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Whole Foods Chain to Stop Use of Plastic Bags
By ANDREW MARTIN, The New York Times, January 23, 2008
The Whole Foods Market chain said Tuesday that it would stop offering plastic grocery bags, giving customers instead a choice between recycled paper or reusable bags.
A rising number of governments and retailers are banning plastic bags, or discouraging their use, because of concerns about their environmental impact. San Francisco banned plastic bags last year unless they are of a type that breaks down easily. China announced a crackdown on plastic bags a few weeks ago, while other governments, including New York City’s, are making sure retailers offer plastic bag recycling.
Whole Foods officials said they had hoped to eliminate plastic bags for some time but had to decide how to make it work in the chain’s 270 stores.
A. C. Gallo, the company’s co-president and chief operating officer, said Whole Foods tried to get customers to buy reusable bags for several years but “it really never caught on.” That changed when the grocery chain began offering reusable bags for 99 cents, he said.
In addition, he said, Whole Foods was given a test run of sorts when San Francisco banned plastic bags last year. The number of paper bags used in the San Francisco stores increased a mere 10 percent, he said, suggesting that some customers switched to reusable bags.
Two other trial runs, in Toronto and in Austin, Tex., also went well enough that Whole Foods executives felt confident broadening the plastic bag ban to all its stores. It will take effect by April 22, Earth Day.
Whole Foods officials estimate that the store distributes 150 million plastic bags a year.
“The fact of plastic bags is they are not something that has been around forever,” said Michael Besancon, a regional president of Whole Foods and the leader of an environmental task force. “It was paper for many, many years. It’s not really a hardship.”
Plastic bags have become ubiquitous because they are lightweight, cheap and functional. Critics complain that the bags are bad for the environment because they are made from petroleum, are typically tossed after one use, fill landfills, and float into trees, rooftops, roadways and oceans.
They also do not break down easily in a landfill.
An industry organization called the Progressive Bag Alliance, however, counters on its Web site that plastic bags take less energy to produce than paper bags and generate less waste, a position backed by at least one study of the issue. The group also argues that virtually nothing decomposes in modern landfills, including paper and plastic.
The Whole Foods decision is “a bold move, without a doubt,” said Allen Hershkowitz, director of the municipal waste program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He noted that Americans use 50 billion to 80 billion plastic bags a year.
He acknowledged that paper bags can also harm the environment. But he described Whole Foods Market’s use of bags made from recycled paper as an environmental “winner.”
Whole Foods is a relatively small retailer, but has been influential in the grocery business. Major grocery chains have copied Whole Foods by sprucing up produce sections and offering a wider variety of natural and organic products. The company’s move may prompt other chains to take a look at the bag issue.
Tara Raddohl, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said her company began selling reusable bags in October and was looking to achieve a goal of zero waste.
“Generally speaking, many of our retail competitors as well as ourselves are looking at these options, and how feasible this is, and how this will be received by the consumer,” she said.
Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, January 22, 2008
Governments in Europe and elsewhere have begun rolling back generous, across-the-board subsidies for biofuels, acknowledging that the environmental benefits of these fuels have often been overstated.
But as they aim to be more selective, these governments are discovering how difficult it can be to figure out whether a particular fuel — much less a particular batch of corn ethanol or rapeseed biodiesel — has been produced in an environmentally friendly manner. Biofuels vary greatly in their environmental impact.
“A lot of countries are interested in doing this, but it’s really hard to do right,” said Ronald Steenblik, research director of the Global Subsidies Initiative in Geneva. “You can’t look at a bottle of ethanol and tell how it’s produced, whether it’s sustainable. You have to know: Was the crop produced on farmland or on recently cleared forest? Did the manufacturer use energy from coal or nuclear?”
Several countries — including Australia, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, as well as parts of Canada — have removed or are revising incentives for farmers, biofuel refiners and distributors.
The manufacturers and sellers will have to quantify their fuel’s net effect on the environment before being eligible for subsidies, or even to count toward national biofuel quotas. Many European countries aim to have 5.75 percent of their transportation fuel made from renewable sources by the end of the year.
There is increasing evidence that the total emissions and environmental damage from producing many “clean” biofuels often outweigh their lower emissions when compared with fossil fuels. More governments are responding to these findings.
Under a proposed Swiss directive, for example, a liter of biofuel would have to produce 40 percent less in emissions than fossil fuel to qualify for special treatment. It will be hard to make corn ethanol or even rapeseed (used to make canola oil) meet the standard, said Lukas Gutzwiller of Switzerland’s Federal Energy Office.
With a fuller picture of “the pros and cons of various biofuels, it was very obvious to us that we should not just push forward blindly,” Mr. Gutzwiller said. “We had to base the political debate on environmental analysis to make sure that biofuels were having a positive effect.”
Similarly, Germany recently canceled tax exemptions for biodiesel at the pump and is about to pass a mandate that only biofuels meeting sustainability criteria would count toward the national quota.
The biofuels craze was founded on the theory that plant-based fuels are carbon-neutral: The carbon dioxide released from burning biofuels would be canceled out by the carbon dioxide absorbed by plants as they grow. But this equation does not include emissions from processing the crops. Nor does it cover the environmental cost of fertilizers. Such factors vary significantly from biofuel to biofuel.
This week, the European Union will put forward an energy policy that, among other things, is expected to restrict imports of biofuels that are not produced in an environmentally sound manner. European governments have sought to encourage production with blanket incentives and mandates to plant crops and build refineries, as well as tax breaks for those who sell biodiesel and those who produce electricity.
Such policies have often led manufacturers to use the cheapest biofuels, rather than those that are best for the environment. The policies have also produced unintended consequences, like the sale by farmers of food crops for use as biofuel, leading to price increases for foods.
Last year, for example, Europe paid farmers a subsidy of 45 euros a hectare, or roughly $27 an acre, for any biofuel crop produced.
The payments, “don’t encourage the best biofuels — just to grow more of what they are already growing,” said Jean-Philippe Denruyter, global bioenergy coordinator at the World Wide Fund for Nature in Brussels.
Last month, the Netherlands announced that it would no longer subsidize the importation of palm oil, its major source of green electricity generation, after investigators showed that the product was grown on Asian plantations created from drained peat land, with disastrous environmental consequences.
To address such problems, Germany is planning to require that a biofuel be certified as “sustainable,” on the basis of its emissions reductions and the way the crops are grown, if it is to count toward the annual target of biofuels making up 5.75 percent of transportation fuel.
Corn ethanol from the United States, for example, will have trouble meeting the standard, because its carbon dioxide reduction is 10 to 20 percent from the level of regular gasoline, said Jürgen Maier, director of the German Forum on Environment and Development, a nongovernmental organization.
Under the Swiss policy, which the Federal Council is expected to approve this month, very few types of biofuel sources — like corn stalks — would qualify automatically for financial incentives. Food crops — sugar beets, rapeseed and soy — will fall into a second category, in which producers will have to prove that their biofuel is environmentally beneficial, on numerous levels.
The next step for many countries is to factor in the broader environmental and social effects of biofuel growing, particularly those imported from the developing world.
While Western subsidies and tax breaks were begun to benefit the environment and to help reduce the West’s dependence on foreign oil, they have been a boon for farmers around the world. Nascent biofuel industries in many countries, including in the West, are resisting cuts in such payments, without which they fear they cannot be profitable.
Tax breaks for corn ethanol and subsidies for building ethanol plants in the United States are motivated more by the desire to help farmers than to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, critics say. Corn is a relatively inefficient crop for making biofuel, because it requires intensive processing and in most cases yields only a minor emissions benefit.
Three years ago, Quebec started building a subsidized corn ethanol plant, to move toward the provincial goal of supplying 5 percent of its fuel from biofuels by 2010. A few months ago, the province’s environment minister announced that it would build no more.
“We had to think about the environmental impacts of corn-based ethanol, the availability of feedstock and also greenhouse gas emissions,” said Daniel Bienvenue, the province’s deputy minister for Energy Strategy.
The government of Quebec, like many others, is supporting research into making biofuel out of waste products like corn stalks and forest debris.
But the Quebec plant has also demonstrated that, under the right circumstances, even corn ethanol can have some environmental advantage: it uses only local surplus corn. That means it is grown with low energy use and does not have to be transported long distances. The ethanol plant also uses electricity generated in a relatively clean manner.
“In general Europe and the U.S. will have to move away from vegetable oils,” Mr. Denruyter said.
“But even with these crops, if you have the right incentives you can improve the greenhouse gas profile a lot.”
Birds in Great Salt Lake Felled by Cholera by the Thousands
By SANA KHALID, The New York Times, January 22, 2008
Some of the birds flew upside down or threw their heads back between their wings. Some fell out of the sky. Others tried to land a foot or more above the water, or swam in circles when they got there. And then they died.
The birds — eared grebes, ruddy ducks, California gulls and northern shovelers, about 15,000 in all — have been discovered over the past month on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. According to the United States Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, they died from avian cholera.
The disease is not new to the West, but the recent outbreak was especially potent, said Tom Aldrich, an expert at the Utah division of wildlife resources. It flourishes in cold weather — last November was the coldest on record, Mr. Aldrich said — and rapidly spreads when there are concentrated populations of birds with diminished food resources.
Avian cholera, caused by the bacterium Pasteurella multocida, is the most prevalent infectious disease among wild North American waterfowl. It was first reported in this country in the 1940s and has cropped up every few years in recent decades. In 1994, it killed 10,000 birds in the Great Salt Lake.
Dr. Krysten Schuler, an ecologist at the National Wildlife Health Center, said avian cholera was probably spread by “carrier birds.” Mr. Aldrich agreed, pointing out that the eared grebes were “the first birds to get infected with avian cholera.”
He added, “The eared grebes in the salty parts of the Salt Lake are likely agents to spread the cholera to the other birds that move to these salty regions when the freshwater marshes freeze.
Can humans contract avian cholera? “It is very unlikely that a human would develop an infection from eating a bird infected with P. multocida,” Dr. Schuler said. “But they could become infected if a wound or scratch is contaminated. A respiratory infection is possible if a person is working with carcasses in an enclosed, poorly ventilated area.”
Dr. Schuler recommended wearing gloves and thoroughly washing hands when handling any sick or dead animals.
High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi
By MARIAN BURROS, The New York Times, January 23, 2008
Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.
“No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks," said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J.
Dr. Gochfeld analyzed the sushi for The Times with Dr. Joanna Burger, professor of life sciences at Rutgers University. He is a former chairman of the New Jersey Mercury Task Force and also treats patients with mercury poisoning.
The owner of a restaurant whose tuna sushi had particularly high mercury concentrations said he was shocked by the findings. “I’m startled by this,” said the owner, Drew Nieporent, a managing partner of Nobu Next Door. “Anything that might endanger any customer of ours, we’d be inclined to take off the menu immediately and get to the bottom of it.”
Although the samples were gathered in New York City, experts believe similar results would be observed elsewhere.
“Mercury levels in bluefin are likely to be very high regardless of location,” said Tim Fitzgerald, a marine scientist for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group that works to protect the environment and improve human health.
Most of the restaurants in the survey said the tuna The Times had sampled was bluefin.
In 2004 the Food and Drug Administration joined with the Environmental Protection Agency to warn women who might become pregnant and children to limit their consumption of certain varieties of canned tuna because the mercury it contained might damage the developing nervous system. Fresh tuna was not included in the advisory. Most of the tuna sushi in the Times samples contained far more mercury than is typically found in canned tuna.
Over the past several years, studies have suggested that mercury may also cause health problems for adults, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and neurological symptoms.
Dr. P. Michael Bolger, a toxicologist who is head of the chemical hazard assessment team at the Food and Drug Administration, did not comment on the findings in the Times sample but said the agency was reviewing its seafood mercury warnings. Because it has been four years since the advisory was issued, Dr. Bolger said, “we have had a study under way to take a fresh look at it.”
No government agency regularly tests seafood for mercury.
Tuna samples from the Manhattan restaurants Nobu Next Door, Sushi Seki, Sushi of Gari and Blue Ribbon Sushi and the food store Gourmet Garage all had mercury above one part per million, the “action level” at which the F.D.A. can take food off the market. (The F.D.A. has rarely, if ever, taken any tuna off the market.) The highest mercury concentration, 1.4 parts per million, was found in tuna from Blue Ribbon Sushi. The lowest, 0.10, was bought at Fairway.
When told of the newspaper’s findings, Andy Arons, an owner of Gourmet Garage, said: “We’ll look for lower-level-mercury fish. Maybe we won’t sell tuna sushi for a while, until we get to the bottom of this.” Mr. Arons said his stores stocked yellowfin, albacore and bluefin tuna, depending on the available quality and the price.
At Blue Ribbon Sushi, Eric Bromberg, an owner, said he was aware that bluefin tuna had higher mercury concentrations. For that reason, Mr. Bromberg said, the restaurant typically told parents with small children not to let them eat “more than one or two pieces.”
Koji Oneda, a spokesman for Sushi Seki, said the restaurant would talk to its fish supplier about the issue. A manager at Sushi of Gari, Tomi Tomono, said it warned pregnant women and regular customers who “love to eat tuna” about mercury levels. Mr. Tomono also said the restaurant would put warning labels on the menu “very soon.”
Scientists who performed the analysis for The Times ran the tests several times to be sure there was no mistake in the levels of methylmercury, the form of mercury found in fish tied to health problems.
The work was done at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, in Piscataway, a partnership between Rutgers and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Six pieces of sushi from most of the restaurants and stores would contain more than 49 micrograms of mercury. That is the amount the Environmental Protection Agency deems acceptable for weekly consumption over a period of several months by an adult of average weight, which the agency defines as 154 pounds. People weighing less are advised to consume even less mercury. The weight of the fish in the tuna pieces sampled by The Times were 0.18 ounces to 1.26 ounces.
In general, tuna sushi from food stores was much lower in mercury. These findings reinforce results in other studies showing that more expensive tuna usually contains more mercury because it is more likely to come from a larger species, which accumulates mercury from the fish it eats. Mercury enters the environment as an industrial pollutant.
In the Times survey, 10 of the 13 restaurants said at least one of the two tuna samples bought was bluefin. (It is hard for anyone but experts to tell whether a piece of tuna sushi is bluefin by looking at it.)
By contrast, other species, like yellowfin and albacore, generally have much less mercury. Several of the stores in the Times sample said the tuna in their sushi was yellowfin.
“It is very likely bluefin will be included in next year’s testing,” Dr. Bolger of the F.D.A. said. “A couple of months ago F.D.A. became aware of bluefin tuna as a species Americans are eating.”
A number of studies have found high blood mercury levels in people eating a diet rich in seafood. According to a 2007 survey by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the average level of mercury in New Yorkers’ blood is three times higher than the national average. The report found especially high levels among Asian New Yorkers, especially foreign-born Chinese, and people with high incomes. The report noted that Asians tend to eat more seafood, and it speculated that wealthier people favored fish, like swordfish and bluefin tuna, that happen to have higher mercury levels.
The city has warned women who are pregnant or breast-feeding and children not to eat fresh tuna, Chilean sea bass, swordfish, shark, grouper and other kinds of fish it describes as “too high in mercury.” (Cooking fish has no effect on the mercury level.)
Dr. Kate Mahaffey, a senior research scientist in the office of science coordination and policy at the E.P.A. who studies mercury in fish, said she was not surprised by reports of high concentrations.
“We have seen exposures occurring now in the United States that have produced blood mercury a lot higher than anything we would have expected to see,” Dr. Mahaffey said. “And this appears to be related to consumption of larger amounts of fish that are higher in mercury than we had anticipated.”
Many experts believe the government’s warnings on mercury in seafood do not go far enough.
“The current advice from the F.D.A. is insufficient,” said Dr. Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health and chairman of the department of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark. “In order to maintain reasonably low mercury exposure, you have to eat fish low in the food chain, the smaller fish, and they are not saying that.”
Some environmental groups have sounded the alarm. Environmental Defense, the advocacy group, says no one, no matter his or her age, should eat bluefin tuna. Dr. Gochfeld said: “I like to think of tuna sushi as an occasional treat. A steady diet is certainly problematic. There are a lot of other sushi choices.”
By ANDREW MARTIN, The New York Times, January 23, 2008
The Whole Foods Market chain said Tuesday that it would stop offering plastic grocery bags, giving customers instead a choice between recycled paper or reusable bags.
A rising number of governments and retailers are banning plastic bags, or discouraging their use, because of concerns about their environmental impact. San Francisco banned plastic bags last year unless they are of a type that breaks down easily. China announced a crackdown on plastic bags a few weeks ago, while other governments, including New York City’s, are making sure retailers offer plastic bag recycling.
Whole Foods officials said they had hoped to eliminate plastic bags for some time but had to decide how to make it work in the chain’s 270 stores.
A. C. Gallo, the company’s co-president and chief operating officer, said Whole Foods tried to get customers to buy reusable bags for several years but “it really never caught on.” That changed when the grocery chain began offering reusable bags for 99 cents, he said.
In addition, he said, Whole Foods was given a test run of sorts when San Francisco banned plastic bags last year. The number of paper bags used in the San Francisco stores increased a mere 10 percent, he said, suggesting that some customers switched to reusable bags.
Two other trial runs, in Toronto and in Austin, Tex., also went well enough that Whole Foods executives felt confident broadening the plastic bag ban to all its stores. It will take effect by April 22, Earth Day.
Whole Foods officials estimate that the store distributes 150 million plastic bags a year.
“The fact of plastic bags is they are not something that has been around forever,” said Michael Besancon, a regional president of Whole Foods and the leader of an environmental task force. “It was paper for many, many years. It’s not really a hardship.”
Plastic bags have become ubiquitous because they are lightweight, cheap and functional. Critics complain that the bags are bad for the environment because they are made from petroleum, are typically tossed after one use, fill landfills, and float into trees, rooftops, roadways and oceans.
They also do not break down easily in a landfill.
An industry organization called the Progressive Bag Alliance, however, counters on its Web site that plastic bags take less energy to produce than paper bags and generate less waste, a position backed by at least one study of the issue. The group also argues that virtually nothing decomposes in modern landfills, including paper and plastic.
The Whole Foods decision is “a bold move, without a doubt,” said Allen Hershkowitz, director of the municipal waste program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He noted that Americans use 50 billion to 80 billion plastic bags a year.
He acknowledged that paper bags can also harm the environment. But he described Whole Foods Market’s use of bags made from recycled paper as an environmental “winner.”
Whole Foods is a relatively small retailer, but has been influential in the grocery business. Major grocery chains have copied Whole Foods by sprucing up produce sections and offering a wider variety of natural and organic products. The company’s move may prompt other chains to take a look at the bag issue.
Tara Raddohl, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said her company began selling reusable bags in October and was looking to achieve a goal of zero waste.
“Generally speaking, many of our retail competitors as well as ourselves are looking at these options, and how feasible this is, and how this will be received by the consumer,” she said.
Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, January 22, 2008
Governments in Europe and elsewhere have begun rolling back generous, across-the-board subsidies for biofuels, acknowledging that the environmental benefits of these fuels have often been overstated.
But as they aim to be more selective, these governments are discovering how difficult it can be to figure out whether a particular fuel — much less a particular batch of corn ethanol or rapeseed biodiesel — has been produced in an environmentally friendly manner. Biofuels vary greatly in their environmental impact.
“A lot of countries are interested in doing this, but it’s really hard to do right,” said Ronald Steenblik, research director of the Global Subsidies Initiative in Geneva. “You can’t look at a bottle of ethanol and tell how it’s produced, whether it’s sustainable. You have to know: Was the crop produced on farmland or on recently cleared forest? Did the manufacturer use energy from coal or nuclear?”
Several countries — including Australia, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, as well as parts of Canada — have removed or are revising incentives for farmers, biofuel refiners and distributors.
The manufacturers and sellers will have to quantify their fuel’s net effect on the environment before being eligible for subsidies, or even to count toward national biofuel quotas. Many European countries aim to have 5.75 percent of their transportation fuel made from renewable sources by the end of the year.
There is increasing evidence that the total emissions and environmental damage from producing many “clean” biofuels often outweigh their lower emissions when compared with fossil fuels. More governments are responding to these findings.
Under a proposed Swiss directive, for example, a liter of biofuel would have to produce 40 percent less in emissions than fossil fuel to qualify for special treatment. It will be hard to make corn ethanol or even rapeseed (used to make canola oil) meet the standard, said Lukas Gutzwiller of Switzerland’s Federal Energy Office.
With a fuller picture of “the pros and cons of various biofuels, it was very obvious to us that we should not just push forward blindly,” Mr. Gutzwiller said. “We had to base the political debate on environmental analysis to make sure that biofuels were having a positive effect.”
Similarly, Germany recently canceled tax exemptions for biodiesel at the pump and is about to pass a mandate that only biofuels meeting sustainability criteria would count toward the national quota.
The biofuels craze was founded on the theory that plant-based fuels are carbon-neutral: The carbon dioxide released from burning biofuels would be canceled out by the carbon dioxide absorbed by plants as they grow. But this equation does not include emissions from processing the crops. Nor does it cover the environmental cost of fertilizers. Such factors vary significantly from biofuel to biofuel.
This week, the European Union will put forward an energy policy that, among other things, is expected to restrict imports of biofuels that are not produced in an environmentally sound manner. European governments have sought to encourage production with blanket incentives and mandates to plant crops and build refineries, as well as tax breaks for those who sell biodiesel and those who produce electricity.
Such policies have often led manufacturers to use the cheapest biofuels, rather than those that are best for the environment. The policies have also produced unintended consequences, like the sale by farmers of food crops for use as biofuel, leading to price increases for foods.
Last year, for example, Europe paid farmers a subsidy of 45 euros a hectare, or roughly $27 an acre, for any biofuel crop produced.
The payments, “don’t encourage the best biofuels — just to grow more of what they are already growing,” said Jean-Philippe Denruyter, global bioenergy coordinator at the World Wide Fund for Nature in Brussels.
Last month, the Netherlands announced that it would no longer subsidize the importation of palm oil, its major source of green electricity generation, after investigators showed that the product was grown on Asian plantations created from drained peat land, with disastrous environmental consequences.
To address such problems, Germany is planning to require that a biofuel be certified as “sustainable,” on the basis of its emissions reductions and the way the crops are grown, if it is to count toward the annual target of biofuels making up 5.75 percent of transportation fuel.
Corn ethanol from the United States, for example, will have trouble meeting the standard, because its carbon dioxide reduction is 10 to 20 percent from the level of regular gasoline, said Jürgen Maier, director of the German Forum on Environment and Development, a nongovernmental organization.
Under the Swiss policy, which the Federal Council is expected to approve this month, very few types of biofuel sources — like corn stalks — would qualify automatically for financial incentives. Food crops — sugar beets, rapeseed and soy — will fall into a second category, in which producers will have to prove that their biofuel is environmentally beneficial, on numerous levels.
The next step for many countries is to factor in the broader environmental and social effects of biofuel growing, particularly those imported from the developing world.
While Western subsidies and tax breaks were begun to benefit the environment and to help reduce the West’s dependence on foreign oil, they have been a boon for farmers around the world. Nascent biofuel industries in many countries, including in the West, are resisting cuts in such payments, without which they fear they cannot be profitable.
Tax breaks for corn ethanol and subsidies for building ethanol plants in the United States are motivated more by the desire to help farmers than to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, critics say. Corn is a relatively inefficient crop for making biofuel, because it requires intensive processing and in most cases yields only a minor emissions benefit.
Three years ago, Quebec started building a subsidized corn ethanol plant, to move toward the provincial goal of supplying 5 percent of its fuel from biofuels by 2010. A few months ago, the province’s environment minister announced that it would build no more.
“We had to think about the environmental impacts of corn-based ethanol, the availability of feedstock and also greenhouse gas emissions,” said Daniel Bienvenue, the province’s deputy minister for Energy Strategy.
The government of Quebec, like many others, is supporting research into making biofuel out of waste products like corn stalks and forest debris.
But the Quebec plant has also demonstrated that, under the right circumstances, even corn ethanol can have some environmental advantage: it uses only local surplus corn. That means it is grown with low energy use and does not have to be transported long distances. The ethanol plant also uses electricity generated in a relatively clean manner.
“In general Europe and the U.S. will have to move away from vegetable oils,” Mr. Denruyter said.
“But even with these crops, if you have the right incentives you can improve the greenhouse gas profile a lot.”
Birds in Great Salt Lake Felled by Cholera by the Thousands
By SANA KHALID, The New York Times, January 22, 2008
Some of the birds flew upside down or threw their heads back between their wings. Some fell out of the sky. Others tried to land a foot or more above the water, or swam in circles when they got there. And then they died.
The birds — eared grebes, ruddy ducks, California gulls and northern shovelers, about 15,000 in all — have been discovered over the past month on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. According to the United States Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, they died from avian cholera.
The disease is not new to the West, but the recent outbreak was especially potent, said Tom Aldrich, an expert at the Utah division of wildlife resources. It flourishes in cold weather — last November was the coldest on record, Mr. Aldrich said — and rapidly spreads when there are concentrated populations of birds with diminished food resources.
Avian cholera, caused by the bacterium Pasteurella multocida, is the most prevalent infectious disease among wild North American waterfowl. It was first reported in this country in the 1940s and has cropped up every few years in recent decades. In 1994, it killed 10,000 birds in the Great Salt Lake.
Dr. Krysten Schuler, an ecologist at the National Wildlife Health Center, said avian cholera was probably spread by “carrier birds.” Mr. Aldrich agreed, pointing out that the eared grebes were “the first birds to get infected with avian cholera.”
He added, “The eared grebes in the salty parts of the Salt Lake are likely agents to spread the cholera to the other birds that move to these salty regions when the freshwater marshes freeze.
Can humans contract avian cholera? “It is very unlikely that a human would develop an infection from eating a bird infected with P. multocida,” Dr. Schuler said. “But they could become infected if a wound or scratch is contaminated. A respiratory infection is possible if a person is working with carcasses in an enclosed, poorly ventilated area.”
Dr. Schuler recommended wearing gloves and thoroughly washing hands when handling any sick or dead animals.
High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi
By MARIAN BURROS, The New York Times, January 23, 2008
Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.
“No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks," said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J.
Dr. Gochfeld analyzed the sushi for The Times with Dr. Joanna Burger, professor of life sciences at Rutgers University. He is a former chairman of the New Jersey Mercury Task Force and also treats patients with mercury poisoning.
The owner of a restaurant whose tuna sushi had particularly high mercury concentrations said he was shocked by the findings. “I’m startled by this,” said the owner, Drew Nieporent, a managing partner of Nobu Next Door. “Anything that might endanger any customer of ours, we’d be inclined to take off the menu immediately and get to the bottom of it.”
Although the samples were gathered in New York City, experts believe similar results would be observed elsewhere.
“Mercury levels in bluefin are likely to be very high regardless of location,” said Tim Fitzgerald, a marine scientist for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group that works to protect the environment and improve human health.
Most of the restaurants in the survey said the tuna The Times had sampled was bluefin.
In 2004 the Food and Drug Administration joined with the Environmental Protection Agency to warn women who might become pregnant and children to limit their consumption of certain varieties of canned tuna because the mercury it contained might damage the developing nervous system. Fresh tuna was not included in the advisory. Most of the tuna sushi in the Times samples contained far more mercury than is typically found in canned tuna.
Over the past several years, studies have suggested that mercury may also cause health problems for adults, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and neurological symptoms.
Dr. P. Michael Bolger, a toxicologist who is head of the chemical hazard assessment team at the Food and Drug Administration, did not comment on the findings in the Times sample but said the agency was reviewing its seafood mercury warnings. Because it has been four years since the advisory was issued, Dr. Bolger said, “we have had a study under way to take a fresh look at it.”
No government agency regularly tests seafood for mercury.
Tuna samples from the Manhattan restaurants Nobu Next Door, Sushi Seki, Sushi of Gari and Blue Ribbon Sushi and the food store Gourmet Garage all had mercury above one part per million, the “action level” at which the F.D.A. can take food off the market. (The F.D.A. has rarely, if ever, taken any tuna off the market.) The highest mercury concentration, 1.4 parts per million, was found in tuna from Blue Ribbon Sushi. The lowest, 0.10, was bought at Fairway.
When told of the newspaper’s findings, Andy Arons, an owner of Gourmet Garage, said: “We’ll look for lower-level-mercury fish. Maybe we won’t sell tuna sushi for a while, until we get to the bottom of this.” Mr. Arons said his stores stocked yellowfin, albacore and bluefin tuna, depending on the available quality and the price.
At Blue Ribbon Sushi, Eric Bromberg, an owner, said he was aware that bluefin tuna had higher mercury concentrations. For that reason, Mr. Bromberg said, the restaurant typically told parents with small children not to let them eat “more than one or two pieces.”
Koji Oneda, a spokesman for Sushi Seki, said the restaurant would talk to its fish supplier about the issue. A manager at Sushi of Gari, Tomi Tomono, said it warned pregnant women and regular customers who “love to eat tuna” about mercury levels. Mr. Tomono also said the restaurant would put warning labels on the menu “very soon.”
Scientists who performed the analysis for The Times ran the tests several times to be sure there was no mistake in the levels of methylmercury, the form of mercury found in fish tied to health problems.
The work was done at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, in Piscataway, a partnership between Rutgers and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Six pieces of sushi from most of the restaurants and stores would contain more than 49 micrograms of mercury. That is the amount the Environmental Protection Agency deems acceptable for weekly consumption over a period of several months by an adult of average weight, which the agency defines as 154 pounds. People weighing less are advised to consume even less mercury. The weight of the fish in the tuna pieces sampled by The Times were 0.18 ounces to 1.26 ounces.
In general, tuna sushi from food stores was much lower in mercury. These findings reinforce results in other studies showing that more expensive tuna usually contains more mercury because it is more likely to come from a larger species, which accumulates mercury from the fish it eats. Mercury enters the environment as an industrial pollutant.
In the Times survey, 10 of the 13 restaurants said at least one of the two tuna samples bought was bluefin. (It is hard for anyone but experts to tell whether a piece of tuna sushi is bluefin by looking at it.)
By contrast, other species, like yellowfin and albacore, generally have much less mercury. Several of the stores in the Times sample said the tuna in their sushi was yellowfin.
“It is very likely bluefin will be included in next year’s testing,” Dr. Bolger of the F.D.A. said. “A couple of months ago F.D.A. became aware of bluefin tuna as a species Americans are eating.”
A number of studies have found high blood mercury levels in people eating a diet rich in seafood. According to a 2007 survey by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the average level of mercury in New Yorkers’ blood is three times higher than the national average. The report found especially high levels among Asian New Yorkers, especially foreign-born Chinese, and people with high incomes. The report noted that Asians tend to eat more seafood, and it speculated that wealthier people favored fish, like swordfish and bluefin tuna, that happen to have higher mercury levels.
The city has warned women who are pregnant or breast-feeding and children not to eat fresh tuna, Chilean sea bass, swordfish, shark, grouper and other kinds of fish it describes as “too high in mercury.” (Cooking fish has no effect on the mercury level.)
Dr. Kate Mahaffey, a senior research scientist in the office of science coordination and policy at the E.P.A. who studies mercury in fish, said she was not surprised by reports of high concentrations.
“We have seen exposures occurring now in the United States that have produced blood mercury a lot higher than anything we would have expected to see,” Dr. Mahaffey said. “And this appears to be related to consumption of larger amounts of fish that are higher in mercury than we had anticipated.”
Many experts believe the government’s warnings on mercury in seafood do not go far enough.
“The current advice from the F.D.A. is insufficient,” said Dr. Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health and chairman of the department of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark. “In order to maintain reasonably low mercury exposure, you have to eat fish low in the food chain, the smaller fish, and they are not saying that.”
Some environmental groups have sounded the alarm. Environmental Defense, the advocacy group, says no one, no matter his or her age, should eat bluefin tuna. Dr. Gochfeld said: “I like to think of tuna sushi as an occasional treat. A steady diet is certainly problematic. There are a lot of other sushi choices.”
