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Showing posts from 2012

Reusable Bags and Dirty Underwear

A reporter came to the lab the other day... http://www.kesq.com/news/Reusable-bags-A-danger-to-your-family/-/233092/17186906/-/r38uom/-/index.html

Grey water

Grey water movements and courses in the Southern California area: The group Greywateraction has an upcoming November conference.  I will be attending this. http://greywateraction.org/workshop/2012/11/15/california-greywater-conference Some news of San Diego movements towards greywater use: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/san-marcos/environment-group-seeks-to-harvest-low-hanging-fruit-for-water/article_9f8f82b4-1d8d-5ae7-be7e-066fad595623.html The Sky Mountain Institute is an active S. Cal group promoting grey water use: http://www.skymountain.org/pdf/Graywater_Harvesting_2012_Flyer.pdf There is also this one at the Solar Living Institute: http://www.solarliving.org/courses/sustainable-living/601/wa-101-install-a-greywater-system/

An outcome of our workshop!

I'm happy to see that the AQMD has chosen to fund a couple of projects from the attendees to our workshops on the AQMD AB 1318 funds.   Not all of them attended our proposal preparation workshops, but a few of them did and the total funded to some of our workshop attendees is over 3 million! http://www.aqmd.gov/news1/2012/coachellavalleyPR.htm

Water Fountain USEPA

I just noticed this on the EPA website. It is the initiative to bring back the water fountain   Bottled water is not a substitute. http://water.epa.gov/action/waterfountain.cfm

Good News California!

http://www.inlandvalleynews.com/?p=13623

Crowdsource your WASH SPOT

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Help the Southern California homeless population: Identify and report free accessible washing locations! The goal of this effort is to search out and find locations where homeless can wash their hands, face, feet and even a shower if possible. We have included a category for public drinking fountains as an indicator of a place where washing may be possibility. An international effort on this is http://wetap.wordpress.com/ This is a tutorial on how to add the washspot.crowdmap.com  to your phone. This will allow you to submit crowdsourced reports using an app on your smart phone. The website is to help identify the places where urban survivors can take a bath or wash their hands. You can also submit reports by: going online and clicking the " Submit Report " button Using a mobile phone to text a report in If you want to use the app method, then follow the steps below. Download the Ushahidi App to your smart phone from the iphone app store or the android store.  

A Christian Perspective on Sanitation

I used the previous post to create this prezi presentation about sanitation and world population growth. http://prezi.com/zodnerwxriws/a-christian-perspective-on-sanitation/

A four letter word

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Here is an interesting take on water conservation, pathogens and.....poop.  How many gallons of drinking water did you **** in today?  Created by: OnlineNursingPrograms.com The original image is here

Coachella Valley Illegal Trash Dumping. What are the health consequences?

Illegal trash dumping impacts Eastern Coachella Valley residents http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-brand/2012/06/04/26799/illegal-trash-dumping-impacts-eastern-coachella-va/ via @kpcc

repost: Reusable grocery bag carried nasty norovirus, scientists say

A case study related to our reusable grocery bag study. Reusable grocery bag carried nasty norovirus, scientists say

Water under Africa: more than we realized!

Thanks to Donn Gaede for forwarding this to me. "New maps indicate that many countries currently designated as "water scarce" have substantial groundwater reserves." Here is the BBC article:  Water under africa??? Here is the article pdf: doi:10.1088/1748-9326/7/2/024009 Its not available for everyone and much of it is not extractable.   The good news is: " ground water is indicated to have a residence time in the ground of 20 to 70 years."

India Water Crisis

The water crisis in India: Its something we should all take note of.  http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/series/thirstygiant/index.html

A Desert Sun Newspaper article quoted our workshop.

Last thursday there was a Public Meeting where the desert sun quoted our Environmental Justice workshop.  The article is entitled " Proposal for Whitewater River trail system draws mixed response ". Our workshop was summarized as:  "On Dec. 29, a coalition of more than a dozen valley community groups held a workshop in Coachella, where they prioritized environmental health issues related to air quality in the valley.  The groups ranked the cleaning of illegal dumps, such as the notorious Mount San Diego sludge pile in Thermal and the Larson dump, once the state's largest illegal dump site, as their top air quality-related problems. The Thermal Chamber of Commerce, Torres-Martinez tribe, Building Health Communities Eastern Coachella Valley and Planned Parenthood all attended the Dec.  29 workshop. A cross-valley parkway didn't even come up in that discussion, according to Ryan Sinclair, a Loma Linda University environmental healt

Environmental Justice and Air Quality

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Here is the summary from our workshop on Dec 29th, 2011 Participatory Priority Ranking of EJ issues in Coachella Valley Ryan G. Sinclair PhD, MPH – rsinclair@llu.edu Loma Linda University Department of Environmental Health and Geoinformatic Sciences Purpose - A Loma Linda University team from the department of Environmental Health held a participatory priority-ranking workshop with several Community groups from the Coachella Valley (Table 1). The purpose of this workshop was to prioritize environmental justice issues that relate to air quality in the Coachella valley.  An output of the workshop was to develop a list of air quality EJ priority issues and then rank those priorities. This method is published in anthropological literature as the Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) technique. The method is also known as “free lists” and “pile sorting”.    Methods - The December 29 th morning workshop took approximately four hours to complete and come to a cons