Greenpeace Switzerland With the help of local activists, on April 17, Greenpeace Switzerland scaled the building at Syngenta’s headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, and dropped a large banner proclaiming “Syngenta Pesticides Kill Bees.” The global agrochemical company consistently denies that its pesticide products kill bees. For the last 15 years, in Europe and North America bees […]
Greenpeace East Asia By Ma Tianjie We live on a wet planet, and without that water we would not be able to survive. But in places like China where I live, industries such as textile facilities are pumping a nasty cocktail of toxic chemicals into our water. At Greenpeace, we’re campaigning to detox our water: […]
Environmental Working Group Photo courtesy of Shutterstock A new Environmental Working Group analysis of 2011 water quality tests by 201 large U.S. municipal water systems that serve more than 100 million people in 43 states has determined that all are polluted with unwanted toxic chemicals called trihalomethanes. These chemicals, an unintended side effect of chlorination, […]
United Nations Environment Programme World Health Organization Many synthetic chemicals, untested for their disrupting effects on the hormone system, could have significant health implications according to the State of the Science of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Health Organization (WHO). The joint study calls for […]
Beyond Pesticides The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) yesterday presented its report which finds that the neonicotinoid class of insecticides poses unacceptable hazards to bees. The report concludes that certain crops treated with neonicotinoid chemicals—imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiamethoxam—are of “critical concern” for bee health. Beekeepers and environmental activists welcome these recent scientific findings that they […]
Scientists from The 5 Gyres Institute have discovered the first evidence of a “garbage patch,” an accumulation zone of plastic pollution floating in the South Pacific subtropical gyre. The new study, published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin marks the first documentation of a defined oceanic garbage patch in the Southern Hemisphere, where little research […]
Natural Resources Defense Council By Taryn Kiekow National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Alaska Fisheries Science Center released last week its annual survey of endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales—and the findings don’t bode well for belugas. The 2012 population estimate is 312. According to NOAA, this is a “small, but not scientifically significant increase over […]
Natural Resources Defense Council By Andrew Wetzler Now that the world’s delegates have returned home from climate negotiations in Doha, many ministries are turning their attention to other international environmental agreements—and the consequences of climate change that echo in their implementation. One of those agreements is CITES—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. For […]
Center for Health, Environment & Justice By Mike Schade Penelope Jagessar Chaffer, calling for a toxic-free Disney. Photo: Gary Du of the Epoch Times Last Saturday, I stood outside of Disney’s iconic flagship store in Times Square, calling on them to make our dreams come true, by getting poisonous phthalates and vinyl plastic out of […]