All posts tagged "water pollution"

If you take your kids to the beach this summer, expect a gritty ride home. California has turned off most of the showers that people use at state beaches to clean the sand off their kids before the long ride home. Then, of course, you get to clean the sand out of your car. All this aggravation saves about 18 million gallons of water a year, according to the state.

In a drought like this one, it makes sense to conserve as much water as possible, wherever we can. So you would think we would be trying to stop some big water users too. Like Chevron. This mega-corporation sells 21 million gallons of treated polluted water a day to the Cawelo Water District, which, according to the Los Angeles Times, provides water to 90 Kern County farmers.

Where Chevron gets the water,

 » Read more about: Chevron's Oil on Troubled Waters  »

Now that the L.A. mayoral race is over, its winner, Eric Garcetti, has much to do to help advance an environmental agenda for Los Angeles. He has a strong record of environmental protection and I’m confident that as mayor he can lead the City to a big and bold vision of environmental sustainability. There are several major issues L.A. will need to address during the next four years. A comprehensive report prepared by UCLA serves as a more in depth analysis than this blog can undertake, but here are some of the major issues that Mayor Garcetti should undertake.

Waste

This next year is going to be critical to advancing a future that relies less on landfills and more on reducing, reusing and recycling. Of immediate priority, Eric Garcetti needs to push hard with the City Council to vote on the single-use plastic bag ban ordinance,

 » Read more about: The Next Four Years: A Time to Work on the Environment  »

This week the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released Testing the Waters: A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches. For some of us, reading the annual report card – or at least hearing its scarier parts summarized on the Six O’clock News – has become a summer ritual, the last piece of broccoli we must swallow before happily heading to our favorite polluted shoreline.

This year’s guide looks at the state of beaches in 2011 and rates them. Among its findings:

• Don’t Drink the Water: “[O]ne study found that swimmers at polluted beaches in the Great Lakes region were more likely to have gastrointestinal illnesses than nonswimmers; another study found that fecal contamination at Los Angeles and Orange County beaches caused between 627,800 and 1,479,200 excess gastrointestinal illnesses each year.

• Economics: “Our coasts provide more than just local recreation – approximately 85 percent of all U.S.

 » Read more about: Beached: NRDC Rates Our Shorelines for Pollution  »