| 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. 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 |
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.
Keep America Beautiful
(KAB), the group known for its “crying Indian” anti-litter
TV ads of bygone days, has been organizing litter clean-ups
across the U.S. since 1953. KAB has a strong track record
of success in litter prevention, though it has been accused
of doing the bidding of its industry founders and supporters
(which include tobacco and beverage companies) by opposing
many mandatory bottle and can recycling initiatives over the
years and downplaying the issue of litter from cigarettes.
Nonetheless, 2.8 million KAB volunteers picked up 200 million
pounds of litter in KAB’s annual Great American Clean-up
last year. 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
| |
Cell
phone tower
© Flickr |
No one doubts
that cell phone towers give off low-level radio-frequency
radiation (similar to the microwave oven in your home),
but scientists are still debating the health effects of
long-term exposure. Some people are genetically predisposed
to certain types of cancers, while others are not (for example,
some lifelong smokers get lung cancer while others don’t).
And with so many different chemicals, pollutants and other
substances around us in our air, food and water, it is very
difficult to determine with certainty if a particular environmental
influence (such as a cell phone tower) is the culprit when
health problems, such as cancer, arise in a particular locale
or among certain populations.
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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