Earth Blog

There are several drawbacks- if not outright awful health problems- to being addicted to smoking cigarettes and some of these might even affect your immediate family. We’ve talked about how cigarettes are bad for your memory and for the air and now there is at least one new study that says we are unaware that cigarettes are “the number one littered item every year on U.S. roadways and beaches.”

Smoking while on the go, in your car or out for a walk, and that cigarette has to go somewhere once you are finished sucking those carcinogens down. Your cigarette butt might go into your car’s ashtray, a trashcan, or a public ashtray. But what if there isn’t a place to toss it? It gets tossed wherever. After all, what are cigarettes made out of? Tobacco and paper: that’s bio-degradable, right? Not really.

The San Diego car2go electric car sharing program was launched in November of last year as part of the Smart City San Diego initiative. Since then more than 6,000 people have registered to use the service and over 25,000 trips have been taken.

There were only 800 electric vehicles (EVs) in the city and now thanks to car2go there are 300 more EVs on San Diego’s roads-a 40% increase. San Diego is now one of the top cities in the world for electric vehicle drivers with an estimated 7,000 EV users.

“At a time when the cost of fuel is reaching record-high prices, San Diegans are looking for ways to reduce their dependence on fuel and for more cost-efficient modes of transportation; and car2go is a very logical choice for them," said Nicholas Cole, president and CEO of car2go.

Smoking is bad for the environment and for your health. Smoking is also killing your ability to remember to pick up your dry cleaning.

Last year, we mentioned the toxicity of isocyanic acid which is produced by cigarette smoke and the smoke of wildfires. Isocyanic acid has been linked to cataracts, rheumatoid arthritis, and cardiovascular disease. Now we are going to mention how awful smoking can be for your brain, because a new study suggests that it can cause memory loss even in “weekend smokers.” 

This study tested prospective memory which is the ability to remember to do a certain action at a specified time.

 “Smoking-related memory decline in general has been linked with increases in accelerated cerebral degeneration such as brain shrinkage,” said Dr. Tom Heffernan one of the study’s authors. Smoking shrinks your brain? That can’t possibly be a good thing.

SC Johnson is pulling nitrogen from the air we breathe to make environmentally friendly aerosol products.  

Now we can breathe in fresher, more pleasant smelling air or spray down every wood surface to a high-shine in our homes knowing their method of production “has reduced volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by approximately six million pounds in its first year of operation. This is the equivalent of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from 1,600 passenger vehicles per year – or the CO2 emissions from 915,000 gallons of gasoline consumed.”

The United States Forest Service estimates that tree cover in urban parts of the United States is declining at four million trees per year. That’s the same amount of iPhones 4S that sold over a single weekend when they debuted in 2011.  While an iPhone owner could argue Apple and their products are an important facet of technology and urban living, can they prove smartphones are necessary to a city’s landscape?

“Trees are an important part of the urban landscape,” according to Michael T. Rains, Director of the Forest Service’s Northern Research Station. “They play a role in improving air and water quality and provide so many environmental and social benefits. As our Forest Service Chief says, ‘…urban trees are the hardest working trees in America.’

Did you ever play SimCity for the Super Nintendo or PC growing up? Not The Sims, the simulation game where a player basically creates a suburban version of his or herself, but rather the old school game rooted in city planning and map making. 

Do you remember the anxiety felt when building an airport in your simulated town because, yes the residents are demanding it but it’s going to create so much pollution! How did you fight pollution? Did you place the airport on an island, far away from residential areas but connected to the main land via rail? Did you surround it with park land trying to combat pollution with the power of trees? Did any of that even work to reduce pollution? Furthermore SimCity was just a game; you could always destroy your town and start all over.  That isn’t an option in real life when city planners look at their communities and airports.

Akron, Ohio, based FirstEnergy will close six coal-fired power plants across Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, by September because they are old and it would be costly to bring them up to the EPA’s recently passed Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). The six might be in the first wave, if not the first, of plants that will close as energy providers weigh the costs of upgrading.

By now you have probably heard about the new standards for power plants the Environmental Protective Agency (EPA) has issued to eliminate toxic chemicals like arsenic, mercury, nickel, selenium, and cyanide from the air. It’s called the Mercury and Toxic Air Standards (MATS) and they are the first set of national standards the agency has put forth for coal-fired power plants to follow. MATS will continue the work the Clean Air Act (CAA) began in 1990.

Breathing is an action our bodies do involuntarily and it’s as easy as blinking. Even before a baby opens their eyes to see the world they just entered, they are gasping for the world’s air. On average a human will take anywhere from 17,280-23,040 breaths per day depending on the rate of heartbeat. A person sitting in a room reading this blog is obviously going to be on the lower side whereas a person running a trail in the open air of a city park is going to take more breaths. It’s unfortunate that breathing isn’t as easy as we would like it to be because of poor air quality.

While it can be rare to hear or read about good news when it comes to the current state of the environment, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry from the Biogeochemistry Department has released findings that show nitrogen in our soil fortifies nature’s ability to clean the air that we breathe. Recently published in the journal Science, this study sheds light on the positive effects of acidic soils which have been strongly criticized and condemned for fostering forest destruction and devastation.