Thursday, 05 Dec 2002

Green Washing

So you spilled some latte on your jeans or dipped your sleeve in guacamole -- or maybe you just wore your favorite sweatshirt one too many times this week. That pile of dirty clothes you're about to toss in the wash is just one of 35 billion loads of laundry done in the U.S. every year, for a total electricity consumption of 81,000 gigawatt hours. While you wait out the spin cycle, check out other startling, significant, and sobering facts about how we clean our clothes, in Counter Culture, that compendium of environmental tidbits, only on the Grist Magazine website.

Drag Your Computer to the Recycle Bin

In an abrupt departure from past policy, high-tech giant Hewlett-Packard has announced that it will support California legislation requiring computer manufacturers to pay for safe disposal of electronic waste. In October, HP used its considerable clout as the world's largest maker of personal computers to persuade Gov. Gray Davis (D) to veto an e-waste measure. But the company changed its tune last week, following the publication of a three-part series by the San Jose Mercury News documenting labor and environmental woes in China stemming from the U.S. computer industry. HP is suggesting that all U.S. computer makers shoulder a percentage of the cost of recycling their products based on relative market shares in California. So far, other electronics companies have remained mute about HP's about-face. If the state adopts new computer legislation, it could pave the way for federal regulations to keep hazardous e-waste out of landfills and prevent it from being sent overseas.

Delay O' Fish

In welcome news for commercial fishing operations in New England, a federal judge has ordered an eight-month delay in implementing drastic cutbacks in fishing levels while scientists review federal estimates of the region's fish population. In September, government scientists acknowledged that the accuracy of fish-count studies on which the original cutbacks were based might have been compromised by an improperly rigged net on a research boat. Federal regulators, environmentalists, and fishers immediately asked for time to verify the fish count -- a petition that was granted yesterday by Judge Gladys Kessler, who also ordered the original cutbacks. Those cutbacks would have had a significant economic impact on the fishing industry, closing more fishing grounds in the Gulf of Maine and cutting every vessel's already-limited fishing days by 50 percent or more. Some fishers who had been hoping for a two-year delay -- sufficient time to redo the entire fish count from scratch -- were disappointed with Kessler's ruling, but environmentalists, who are anxious to move forward with restoring overfished populations, generally felt the delay was fair.

Changing Their Tuna

In other marine news, a new report released by the federal government has found that dolphin populations in the Pacific Ocean are failing to recover from years of tuna fishing, and that some 3,000 dolphins are still killed by tuna boats every year. The report, by the U.S. Commerce Department's Southwest Fisheries Science Center, contradicts earlier claims by the government, Mexican officials, and foreign fishing fleets that dolphin populations have benefited dramatically from changes in tuna fishing. In the past, tuna boats gained infamy for chasing down dolphins to locate the tuna that swim with them, a practice that led to the death of about 6 million dolphins from the 1950s forward. The new finding that dolphin populations have not yet recovered from those fishing practices could have implications for a battle between environmentalists, who fought hard for the "dolphin safe" tuna label, and the Commerce Department, which wants to weaken the meaning of that label in order to increase trade with Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and other countries.

Dodge Bawl

Looking to minimize your impact on the environment? Don't buy a car -- and especially don't buy anything made by DaimlerChrysler. The U.S.-based automaker ranked dead last on a survey, released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists, of pollution levels in vehicle fleets. The survey looked at the environmental implications of the six largest car manufacturers in the U.S. market, which together sell nine out of every 10 vehicles purchased here. Those vehicles account for vast percentages of smog-forming pollution and carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. From best to worst, the companies were Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler. Toyota was the only company to cut its fleet's average CO2 emissions between model years 2000 and 2001. The only company to move up in the survey was Ford, which went from being second-to-last in the previous survey to fourth in the current one. UCS credited that change to the environmentally friendly leadership of William Clay Ford, Jr.