environmental health

Floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters can devastate a town in just a few hours. But the impact on residents can linger for years in the form of anxiety, depression or other mental health problems. 

“I water my horses out of this creek down here,” Jeff Ivers says, resting his hand on his horse’s nose.

He looks out over his land: 43 acres, surrounded on three sides by Perry State Forest, with a small creek running through it.

That white plume also became a focus of the research. Whelton and his team visited several sites and placed air quality monitors in and around the chemical clouds to capture samples of emissions that the professor now definitively says are “not steam.”

A Purdue University professor is investigating drinking water safety with a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Andrew Whelton, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Ecological Engineering, says drinking water safety, despite what many people might think, is not well understood.

“A lot of the declarations about drinking water safety are not actually based on science,” Whelton says. “They’re based on hope.”

It was a busy summer for environmental safety workers at the school district in Rochester, New York, where employees sampled over 2,000 school water fixtures and replaced nearly 20 percent of them, after finding problematic levels of lead.

Pollution from power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania caused up to 4,400 premature deaths across the country in 2015, according to a new study. 

For years, scientists have known that pollution from burning fossil fuels is bad for us. But just how bad? And can we place a dollar amount on the hidden costs of burning coal and other fossil fuels for electricity?

Retired farmer Dick Himsel’s Danville, Indiana property looks like an idyllic Midwestern small farm. Trees line the driveway, leading up to an old-fashioned wooden farmhouse that’s surrounded by tall stalks of corn.

One thing the property does not have, though, is fresh air.

The coal industry is struggling as cheaper and cleaner natural gas undercuts coal, and environmental regulations push utilities to shut down their older coal-burning plants.

Yet new coal mines open and others expand. In one Texas county on the Mexican border, local officials and residents seem nearly united in their opposition to a new coal strip mine, the Eagle Pass Mine. The company that owns it, Dos Republicas Coal Partnership, says it intends to ship out the first load of coal by train next month.

Where the Monon Trail hits 126th Street in Carmel, Ind., it’s crowded with bikers and joggers. There’s a shopping center with a yoga studio and some restaurants, and two different theaters are in view.

A few hundred yards away, a jazz band plays right off the trail. There are hundreds of people out for the show, and some of them dance. Further down, there’s a community center, complete with a skate park.

 A plastic bottle can contain from two to two hundred different chemicals, additives like softeners, hardeners and dyes. But certain chemicals found in plastics—and present in other substances such as flame retardants, pesticides, and cosmetics— have come under scrutiny for their ability to act like hormones in the human body and affect human health. A growing body of research links exposure to these chemicals to a host of health problems including obesity, diabetes, learning disorders, infertility, birth defects, and cardiovascular disease.