The Green Scene: A leaking well highlights continued CTS contaminat­ion

Two grade-school boys playing in Becky Robinson‘s yard on April 24 discovered that an old well on the property was leaking. It hadn’t been used since 1999, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency confirmed that it was contaminated by trichloroethylene, one of many chemicals used at the former CTS electroplating plant on Mills Gap Road […]

The Green Scene

Not enough, say residents frustrated by a proposed agreement with CTS Corp. for cleaning up contamination at its former Mills Gap Road manufacturing site. A 1987 North Carolina law caps participating companies’ liability in such cleanups at that amount. Contained? Fences don’t prevent toxic vapors—produced by the suspected carcinogen trichloroethylene—from reaching residents living near the […]

The Green Scene

These are names that only a congressional bill sponsor could love: the Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act, the Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act, the Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act, and the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, a Democrat, has sponsored the latter bill, which has […]

The Green Scene

Perhaps you can’t quite picture a farmers’ market hosted by the local hospital, but to Molly Nicholie, it’s a perfectly green combination. Such a partnership is just one possibility raised by the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project’s Farm to Hospital program. The pilot project seeks to play matchmaker, linking local farmers looking to build their customer […]

The Green Scene

Two days after President Obama signed the stimulus package into law, DeWayne Barton and Dan Leroy were in D.C. for the “Good Jobs, Green Jobs” conference. But the two men—co-founders of the Asheville Green Opportunity Corps—were not content with merely attending the event and eyeing the new funding possibilities. With help from Barton’s D.C. brother […]

The Green Scene

Elevated arsenic levels have been found in a preliminary sampling of water and sediment collected downstream from Progress Energy’s Skyland power plant and coal-ash pond. A water sample taken from an unnamed French Broad River tributary nearby contained arsenic at slightly above the permissible level for surface waters—and seven times higher than the U.S. Environmental […]