Daily Archives: April 11, 2012

Synthetic Turf Promotes Sustainability Through Conservation of Six Billion Gallons of Water Annually, Innovative Practices and Reclamation of Resources

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Synthetic Turf Promotes Sustainability Through Conservation of Six Billion Gallons of Water Annually, Innovative Practices and Reclamation of Resources – MarketWatch.

ATLANTA, April 10, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — From schools and municipalities to homeowners, a growing number of people are turning to synthetic turf for sustainable landscape and play solutions. As of 2012, the estimated total amount of synthetic turf installed in North America annually conserves six billion gallons of water and eliminates close to a billion pounds of harmful fertilizers and pesticides. Now, members of the Synthetic Turf Council are creating innovative practices and programs to further synthetic turf’s positive impact on the environment.

Significant Environmental Impact

Depending on the region of the country, one full-size synthetic turf sports field saves 500,000 to 1,000,000 gallons of water each year. During 2011, about six billion gallons of water were conserved through its use. According to the EPA, the average American family of four uses 400 gallons of water a day. Therefore, a savings of six billion gallons of water equates to the annual water usage of nearly 40,000 average American families of four.

Thousands of homes, businesses, golf courses, and public spaces have turned to synthetic grass to provide a lush, attractive landscape solution that requires minimal resources. The EPA states that nationwide landscape irrigation is estimated to account for almost one-third of all residential water use, totaling more than seven billion gallons per day. Yet water conservation is more critical than ever before. In March 2011, Wharton published a report about the growing scarcity of water which referenced a prediction by the 2030 Water Resources Group that by 2030 global water requirements will be “a full 40% above the current accessible, reliable supply.”

The Southern Nevada Water Authority estimates that every square foot of natural grass replaced saves 55 gallons of water per year. If an average lawn is 1,800 square feet, then Las Vegas homeowners with synthetic grass could save 99,000 gallons of water each year. Recognizing its ability to conserve water, the Simi Valley City Council adopted an ordinance in March 2012 allowing single-family homeowners to cover their front yards almost entirely with synthetic grass.

Replacing grass landscape and sports fields with synthetic turf has eliminated the need for nearly a billion pounds of harmful pesticides and fertilizers, which has significant health and environmental implications. The EPA notes runoff of toxic pesticides and fertilizers is a principal cause of water pollution. Synthetic turf also keeps more than 105 million used tires out of landfills, since crumb rubber recycled from used tires is often used for infill.

Innovative Practices

When the Battery Park City Authority in New York decided to renovate its old grass ball fields that frequently turned to mud, they wanted to create an athletic field that benefitted the environment as much as players. The result is the country’s most sustainable playing field featuring synthetic grass. “We conducted a lifecycle analysis of the individual components of a synthetic turf system in order to maximize sustainability,” explained David Nardone, the Sport Group Leader- North America for architecture and planning firm Stantec, who designed the project. The completed field system features Brock International’s Cradle to Cradle Certified(CM) combined drainage and shock pad and turf fiber manufactured by TenCate Grass.

Expanding the recycling effort it launched with Yellowstone National Park, Universal Textile Technologies (UTT) is collecting plastic bottles from Grand Teton National Park and converting them into a non-woven fleece material used to manufacture high-performance, environmentally friendly backing for carpet and synthetic turf products. Called the PET Park Project, this partnership diverts nearly 300 million plastic bottles from landfills annually and helps the park meet its recycling goals.

Reclamation of Resources

When a synthetic turf field reaches the end of its useful life, a number of organizations are finding creative ways to reuse system components. EnviroTurf hopes to improve the golf-playing experience by lining sand traps with older synthetic turf fields. Sand typically washes out in traps, creating mud until the sand is replaced. A recycled synthetic turf lining protects the integrity of the sand trap, is aesthetically pleasing and limits erosion. Rather than remove, repair drainage problems and dispose of their old synthetic turf field, Vista High School in Vista, California covered the area with sand and a synthetic turf underlayment system from American Wick Drain. This move saved the school district about $400,000.

Through its Green Edge Recycling Program, all components of Shaw Sportexe synthetic grass can be either reused or recycled. Once the synthetic turf field is taken up, the infill (sand & rubber) is removed, cleaned and reused in future fields. The artificial turf can then be shipped to Shaw’s headquarters and repurposed using different methods such as converting it into resin pellets that are used in the manufacturing of other products like Shaw carpet backing and resilient flooring. Shaw’s state-of-the-art Re2E (Reclaim to Energy) provides a waste-to-energy solution that reduces post-industrial waste by 90% and produces enough steam to power several of their manufacturing facilities.

Turf Reclamation Services, LLC and FieldAway USA provide the specialized equipment and services needed to remove and reclaim synthetic turf for recycling. Textile Rubber and Chemical Company’s ThermoTex Division reprocesses and recycles over a million pounds of synthetic turf materials previously destined for landfills into a variety of new products.

About the Synthetic Turf Council

Based in Atlanta, the Synthetic Turf Council was founded in 2003 to promote the industry and to assist buyers and end users with the selection, use and maintenance of synthetic turf systems in sports field, golf, municipal parks, airports, landscape and residential applications. The organization is also a resource for current, credible, and independent research on the safety and environmental impact of synthetic turf. Membership includes builders, landscape architects, testing labs, maintenance providers, manufacturers, suppliers, installation contractors, infill material suppliers and other specialty service companies. For more information, visit http://www.syntheticturfcouncil.org .

SOURCE Synthetic Turf Council

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Why the huge interest in the 1940 Census? – CNN.com

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Why the huge interest in the 1940 Census? – CNN.com.

Editor’s note: Michael S. Snow is a historian on the history staff of the U.S. Census Bureau.

(CNN) — A reporter last week asked me if many people cared about the release of individual records from the 1940 Census. “Are they just a historic relic?” was the followup from someone else unimpressed that the general public would finally have access to more than 100 million census records locked away for 72 years.

Americans answered those questions loud and clear. The National Archives and Records Administration website housing 1940 Census records registered over 60 million hits in just three hours on Tuesday, April 3, 2012, the second day they were open. The outpouring of demand for such information calls on us to examine what is driving it.

The individual records help Americans gain a greater sense of who our ancestors were and with it an understanding of the blood that runs through our own veins. Each image from the 1940 Census is a lined page called a population schedule, containing the records of up to 40 individuals.

They might not look like much — the penmanship of 123,000 census takers varied, the cursive may be hard to read, ink from fountain pens ran too light on some letters. One line on a 1940 Census record, however, has the power to confirm a family legend we have heard for years, or it can make us confront a troubling truth buried long ago.

Michael Snow

Michael Snow

The National Archives’ innovative move of putting scans of these 3.9 million pages online has democratized genealogy. We might have expected that the first wave of retirees from the nation’s nearly 77 million baby boomers would pause to reflect on the world their parents inhabited. We might have expected the too-rapidly dwindling ranks of World War II veterans to look for a glimpse of home life in the months before 15 million of them entered the services.

When the 1930 Census records and those from earlier decades were released, searches largely were confined to people able to trek to National Archives facilities and depository libraries to work through microfilms produced by the Census Bureau in the 1930s and 40s. Now the 1940 census records are available for free, and millions of people are accessing them.

The fascination with the snapshot of the United States provided by the 1940 Census runs beyond any one individual’s search for her or his own past. The statistics available online now from the Census Bureau can deepen people’s understanding of the towns and times their ancestors inhabited.

Las Vegas, Nevada, had exploded in size with construction of the Hoover Dam.  Its population stood at 8,422.

Around 9 million U.S. households used ice boxes to preserve their food.

Family members finding their grandmother had completed four years of college by 1940 will learn that her accomplishment put her among the top 5% of U.S. residents in terms of education.

Genealogists have been looking forward to this release as they would a national holiday, as have thousands of historians, economists and demographers. The release of the 1940 Census records will allow them to shed a light on a United States very different from how we live now.

Community profiles of smaller population groups of the type so commonly released now by the Census Bureau with data from the American Community Survey were not published from the 1940 Census during days of World War II. When it is released, the Minnesota Population Center‘s database of digitized 1940 census records will allow researchers to build such profiles. They will be able to aggregate individual items into their own tables and run analyses.

To get an idea of the diversity of nationalities in the United States at the time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s Census Proclamation, urging Americans to participate, was translated into 23 languages, including Slovak, Greek, Lithuanian, Russian, Dutch, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian, French, Italian, Spanish, German.

Because residents in 1940 answered census takers’ questions, the records released last week will provide a glimpse of Navajo tribal lands on the eve of the uranium boom, which transformed the landscape.

Economists will be able to analyze how people in specific occupations or smaller geographic areas fared during the Great Depression.

The possibilities are vast.

The 1940 Census gave the country in 1940 a snapshot, one moment frozen in time. That portrait attracts us because it was taken on the edge of momentous change — a time when Americans began developing many of the tools we now take for granted. The United States instituted its first peacetime draft in September 1940; and the ranks of the armed forces mushroomed. Unemployment fell from around 15% for the week before Census Day 1940 to around 4.7% by 1942.

Citing unprecedented movements of the population to areas with heavy concentrations of armaments manufacturing and responding to the administration’s orders, the Census Bureau unveiled a 1941 plan to conduct an annual sample census. When that plan faltered for lack of funding, more than 200 communities paid the Census Bureau to conduct censuses within their jurisdictions between 1941 and 1946 alone. Today those communities base much of their decision-making on data from the descendant of those plans, the American Community Survey.

Because Americans opened their doors to census takers in 1940 and the survey interviewers who followed them, the United States had the information President Franklin Roosevelt assured them was necessary “to guide us intelligently into the future.” The Census Bureau thanked the millions of respondents in 1940 and the thousands of households responding to surveys each month since then; we their heirs should thank them now.

To most Americans, it doesn’t feel like an economic recovery – CNN.com

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To most Americans, it doesn’t feel like an economic recovery – CNN.com.

A job seeker holds an employment application during a job fair last month in San Francisco.
A job seeker holds an employment application during a job fair last month in San Francisco.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • David Frum: Friday’s weak jobs report is a sign of America’s economic future
  • Frum says we are many years away from regaining all jobs lost in the recession
  • Most Americans are seeing their economic future changed for the worse, he says
  • Frum: Politicians in both parties will find it hard to adopt policies to reinvigorate economy

Editor’s note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He was a special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002 and is the author of six books, including “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again.”

(CNN) — Friday’s weak jobs report is more than a disappointing blip.

It is a glimpse ahead of our disappointing future.

Nearly three years from the beginning of the economic recovery in the summer of 2009, the U.S. economy has replaced not even half the jobs lost in the slump of 2007-2009. At the current pace of job creation, it will take until 2017 to replace all the jobs lost.

But of course the population has grown since 2007, so “replacement” is not good enough. We are even further away from equaling the employment rate of 2007 — the proportion of the working-age population at work.

Even when (or if) full job recovery does come, it will not restore the economy of 2007 just as it was.

Recessions reshape economies.

DNC chair: GOP wants bad economy

Arguments for, against economic recovery

Jobs report weaker than expected

The best book written about the social effects of the Great Recession is Don Peck’s “Pinched.”

Peck shows us a new world emerging from the catastrophe of 2008, a new world that most Americans will find harsher than the old.

For example: Despite the long, slow relative decline of manufacturing as a source of American jobs, the total number of manufacturing jobs in the United States had remained constant at about 18 million for decades. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 6 million.

While manufacturing is beginning a recovery now, it seems impossible that the sector will regenerate to anything like its former extent.

The new jobs being added to the U.S. economy pay less, on average, than the jobs lost — which is why the average rate of pay in the United States remains stagnant or even drops as the number of jobs slowly grows.

At the top of the economic heap, recovery has been more complete. The richest Americans suffered sharp shocks to their wealth when markets collapsed in 2008-2009. As financial markets have revived, so has the wealth of the top 1% (households earning more than $380,000 per year.)

The top 5% have done OK, too. (The top 5% begins a little south of $200,000 in household income.)

For most of the country, however, the outlook is — to borrow Peck’s title — “pinched.” Young people who come of age in the crisis will earn less through their lives than those who came of age during happier times. Marriages break up. Babies are not born. A sense of unfairness spreads through the society. Politics becomes angrier and more paranoid — for those who take part — while many others drop out of public life entirely, disregarded and alienated.

The country’s political class tends to discuss these hard economic and cultural facts as if they were interesting only in relation to the presidential race, as if the only questions that mattered about economics were: “Good for Obama?” “Bad for Obama?”

For most of the country, however, Barack Obama is a flickering electronic image, an only intermittently interesting distraction from the realities of life: stagnant pay, unattractive job options, darkening retirement prospects for the middle-aged and narrowing opportunities for the young.

What would it take to do better? The answer, ironically, will be nearly equally difficult (but in very different ways) for politicians of either party.

To do better, we’ll need a program to stimulate employment for the long-term unemployed — including potentially a New Deal-style requirement that nobody receive benefits without working. It’s no good to anybody — the unemployed least of all — to allow the unemployed to collect two years’ worth of benefits while waiting at home, their skills atrophying, their resumes going stale.

To do better, we may need to induce employers to create jobs, not only through tax cuts but through direct subsidies, including subsidies of the cost of health coverage. (Especially for older workers, health costs can be more of a deterrent to hiring even than the cost of wages.)

We will need to curtail the generosity of Medicare to open fiscal room for government programs to support opportunities for the young.

We will need a permissive monetary policy that accepts moderate inflation to reduce the burden of mortgages and other debts — even if it bites a little into savings and fixed incomes.

We’ll need above all to recognize the magnitude of the social distress we still face, even as the economic statistics tell us of a recovery that moves financial markets and presidential polls — but that threatens to bypass tens of millions of Americans for months and years.