EPA Research in the News
Chemistry: It’s not easy being green
Science journalist Katharine Sanderson interviewed EPA Assistant Administrator Paul Anastas—a.k.a. the Father of Green Chemistry—for her feature story on the past two decades of green chemistry. A supplementary Q&A with Dr. Anastas 
accompanies the article.
Chemistry: It’s not easy being green.
Published online 5 January 2011 | Nature 469, 18-20 (2011)
The Green Book: EPA Looks Forward
Chemical and Engineering News’ (C&EN) “The Editor’s Blog” featured EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson’s announcement about “the launch of a groundbreaking study by the National Research Council on incorporating sustainability concepts into all of the agency’s programs.”
West Nile Virus Higher in Low-income Neighborhoods
The environmental news web site Treehugger was one of several environmental news sites to spread the word about an EPA-funded study that found higher rates of West Vile virus in low-income neighborhoods. Results of the study were originally presented in the scientific journal PLoS One.
Citation: Harrigan RJ, Thomassen HA, Buermann W, Cummings RF, Kahn ME, et al. (2010) Economic Conditions Predict Prevalence of West Nile Virus. PLoS ONE 5(11): e15437. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015437
Crisis Science—Delivered
Examples of EPA “crisis science” designed and conducted in response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are highlighted in the paper Designing Science in a Crisis: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Citation: Anastas, Paul T., Cynthia Sonich-Mullin, and Becky Fried. (2010) Designing Science in a Crisis: the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2010, 44, 9250–9251
The U.S. EPA released two peer reviewed reports about dioxin emitted from controlled burns of leaked crude oil during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
- The first report (PDF) (22 pp, 298 KB), summarizing EPA’s sampling effort indicates that while dioxins were created from the burning of oil on ocean water, they were created at low levels – levels similar to the emissions from residential woodstoves and forest fires.
- The second report (PDF) (21 pp, 255 KB), coauthored with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), presents the results of a screening risk assessment for the dioxins emitted from the controlled oil burns.