunity for engagement, empowerment and education because families are able to identify potential sources of harm and work on proactive strategies to address them.”

Since 1994, the EJ small grants program has provided more than $23 million to fund projects that help protect and improve people’s health and the environment in more than 1,200 communities across the nation.

About the author: Sheila Lewis has dedicated 30 years to federal service and has worked to support community-based efforts since 1999. She currently serves as the Grants Program Manager for the Office of Environmental Justice in Washington, D.C.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

My kids are hooked on Storage Wars (they love Barry and despise Dave) and my wife and I enjoy Hoarders, probably since it makes us feel like better housekeepers than we really are. At EPA in Kansas City, we are preparing for a transition from one building to another and many of us are beginning to grapple with our pack-rat tendencies and being forced to open long forgotten storage cabinets. Such an endeavor should be easy; and the most important part of it is. Records are saved, stored, and managed in accordance with requisite policies and procedures. Unfortunately scientists tend to amass collections of journal articles, data sets, guidance documents, and even specimens that, while not records, represent a life-time of learning and serve as a record of an individual’s career spent protecting human health and the environment.

Which gets me to the hackneyed phrase, one person’s junk is another’s treasure. Case in point; a colleague of mine uses a discolored booklet which is older than I as a prop for employee training. I grabbed it from him one day and realized the title was, “Everyone can’t live upstream: a contemporary history of water quality problems on the Missouri River, Sioux City, Iowa to Hermann, Missouri.” It just so happened we were working on a Missouri River project, and boom there it was, information not present in EPA’s databases or easily accessible at the time in any library. We were able to use this secondary information to fill in historical gaps for our project. Secondary data analysis, using information collected by someone else for another purpose, can be a fantastic way to provide additional context and relevance to a project as well as save costs assuming the information meets your data quality requirements.

As we all continue our march from the paper age to the electronic, consider making your old information and data available through sites like Data.gov, Socrata, or any number of other open data websites. Although this may be sacrilegious to say, all science doesn’t necessarily make its way into published journals. I’ll be giving this a shot as I clean my cabinets. Who knows, something old and dusty may still be valuable to another person in the future for an entirely new reason. Now if I can just convince my wife that this is the case for my Star Wars lunchboxes.

About the author: Jeffery Robichaud is a second generation scientist with EPA who started with the Agency in 1998. He serves currently serves as Deputy Director of the Environmental Services Division in Kansas City.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

It’s been said that there is no one more protective than a mother over her children, and when it comes to our children’s health, our passion knows no bounds. Yet many women, like me, grew up taking the environment and the air we breathe for granted. We left the work of fighting for clean air to the die-hard environmentalists and dared speak up unless an issue hit too close to home.

But now across this country, many mothers, and mothers organizations in particular are realizing the incredible power of their collective voice. Mothers are the new face of environmentalism. You see us now on the frontlines, writing letters to the editor of our local paper, organizing grassroots efforts to educate our peers, promoting online environmental campaigns, going door to door with petitions and demanding accountability at town hall meetings. We now know that clean air is not only important, it is vital to the health and well being of future generations.

As an African American wife of an asthma sufferer and mother of three children, one of whom also suffers from asthma, I am horrified by the statistics that are devastating our community. African Americans visit the emergency room for asthma at 350 percent the average rate that whites do, and die from it twice as often. Mortality rates for cancer are higher for African Americans than for any other group, and heart disease is the most fatal illness in the black community.

We need to expand the conversation to include the environmental causes of illnesses that affect communities of color, the pollution that makes its way into our schools and the environmental challenges in our neighborhoods that hold back economic growth.

When the EPA asked Mocha Moms to join them in the fight for cleaner air, we jumped at the chance to further educate our mothers and their families.
Our hope is that our partnership with the EPA is only the beginning of an ongoing national dialog to empower mothers of color to be greater advocates for healthier environments. We are thrilled to have a seat at the discussion table. After all, it is our children who will ultimately reap the greatest benefit.

About the author: Kuae Kelch Mattox is the National President for Mocha Moms, Inc.  Mocha Moms, Inc. is a national, non-profit organization that supports stay at home mothers of color with 100 chapters in 29 states.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

It was a struggle to get our relatives in Pennsylvania to recycle their PC and monitor.

“We’ve got plenty of landfill space in state, and besides, we would have to drive to Staples and pay $10 to recycle them,” they argued.

My husband and I both work for environmental agencies, but they were unmoved by our “responsible recycling” arguments. They even refused our $10 “bribe.”

No surprise then that we found ourselves transporting electronics 350 miles back home from the Keystone State!

After this flush of green virtue, practical considerations intruded: our community didn’t have electronics recycling, we lived 30 miles from the closest Staples and we commute via train.

Fortunately, we found Costco’s elegantly simple mail-in electronics trade-in program. All I had to do was type model information into Costco’s recycling website. If the units had market value, I could ship them free – AND receive a Costco cash card. Since these units had no value, I downloaded a prepaid shipping label and deposited the electronics at a UPS pick-up location four miles away.

At the time of this PC intervention, challenges to recycling included consumer confusion, minimal recycling networks, and few manufacturer take-back programs. The proliferation of cell phones since then has me wondering how many are recycled today.

According to EPA, only about 10 percent of cell phones are recycled. If Americans recycled the roughly 130 million cell phones disposed of annually, the energy saved would power more than 24,000 homes.

Also, many organizations look for cell phones for soldiers and victims of domestic abuse, among others. Many will send you a free mailing label.

As to manufacturer take-back programs, we’ve come a long way, baby: http://epa.gov/osw/partnerships/plugin/partners.htm

In a non-scientific experiment, last week I tested the state of the trade-in market for my Samsung cell phone and Canon camera.

I learned:

• Costco and Samsung would provide prepaid shipping labels for these “no-value” items;
• Gazelle (a national recycler) would ship electronics items with value for free;
• Canon would charge $6 to recycle the camera;
• Best Buy would ship both for free – AND give me a $24 gift card for the camera. Plus, I could drop them off at any Best Buy.

So look in your closets, do your homework, and decide whether to donate or trade-in your electronics. As for me, I’ll keep the phone and camera – and wouldn’t trade my family for the world!

About the author:  Lucy Casella is a somewhat technologically-challenged neo-Luddite and Strategic Planner in Region 1.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.