Lead Poisoning Maps in Rhode Island Reveal Huge Disparities, Guide Cleanup

A selective scourge A higher incidence of lead poisoning (darker areas), using 1993-2005 data, correlated with lower income areas and communities with a preponderance of older, pre-1950 housing stock.
Rhode Islanders under six years of age who lived in the state's lowest income areas or in neighborhoods with lots of pre-1950 housing faced a threat of lead poisoning several times higher than average, according to a new study of data from 1993 through 2005. Mapping cases of lead poisoning is helping to focus cleanup efforts on areas where the problem is worst.
The rate at which lead poisoning has struck young Rhode Island children depends heavily on where they live, according to a Brown University-led geographic analysis of comprehensive health department data from across Rhode Island between 1993 and 2005. By mapping cases of lead poisoning, researchers have been able to help target cleanup resources to do the most good.
During that 12-year period, some census blocks in the state had no cases of poisoning in the study group of 204,746 children, but in the hardest hit census blocks of Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Woonsocket, and Newport, lead poisoning afflicted as many as 48.6 percent of kids under 6.
Patrick Vivier, associate professor of community health and pediatrics and lead author of the study, said that although he has been familiar with the state's fight against lead poisoning for years, he was still struck by the geographic and demographic disparities uncovered in the analysis published online Oct. 23 by the Maternal and Child Health Journal.
"We know there are disparities, but to look at zero cases in some areas and almost 50 percent in some areas is still shocking," said Vivier, who is also affiliated with Hasbro Children's Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital.
Although the trend over time has been that lead poisoning cases are declining, that does not mean the problem's impact has dissipated. The damage lead can do to a child's developing nervous system is irreversible. In hard-hit areas, a generation of children has been at high risk for suffering symptoms such as behavioral disorders and reduced attention span and IQ scores.
Pinpointing poisoning
According to the study of state health department mandated test results, the risk of a child being poisoned by lead was four times higher than average for children living in the state's poorest neighborhoods, and just under three times higher for children living in a neighborhood with a preponderance of pre-1950 housing. Sometimes those areas overlapped, but even accounting for that overlap, each factor independently and significantly heightened the risk kids faced.
Viewed on maps, the data make a clear case that lead poisoning is a much greater problem in some very specific areas of the state than in others, Vivier said. This insight has allowed a commission formed by Attorney General Patrick Lynch to recommend the best places to spend millions of dollars of cleanup money provided by DuPont after years of protracted litigation by the attorney general against several chemical companies and paint manufacturers.
The commission used the data to map the neighborhoods that had the highest poverty, the highest stock of pre-1950 housing and the highest frequency of lead poisoning, and focused the efforts there.
"We know where to go," Vivier said. "These places are clustered in specific spots so it means we can go and do something about it in those places."
Cleanup efforts around the state funded by the Du Pont money are still going on.
Rhode Island's mandatory program of testing for lead poisoning and the Rhode Island Department of Health's statewide lead database have provided an unusually rich record of data, Vivier said. But looking at the striking sociological disparities in the data, as well as its usefulness in mapping those disparities, Vivier said public health researchers should be eager to apply geographic analysis in other such studies.
"This paper demonstrates the huge health burden that where you live can have," Vivier said.
In addition to Vivier, the study's other authors were Sherry Weitzen, research assistant professor of community health; John Logan, professor of sociology; Marissa Hauptman of New York University Medical School; Scott Bell, associate professor of geography at the University of Saskatchewan; and Daniela Quilliam of the Rhode Island Department of Health.
The study was funded by Brown University, including money received from Du Pont as part of an agreement between the company and state Attorney General Patrick Lynch.

New Way of Removing Excess Nitrogen from the Environment

An Illinois denitrifying bioreactor removes nitrogen from the croplands of the U.S. midwest.
Excess nitrogen from agricultural and urban lands is contaminating groundwater, streams, lakes and estuaries, where it causes harmful algal blooms and contributes to fish kills.
Cost-effective approaches to removing this nitrogen from croplands and urban stormwater runoff before it reaches sensitive water bodies have been elusive.
But simple and inexpensive technologies are on the horizon. A recent scientific workshop on denitrification brought together ecologists, engineers and policy experts to find answers.
Denitrification is a biological process carried out by soil and aquatic microorganisms, in which forms of reactive nitrogen are converted to unreactive and harmless dinitrogen gas.
Findings from the workshop, held in May, 2009, at the University of Rhode Island, are published in the November, 2010, special issue of the scientific journal Ecological Engineering.
The workshop was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Denitrification Research Coordination Network (RCN), established to enhance collaboration among researchers investigating denitrification.
"This special issue of Ecological Engineering, with its focus on managing denitrification in human-dominated landscapes, highlights our need to understand Earth's microorganisms and their processes," says Matt Kane, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the RCN and the workshop.
"The RCN brought together an international and interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers to synthesize the knowledge necessary to provide pure water for generations to come."
At the workshop, more than 40 participants combined their expertise to address the goal of using ecological principles in engineering design to control nitrogen pollution.
One workshop goal was to evaluate a new and relatively inexpensive way to treat wastewater and drainage from agricultural lands using "denitrifying bioreactors."
These bioreactors use common waste products, such as wood chips, to provide a food source for naturally occurring microorganisms. The microbes convert dissolved nitrogen into harmless nitrogen gas, which is then released to the atmosphere.
Research results in Ecological Engineering are reported from New Zealand, Canada and several locations in the United States.
All confirm that denitrifying bioreactors may be used in many settings, and operate well in a range of temperatures.
The systems have been successful in the cleanup of domestic effluent from small townships, septic tank systems and wastes from dairy farms, says Louis Schipper of the University of Waikato, New Zealand, author of the lead paper in the journal.
"Denitrifying bioreactors have been integrated into agricultural fields," adds Eric Davidson of The Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Mass., and co-author of the journal's lead paper.
"Underground drainage pipes there remove excess water that contains excess nitrogen. By intercepting some of this drainage water, direct inputs of nitrate to surface water can be reduced."
The largest bioreactor tested, by Schipper and colleagues Stewart Cameron and Soren Warneke at the University of Waikato, is 200 meters long by five meters wide by two meters deep. It treats effluent from greenhouse-grown tomatoes.
Research led by Will Robertson of the University of Waterloo found that bioreactors may operate for more than a decade without replacement of wood chips or substantive maintenance.
Similar longevity was confirmed in research in Iowa by Tom Moorman of the USDA-Agricultural Research Service.
Studies by D.Q. Kellogg and Art Gold of the University of Rhode Island demonstrate that recent advances in geospatial data--such as computer-based maps of geologic and land-use patterns--provide a decision-support tool for local regulatory and planning agencies.
These advances, Kellogg and Gold say, will help reduce nitrate-loading to downstream waters.
A study conducted at the University of California at Davis by Harold Leverenz and reported in the journal showed that plants may be grown on the surface of denitrifying bioreactors, providing biodiversity benefits.
"Research presented in this special issue of Ecological Engineering goes a long way toward applying a scientific understanding of the biological processes of denitrification to the engineering challenges of denitrifying bioreactors," says Davidson.
"The resulting guidelines and principles for denitrifying bioreactor design and operation are an additional option in the land manager's tool box."

Microreactor Speeds Nanotech Particle Production by 500 Times

A "multilayer micromixer" production process developed at Oregon State University allows a much higher production rate of nanotech particles than conventional approaches, with no loss of quality.
Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a new method to speed the production rate of nanoparticles by 500 times, an advance that could play an important role in making nanotechnology products more commercially practical.
The approach uses an arrayed microchannel reactor and a "laminated architecture" in which many sheets, each with thousands of microchannels in them, are stacked in parallel to provide a high volume of production and excellent control of the processes involved.
Applications could be possible in improved sensors, medical imaging, electronics, and even solar energy or biomedical uses when the same strategy is applied to abundant materials such as copper, zinc or tin.
A patent has been applied for, university officials say. The work, just published in the journal Nanotechnology, was done in the research group of Brian Paul, a professor in the OSU School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering.
"A number of new and important types of nanoparticles have been developed with microtechnology approaches, which often use very small microfluidic devices," said Chih-hung Chang, a professor in the OSU School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering, and principal investigator on the study.
"It had been thought that commercial production might be as simple as just grouping hundreds of these small devices together," Chang said. "But with all the supporting equipment you need, things like pumps and temperature controls, it really wasn't that easy. Scaling things up to commercial volumes can be quite challenging."
The new approach created by a research team of five engineers at OSU used a microreactor with the new architecture that produced "undecagold nanoclusters" hundreds of times faster than conventional "batch synthesis" processes that might have been used.
"In part because it's faster and more efficient, this process is also more environmentally sensitive, using fewer solvents and less energy," Chang said. "This could be very significant in helping to commercialize nanotech products, where you need high volumes, high quality and low costs."
This research, Chang said, created nanoparticles based on gold, but the same concept should be applicable to other materials as well. By lowering the cost of production, even the gold nanoclusters may find applications, he said, because the cost of the gold needed to make them is actually just a tiny fraction of the overall cost of the finished product.
Nanoparticles are extraordinarily tiny groups of atoms and compounds that, because of their extremely small size and large surface areas, can have unusual characteristics that make them valuable for many industrial, electronic, medical or energy applications.
This work was supported by the Safer Nanomaterials and Nanomanufacturing Initiative of the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute, or ONAMI. Funding was also provided by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the W.M. Keck Foundation.

Algae for Biofuels: Moving from Promise to Reality, but How Fast?

Algae is considered a prime candidate to serve as feedstock for biofuels because of its high energy content and yield, rapid growth and ability to thrive in seawater or wastewater. Oil from algae can be refined into gasoline, biodiesel or jet fuel.
A new report from the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) in Berkeley projects that development of cost-competitive algae biofuel production will require much more long-term research, development and demonstration. In the meantime, several non-fuel applications of algae could serve to advance the nascent industry.
"Even with relatively favorable and forward-looking process assumptions (from cultivation to harvesting to processing), algae oil production with microalgae cultures will be expensive and, at least in the near-to-mid-term, will require additional income streams to be economically viable," write authors Nigel Quinn and Tryg Lundquist of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which is a partner in the BP-funded institute.
Their conclusions stem from a detailed techno-economic analysis of algal biofuels production. The project is one of the over 70 studies on bioenergy now being pursued by the EBI and its scientists at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and Berkeley Lab.
The algae biofuels industry is still in its early gestation stage, the new report notes. Although well over 100 companies in the U.S. and abroad are now working to produce algal biomass and oil for transportation fuels, most are small and none has yet operated a pilot plant with multiple acres of algae production systems. However, several companies recently initiated such scale-up projects, including several major oil companies such as ExxonMobil (which a year ago announced a $600 million commitment to algae biofuels technology), Shell (with a joint venture project, "Cellana," in Hawaii), and Eni (the Italian oil company, with a pre-pilot plant in Sicily).
The U.S. Department of Energy has funded several R&D consortia and pilot projects, and one 300-acre demonstration project in New Mexico, by Sapphire Energy, Inc. The U.S. Department of Defense is supporting several fast-track projects. In the United Kingdom, the Carbon Trust has initiated a 10-year effort to develop algae oil production, engaging a dozen universities and research laboratories, while the European Union recently funded three 25-acre pilot projects.
Most of these projects use the raceway, open pond-based algal production technologies, which were analyzed in the EBI Report. These projects hope to show that it is possible to mass culture algae with current or near-term technology within the technical and economic constraints required for biofuel production.
Once the technologies are developed, global resource availability will be a major controller of algae production, the report states. Four key resources (suitable climate, water, flat land and carbon dioxide) must all be available in one location for optimal algal biomass production. The authors state that despite the need for all four resources, algal oil production technology has the potential to produce several billion gallons annually of renewable fuel in the U.S. However, achieving this goal, particularly at competitive capital and operating costs, will require further research and development.
The EBI report focuses on algal biofuels produced in conjunction with wastewater treatment as a promising cost-effective strategy to fast-track development of a practical production process. Besides providing the needed water and nutrients, use of wastewater in algae production provides the potential for income from the treatment service provided.
The areas the study identified as essential for R&D are in both the biology and engineering fields. The ability to cultivate stable cultures under outdoor conditions, while achieving both high productivities and oil content, is still to be developed. Despite the well-known rapid growth rate of algae, increasing the volume of algae oil produced per unit of surface area per year is a crucial goal. Oil-rich algae strains that are biologically competitive with contaminating wild species and that consistently grow well in various climates are needed. Other key steps to be improved are low-cost harvesting of microscopic algae cells and the extraction of their oil content, as well as dealing with the biomass residue remaining after oil extraction.
The report's analysis includes five conceptual facilities for algae pond biofuel production, four of them 250 acres in size and one of 1,000 acres. All used municipal wastewater as the source of both water and nutrients, with some emphasizing production of oil, while others have wastewater treatment as their main priorities. Biofuel products included either biogas and oil or just biogas production, with the biogas used for electricity generation. The hypothetical location was the Imperial Valley in southern California, where the only major microalgae farms in the continental U.S. are presently located. In the scenarios, productivity peaks in the summer months but is essentially nil in the coldest winter months, with light and temperature being the main limiting factors.
Engineering designs and cost analysis for the various cases were based on projecting current commercial microalgae production and wastewater treatment processes at much larger scales. They assumed higher productivities due to plausible technological advances. The estimated capital costs for a 250-acre biofuel production system emphasizing oil production were about $21 million, with annual operating costs at around $1.5 million, to produce about 12,300 barrels of oil, giving a break-even price per barrel of oil of $330 (based on an 8 percent capital charge). Increasing the scale of the system to 1,000 acres reduced the break-even price to about $240 per barrel. These prices considered wastewater treatment credits, which reduced costs about 20 percent. Other facilities that maximized wastewater treatment produced fuel at lower cost due to greater treatment revenue. However, the availability of wastewater would greatly limit the national scale of this lower-cost fuel production.
Other co-products, specifically animal feeds, could help offset costs, but these products are of relatively low value or have very limited markets. "Wastewater treatment is the only realistic co-product for (algal) biofuels production," the report states. "Only through intensive, continuous, large-scale research with outdoor ponds can we hope to progress in a reasonable time frame."
The EBI scientists conclude that "algal oil production will be neither quick nor plentiful -- 10 years is a reasonable projection for the R, D & D (research, development and demonstration) to allow a conclusion about the ability to achieve, at least for specific locations, relatively low-cost algal biomass and oil production."

'Living' carbon-negative material could be used to protect buildings

'Protocell drivers' in a flask surrounded by carbon structures, in the Hylozoic Ground installation

Architects have been looking at ways to improve city buildings with living walls and living roofs that add some much needed greenery and help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Now researchers are looking at using a different sort of “living “ material created from protocells – bubbles of oil in an aqueous fluid sensitive to light or different chemicals – to create a coral-like skin that could be used to clad city buildings, build carbon-negative architecture and even "grow" reefs to stabilize the city of Venice.
Instead of using tiny, living marine polyps whose secretions form into calcium carbonate to create coral, the researchers from the University of Greenwich, in collaboration with the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Glasgow and University College London, are looking at using protocells – tiny droplets of fatty oil suspended in water, that have been engineered to behave like living microorganisms.
Besides moving through their liquid environment, oil-in-water protocells have been observed doing things such as avoiding each other’s trails, circling one another, and swarming. Their “behavior” is due to chemical reactions, and it is the ability of protocells made from oil droplets in water to allow soluble chemicals to be exchanged between the drops and their surrounding solution that the researchers are looking to take advantage of.
Under certain conditions, the oil droplets will develop a precipitate coating that they eventually slough off. At the University of Southern Denmark, researchers have been able to get protocells to capture carbon dioxide from the water, and convert it into a carbon-containing precipitate. Done on a large enough scale, it is hoped that coral-like building materials could be produced from a conglomeration of the cast-off skins. Because the CO2 would be taken from the air (via the water) and locked up in the limestone-like material, the process would be carbon-negative.
It might all sound like science fiction, but it is currently being publicly demonstrated, on a small scale. Hylozoic Ground, an installation created for the Canadian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale 2010, uses protocells to create carbon-containing solids from the CO2 exhaled by visitors. Created by Canadian architect Philip Beesley, the scientific aspect of the installation was designed by Dr. Rachel Armstrong of University College London.
Besides its potential to clad buildings in an ethical, green and sustainable way, it is also hoped that the technology could be used to stabilize the entire city of Venice, by creating a limestone “reef” beneath its foundations that would spread the structural weight-load of the city.

Ambitious plans for 5 gigawatt solar plant in South Africa

Concentrating solar mirrors are one potential technology to be used in the proposed 5GW solar park in South Africa
Laying claim to “what will be the world’s largest solar power plant” is difficult these days with so many in development, but the Texas-based Fluor corporation is drawing up plans for a five gigawatt (GW) plant in South Africa that would certainly make it amongst the world’s largest. Following a feasibility study, the company has been selected to draw up plans for a potential solar park to be built on the edge of the Kalahari Desert in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa – an area the South African government says is amongst the sunniest three percent of regions in the world.
Currently, the world’s largest operational solar power plant is the 80MW Sarnia Solar Project completed last month in Canada. No sooner had it commenced operation than a 1GW plant known as the Blythe Solar Power Project received approval to be built in California. The U.S. plant is expected to take six years to complete and won't generate as much power as the proposed 2GW plant planned for China, but the South African government hopes its Solar Park will be generating 1GW as early as 2012 and a total of 5GW by 2020.
Last week more than 400 potential investors and solar energy experts gathered at the two-day Solar Park Investors Conference held in the small town of Upington where the park is to be built to learn more about the project. The site is seen as ideal for a solar park as it hardly ever rains, rarely has clouds, and doesn’t have sandstorms. The park carries an estimated price tag of 150 billion Rand (approx. US$22 billion), most of which would be provided by private investors.
The park proposed by Fluor would be built over a ten-year period and make use of various solar technologies, possibly including photovoltaic, concentrated photovoltaic and concentrating solar power technologies such as power tower and parabolic trough solutions.
With the project, the South African government is looking to kick-start cleaner energy solutions to allow the country to meet its international obligations on climate change. Definitely a move in the right direction for a country that currently derives over 90 percent of its annual 45–48GW of power generated each year from coal fired power plants.

Avoiding CO2 Capture Health Risks Is Possible

Experts at Norway's SINTEF believe it is possible to develop efficient CO₂ capture technologies without generating harmful emissions.
SINTEF and NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, are among the leading research institutions in the world in the field of the capture and storage of the greenhouse gas CO₂. Their research is being carried out in close collaboration with the industry and other leading research institutions.
Researching a variety of technologies
SINTEF is conducting research into several different CO₂ capture technologies involving coal and gas-fired power stations and industrial processes. The three main technologies under the spotlight are the removal of CO₂ from exhaust gases following power generation, the removal of carbon from fuels prior to combustion, and the use of oxygen as a combustion gas instead of air.
Among these technologies, the so-called post-combustion process is the most mature. This involves the use of plants that employ chemicals to remove CO₂ from exhaust gases. Usually, so-called amines are employed, and the process is termed amine based CO₂ capture. A key benefit of amine based CO₂ capture is that the technology can be installed in existing industrial plants and power stations.
Research to eliminate negative health effects
It has been acknowledged for many years that amine based CO₂ capture can result in the emission of nitrosamines, which may be harmful to health. Nitrosamines are substances that have been much in focus in connection with the use of nitrates in foodstuffs. Issues surrounding the formation and control of nitrosamine emissions are a key component of SINTEF's research activities in this field.
In the light of current uncertainties regarding the role of amines and associated health and environmental concerns, the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy has decided to conduct an inquiry into whether alternative processes should form the basis of the Norwegian Mongstad CO₂ capture and storage project.
"SINTEF understands the Ministry's need to establish a clear and comprehensive overview on this issue," says Nils A. Røkke, SINTEF's Vice President of Climate Technology. "We must make sure that we do not simply substitute one environmental problem for another, and for this reason we need more data."
Negative health effects can be avoided
"It is vital that we resolve this issue," says Røkke. "We believe it is possible to develop chemical capture technologies without generating negative health effects."
In his opinion it is too early to conclude that CO₂ capture using amines will result in emissions that constitute a negative health effect. "We are working to develop systems that can control the level of emissions. We still don't know enough about the stability of nitrosamines in the environment."
Calls for international research
SINTEF believes that to shed light on these issues, more research organisations should be incorporated on an international basis. Norway is more than capable of assuming a role among the world leaders in this field. This will place demands on the work we must carry out, and a scientific consensus on the facts must be reached. It would be unfortunate if we put into operation a technology that results in health risks, and doubly so if CO₂ capture on a global scale is delayed on the basis of inadequate science. Increased know-how is the key to avoiding such situations.
SINTEF believes that it is vital to carry out research into a variety of CO₂ capture technologies. At present, no-one knows which technologies will emerge as the winners. "We must not reject technologies simply because we are yet to resolve all the issues,"

Carbon cloth found to be highly effective at removing pollutants

Activated carbon cloth could find its way into a variety of filtration applications

Researchers at the University of Abertay Dundee (UAD) have discovered that activated carbon cloth is very effective at filtering harmful compounds out of air and liquids. The material was first developed in the 1980s, to protect British soldiers from chemical attacks. It is still in use today, in chemical, biological and radiological warfare suits for the military. This recent study, however, indicates that it could have a number of other uses.
The initial phase of the latest research was carried out in conjunction with Carbon Filter Technology, a Scottish company that manufacturers carbon cloth. The UAD researchers found that the material can be used to create reactive chemicals known as hydroxyl radicals. These are highly unstable, so they react instantly with any pollutants, even at concentrations of a few parts per million.
When combined with ozone gas, it becomes an even more effective filtration medium. “The fabric has countless tiny pores which absorb the organic molecules onto the surface via weak Van der Waals forces,” explained Carbon Fiber Technology’s Ian Johnson. “The pollutants then react with the oxidant (ozone) on the surface of the carbon cloth, converting them into smaller molecules or even carbon dioxide and water. The carbon cloth is really acting as a catalyst, promoting the decomposition of the pollutants.”
Various uses for the relatively inexpensive cloth are now being proposed. They include using it in hospitals to filter antibiotic and drug waste out of outgoing water, in municipal water treatment systems to keep pollutants from entering rivers, on wound dressings, and as a covering for highly-sensitive equipment.