Published on July 2nd, 2008
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What started out as a innovative, new program to keep old medications out of the waste stream in LaCrosse County, Wisconsin, has grown to become an award-winning initiative now used by more than 30 counties in three states.
Special waste manager Jeff Gloyd created the program in which LaCrosse County began collecting old over-the-counter drugs and prescription medications to keep them out of the regular waste stream. Pharmaceuticals thrown out that way have increasingly seeped into natural waterways and, eventually, human drinking water supplies, raising concerns about environmental and health dangers.
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Published on June 5th, 2008
This summer, a group of students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to travel to New Orleans to help restore an urban wetland in the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood decimated by flooding after the post-Katrina levee failures.
The group of nine students expect to study Bayou Bienvenue, testing water, surveying vegetation and researching whether the area could be restored with a diversion dam that would help bring in fresh water and sediment. They also plan to talk with neighborhood residents about their concerns and will even host a crab boil to involve the community.
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Published on April 30th, 2008
The always-progressive Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, has once again offered a worthy — and green — lesson to its print media counterparts across the U.S.
That’s because, as of this week, the daily newspaper is being distributed exclusively online. The Capital Times’ last daily print edition went out on Saturday, April 26.
A Monday article in The Washington Post notes the Madison newspaper, like almost every traditional print paper across the country, has seen a steep drop in circulation over past decades. The switch to an exclusively online edition (outside of a free weekly insert in The Wisconsin State Journal) also comes with a deep cut in employees — from about 60 to 40, but the paper promises to continue delivering local and breaking news seven days a week.
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Published on April 25th, 2008
Back in 1983, when the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) held its first-ever Human Powered Vehicle Challenge, gas was about 81 cents a gallon, peak oil theorists were considered mostly crazy Chicken-Little types and global warming was but a vague and distant threat.
How times have changed.
Today’s circumstances make human powered vehicles sound more appealing than they probably did 25 years ago. Sweat-fueled technology doesn’t consign us to traveling at 20 mph or less, either, or to living our lives within a 10-mile radius of home. At least, that’s what competitors in the 25th annual Human Powered Vehicle Challenge, or HPVC, aim to prove when they meet this weekend at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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