Green plex Environmental Blog

  Ozone is a form of oxygen that shows up in our atmosphere. Instead of two atoms bound together, which is the form we breath, this is three atoms that bind under certain circumstances. The contradiction is that it is toxic for us to inhale, but is vital to protecting life on Earth. The toxic form of ozone is a form of pollution that occurs more commonly in the summer when pollution interacts with high angle sunlight and high temperatures. This is also one component of smog. This is why we have ‘Ozone Action Days’ sometimes during a heat wave. The essential form of ozone is much higher in the sky in the stratosphere. This is above the weather portion of our sky and above the normal flight path of commercial planes between 10 and about 30 miles above the ground.   This is a more natural location for that molecule, where it serves to block harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Without it, most life on our planet could not exist.    So basically, we need this. The...

  Click here to watch PBS NewsHour Documentary - The Plastic Problem By 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans. It’s an environmental crisis that’s been in the making for nearly 70 years. Plastic pollution is now considered one of the largest environmental threats facing humans and animals globally. In “The Plastic Problem: PBS NewsHour Presents”, Amna Nawaz and her PBS NewsHour colleagues look at this now ubiquitous material and how it’s impacting the world, why it’s become so prevalent, what’s being done to mitigate its use, and what potential alternatives or solutions are out there. This hour-long program travels from Boston to Seattle, Costa Rica to Easter Island to bring the global scale of the problem to light. From an expert on the world’s garbage patches to an industrial ecologist who quantified exactly how much plastic has ever been produced, Nawaz tracks how the world is grappling with plastic. She also sits down with two of the world’s biggest plastic pr...

  Reports of a terrible odor and polluted water near the city of Brovary, 12 miles northeast of Kyiv, started making their way to Ukrainian environmental regulators this summer. Olena Sydorenko, an official at a regional environmental agency, was sent to investigate. Back in early March, Russian rockets had destroyed a large, frozen-food warehouse as the invasion force moved in to occupy the area. As huge quantities of butter, meat, and vegetables began to spoil, local residents did their best to deal with the waste, burying the food in dozens of nearly 600  ft.-long  trenches in a nearby field. Sydorenko arrived three months later, after Ukrainian forces recaptured the region. She conducted tests of the local groundwater, and found that the rotten food had been leaching nitrates and ammonia into the groundwater, poisoning local wells. The smell, she says, was indescribable. “You can imagine how horrible the odor was if you, for example, forgot some food in your kitchen a...

  By Colleen Dawkins  The Ministry of Housing, Urban Renewal, Environment and Climate Change is encouraging citizens to participate in the National Tree Planting Initiative being executed by the Forestry Department. “The Government is encouraging every Jamaican man, woman, child – everyone – to plant a tree, whether inland or on the coast. It is a very simple but important activity,” Minister Charles told JIS News in an interview. He explained that the tree-planting initiative will help the nation safeguard food security, water security, conserve biological resources and assist with the adaptation and mitigation of the effects of climate change. The National Tree Planting Initiative was launched by the Prime Minister, the Most Hon. Andrew Holness, on October 4, 2019. The objective is to plant three million trees within three years to support national development in the areas of climate change and reforestation to increase forest cover and establish high-value urban green space...