Week of 1/20/08
Dear EarthTalk: What is the impact of all the littering that individuals do, largely from their cars and on highways? What can I do to help clean it up? How can we strengthen laws to prevent it?
-- Won’t litter in Norwalk, CT
Environmentalists consider litter a nasty side effect of our convenience-oriented disposable culture. Just to highlight the scope of the problem, California alone spends $28 million a year cleaning up and removing litter along its roadways. And once trash gets free, wind and weather move it from streets and highways to parks and waterways. One study found that 18 percent of litter ends up in rivers, streams and oceans.
Cigarette butts, snack wrappers and take-out food and beverage containers are the most commonly littered items. Cigarettes are one of the most insidious forms of litter: Each discarded butt takes 12 years to break down, all the while leaching toxic elements such as cadmium, lead and arsenic into soil and waterways.
The burden of litter cleanup usually falls to local governments or community groups. Some U.S. states, including Alabama, California, Florida, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia, are taking strong measures to prevent litter through public education campaigns, and are spending millions of dollars yearly to clean up. British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland also have strong anti-litter campaigns.
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| Environmentalists consider litter a nasty side effect of our convenience-oriented disposable culture. Several U.S. states and Canadian provinces are now taking strong measures to prevent litter through public education campaigns. They are also spending millions of dollars yearly for cleanup. |
| © Getty Images |
A more grassroots-oriented litter prevention group is Auntie Litter, which started in 1990 in Alabama to help educate students there about the importance of a healthy and clean environment. Today the group works internationally to help students, teachers and parents eliminate litter in their communities.
In Canada, the nonprofit Pitch-In Canada (PIC), founded in the late-1960s by some hippies in British Columbia, has since evolved into a professionally run national organization with a tough anti-litter agenda. Last year 3.5 million Canadians volunteered in PIC’s annual nationwide Cleanup Week.
Doing your part to keep litter to a minimum is easy, but it takes vigilance. For starters, never let trash escape from your car, and make sure household garbage bins are sealed tightly so animals can’t get at the contents. Always remember to take your garbage with you upon leaving a park or other public space. And if you’re still smoking, isn’t saving the environment a compelling enough reason to finally quit? Also, if that stretch of roadway you drive everyday to work is a haven for litter, offer to clean it up and keep it clean. Many cities and towns welcome “Adopt-A-Mile” sponsors for particularly litter-prone streets and highways, and your employer might even want to get in on the act by paying you for your volunteer time.
CONTACTS: Keep America Beautiful; Auntie Littler; Pitch-In Canada
Dear EarthTalk: My uncle worked for over a decade on the top floor of an office building with cell phone towers directly above him. He was recently diagnosed with cancer. Is there any scientific evidence of links between exposure to cell phone tower radiation and cancer?
-- Jennifer L., Wellesley, MA
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| © Flickr. |
But that hasn’t stopped many communities from worrying about this issue and taking cautionary measures. In San Francisco, for instance, concerned individuals and neighborhood groups have formed the San Francisco Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union (SNAFU) for the purpose of preventing “the placement of wireless antennas on or near residences, schools, health care centers, day care centers, senior centers, playgrounds, places of worship, and other inappropriate locations…”
SNAFU is worried that San Francisco is “already immersed in a sea of electromagnetic radiation” from, among other sources, some 2,500 licensed cell phone antennas at 530 locations around the city. The group is distributing petitions calling on local public officials to increase “restrictions on the number and location of cellular phone antennas and other wireless transmitters.” Other controversies have erupted in communities in Connecticut and elsewhere over churches renting their rooftops and steeples to cell phone companies for placement of antennas. And parents in Ossining, New York waged an unsuccessful battle in 2000 to ban revenue-generating cell towers from school grounds.
Still, the American Cancer Society (ACS) does not seem concerned, stating that limited epidemiological evidence suggests no link between cancers and living or working near a cell phone tower. ACS says that the energy level of radio waves coming off cell towers is too low to cause any noticeable human health impacts, and that a person would have to stand right in front of an antenna to pick up even trace amounts of radiation. And unlike X-rays or gamma rays, radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation is “non-ionizing,” meaning it lacks the gusto to break the bonds that hold molecules (like DNA) in cells together.
Still, cell phones and their towers are a fairly new technology, and very few studies of their health effects have yet been conducted. And the bulk of the research cited by the American Cancer Society has focused on direct and prolonged exposure to radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation in general, not on cell towers and their effects specifically. SNAFU reports that “no systematic attempt has been made to determine what current cumulative exposures to this radiation are….” Lingering public concerns about the issue surely means that more research on the topic is to come.
CONTACTS: American Cancer Society; San Francisco Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union (SNAFU)
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