Zac Trahan, Author at Texas Campaign for the Environment

Groups sue top Texas environmental regulator over air pollution permits

Posted on November 25, 2015 at 2:26 pm.

KXAN News Austin
By David Barer

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Several environmental advocacy groups have sued the state’s top environmental regulation agency for alleged inadequate handling of several air pollution permits, including one for a large coal power plant near Waco, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Travis County district court.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has a duty to take action on the permits within 18 months of receiving them. According to the lawsuit, the agency missed the deadline on eight facilities. By failing to act on the permits, the people of Texas are denied the protection of the permits and the right to challenge them, the groups state in the suit.

“These companies all filed their applications on time,” said Gabriel Clark-Leach, with Environmental Integrity Project, in a statement. “The state environmental regulators have been sitting on these applications for years.”

Those coal power plants, oil refineries and petrochemical plants create significant amounts of smog-forming pollution and ozone problems, said Neil Carman with the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, in a news release.

“We should not have to file a lawsuit simply to force the state environmental agency to do its job,” said Robin Schneider, executive director of Texas Campaign for the environment, in a prepared statement. “By failing to act on these expired air pollution permits, The TCEQ is denying Texans our right to know how much air pollution industries are allowed to release into the air we breathe.”

A TCEQ spokesperson told KXAN the agency has no comment at this time.

Major sources of air pollution, such as a coal power plant, are required to get a “Title V” permit meant to “improve compliance” with the Clean Air Act’s pollution control requirements. Title V permit requires a company to consolidate emission limits and regulations on a single document and establish procedures for monitoring, recording and reporting emissions that comply with the law, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit alleges TCEQ did not take action on permits for these locations in a timely manner:

Sandy Creek coal power plant, near Waco
American Electric Power Company’s Welsh coal power plant in Titus County
BP’s Texas City oil refinery near Houston
Motiva’s Port Arthur oil refinery
ExxonMobil’s Baytown oil refinery near Houston
Koch Industries’ Flint Hills East oil refinery in Corpus Christi
BP Amoco’s Texas City chemical plant near Houston
Luminant’s (formerly TXU) Oak Grove coal power plant in Robertson County

Approval or denial of several of the permits noted in the lawsuit has been delayed for months or years, according to the environmental groups. The TCEQ executive director placed the Waco coal plant’s permit application on management delay in November of 2009 and has yet to approve or deny it, according to the suit. In other cases, Environmental Integrity Project submitted comments identifying problems in draft permits approved by TCEQ, but the agency has not responded to the comments or taken action on the permits, the lawsuit states.

Groups involved in the lawsuit include Environmental Integrity Project, Sierra Club, Air Alliance Houston and Texas Campaign for the Environment.

Council approves new recycling standards for construction material

Posted on November 24, 2015 at 5:08 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

The Austin Monitor
By Jack Craver

In a victory for environmentalists, City Council voted Thursday to approve an ordinance that sets limits on the amount of material from a construction or demolition site that can go to waste.

The ordinance, which passed 8-3, with Council members Sheri Gallo, Ellen Troxclair and Don Zimmerman in opposition, requires those involved in a construction or demolition project to meet one of two standards aimed at minimizing waste. They must either dispose of less than 2.5 pounds of material per square foot of the project or divert at least 50 percent of the project material to a “beneficial use.”

The new requirements will go into effect on Oct. 1, 2016, for projects exceeding 5,000 square feet of new, added or remodeled floor area. The law will go into effect for any commercial project requiring a demolition permit on Oct. 1, 2019.

An amendment to the ordinance from Council Member Greg Casar also put in place goals to tighten the restrictions on waste in the future. The stated goals would reduce the allowable amount of waste per square foot to 1.5 pounds in 2020 and 0.5 pounds in 2030, as well as raise the required percentage of diverted material to 75 percent in 2020 and 95 percent in 2030. For the time being, they remain just goals; they will be implemented only if they are approved by Council in the future.

Andrew Dobbs, program director of Texas Campaign for the Environment, said the ordinance was a crucial step toward meeting the Zero Waste Strategic Plan adopted by the city in 2009 and that it would create economic opportunities in the recycling industry.

“This is about 10 percent of the material that we’re generating in this city,” Dobbs said. “This is stuff that we can now start to capture, create a lot of value, create a lot of opportunities for jobs and for businesses and for wealth creation here in the city of Austin.”

A previous incarnation of the ordinance had included automatic increases in the recycling thresholds for 2020 and 2030. While the Zero Waste Advisory Commission recommended the benchmarks, the Planning Commission urged their removal from the ordinance.

Dobbs advocated for reinstating the automatic threshold increases, which he called “visionary.” He suggested that a future Council will be able to reduce the standards if it becomes clear in the coming years that they are infeasible. But if the city is serious about accomplishing its zero waste vision, he argued, it should set ambitious goals.

“(The standards) anticipate cultural and economic and technological advances that if we don’t have by then, we’re going to be in some trouble anyways,” Dobbs said.

But Ross Rathgeber, vice president of Southwest Destructors, said that while he supported the 50 percent recycling requirements, the goals for 2020 and 2030 were unrealistic.

“It was explained to me that it’s aspirational,” Rathgeber said. “I can tell you, you can aspire all you want to, but you’re not going to get there.” The city should do some “serious studies” before it raises recycling thresholds again, he said.

Casar’s amendment sought to reconcile the feasibility concerns raised by Rathgeber with the ambitious environmental goals. “What I’m trying to get at is some sort of meeting between the two,” Casar said. “We still maintain the baseline expectation that we’re trying as aggressively as possible to get to those stair steps, but we don’t implement them without affirmative vote.”

Gallo said she would support the ordinance but not if it included Casar’s amendment, saying that the unamended version had been unanimously supported by the Planning Commission as well as OK’d by the Open Spaces Committee.

“I’m uncomfortable supporting changes to something that went through those two entities already,” she said.

The only other opposition expressed came from Council’s two most conservative members, Troxclair and Zimmerman. The latter characteristically denounced the proposal as a government overreach.

“It’s going to be unaffordable, it’s going to provide virtually no benefit, provide a surprisingly high cost, it’s going to contribute to our unaffordability,” said Zimmerman. “It takes our city in exactly the wrong direction, and it’s really frustrating for me to sit here and watch this happen.”

Victory: Pier 1 Eliminates Toxic Flame Retardants

Posted on November 18, 2015 at 6:49 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

TCE Blog
Zac Trahan, Statewide Program Director

We are celebrating another victory as Pier 1 Imports has publicly announced its decision to phase out toxic flame retardant chemicals in furniture for sale on its shelves. This will benefit all Texans – and people across North America – by helping to reduce exposure to toxic chemicals that can affect human health.

Together with a national campaign for safer chemicals called Mind the Store, we have been pressuring Pier 1 (based in Fort Worth!) with a letter-writing campaign and an online petition directed at CEO Alex Smith. Then we delivered letters and petitions during a demonstration at the company’s downtown headquarters – and Pier 1 executives responded within hours, saying they no longer allow their suppliers to make furniture with flame retardant chemicals. The company revised its website and posted its stated policy against flame retardants for the first time.

To be clear, this is a big victory. Pier 1 has absolutely done the right thing by committing to sell safer furniture – which shouldn’t be riddled with chemicals that escape into household dust and then enter our bodies. We’re glad this Texas-based company is taking action immediately.

And they’re not alone: Pier 1 is just the latest major retailer to go public with a change to its chemicals policy. Activists have secured similar commitments from companies such as Macy’s, Ashley Furniture and IKEA. The Mind the Store campaign is pressing other retailers to follow suit. Here’s what Mike Schade, Mind the Store campaign director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families had to say:

“Thank you to Pier 1 Imports for taking a stand against toxic flame retardants in furniture.” The company should take the next step and evaluate how they can tackle other toxic chemicals in products they carry. We hope other big retailers such as Berkshire Hathaway’s furniture stores will join Pier 1 Imports in getting toxic flame retardants out of furniture once and for all.”

For nearly four decades, controversial flame retardants were required in furniture in the state of California to prevent fires. As pressure mounted on tobacco companies to create fire-safe cigarettes, they responded by aggressively lobbying for this furniture chemicals requirement instead. As a result, many national furniture companies added these chemicals to their products in every state. But recent evidence suggests that the chemicals do not effectively protect against fires – and they can actually cause more harm than good, contributing to more toxic soot and smoke during fires and releasing chemicals into dust during everyday use. (Read more about this in our prior blog post, here!)

California changed its law so toxic flame retardants are not required, but they still allowed. Federal law doesn’t prohit these chemicals either. (In 2011, TCE helped defeat state legislation that would have required toxic flame retardants in furniture here.) In response, the furniture industry as a whole seems to be phasing them out, but there is still furniture for sale with the fire retardants.

That’s why safer chemical advocates, including our organization, have been urging top retailers to accelerate the change by using their market power effectively. By telling their suppliers to remove these chemicals, retailers can help “slam the door” on the use of flame retardants in all furniture in the future.

However, in the meantime, many retailers – including Pier 1 – have older furniture for sale that have toxic flame retardants. So check labels and ask questions if you’re in the market for upholstered furniture. More info is available here and here.

We think of our homes, our living rooms and bedrooms as places for us to relax. Safe havens. But we can’t count on outdated, inadequate federal chemical safety laws to make that a reality. We can’t count on corporate leaders to take protective action out of the blue. Sometimes they need a little push. We’re glad that Pier 1 has taken this step, and we plan to continue with this strategy with other retailers.

Take Action

Want to take action now? Send a message to Best Buy urging company officials to phase out toxic flame retardants in all the electronics they sell. Add your little push! Together we will succeed.

Zac Trahan
Statewide Program Director

Media Release: Pier 1 Faces Demonstration Over Chemicals in Furniture

Posted on November 17, 2015 at 3:47 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

For more information:

Corey Troiani, Texas Campaign for the Environment
214-599-7840 or 972-658-3617, corey@texasenvironment.org

Zac Trahan, Texas Campaign for the Environment
214-599-7840 or 214-497-6050, zac@texasenvironment.org

Pier 1 Faces Demonstration Over Chemicals in Furniture
Protestors visit Fort Worth HQ urging retailer to shelve toxic flame retardants

10924228_10155541072440004_5316758302718647094_o

FORT WORTH— A Texas environmental group is drawing attention to locally headquartered Pier 1 Imports and pressuring the company to sell furniture without flame retardant chemicals they say pose a threat to public health. Protesters brought a large sofa and stood just outside the company’s downtown headquarters, displaying a large banner, “Pier 1 Imports Toxics, Make All Sofas Safe,” and a speech bubble, “Ask me about my toxic chemicals.”

Today’s demonstration coincides with a national effort to pressure Pier 1 to change its chemical policy and phase out the use of toxic flame retardants. Several other leading furniture retailers such as IKEA and Ashley Furniture have already responded to similar pressure – they will not be selling furniture with such chemicals.

Advocacy organizations and consumers have become concerned with the flame retardant chemicals in their clothing, furniture, and electronics as it is becoming clear that they pose more harm than good.

“We think of our living rooms and bedrooms as places for us to relax,” said Corey Troiani with Texas Campaign for the Environment a local nonprofit advocacy organization, “Our furniture shouldn’t be riddled with chemicals that escape into household dust and then enter our bodies. Toxic flame retardants threaten our reproductive and nervous systems.”

For nearly four decades, controversial flame retardant chemicals were required in furniture in the state of California to prevent fires. Many national furniture companies added these chemicals to furniture products in every state to meet minimum standards in California. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the chemicals do not effectively protect against fires, but actually cause more harm than good, contributing to more toxic soot and smoke during fires and releasing chemicals into dust during everyday use. (California no longer requires them.)

In 2003, Texas Campaign for the Environment participated in a national study which found that toxic flame retardants were detected in 100% of mother’s milk samples from women who were tested for dangerous compounds. These chemicals are linked to cancer, obesity, reduced IQ, infertility, and other reproductive disorders.

“We shouldn’t have to check labels for toxic chemicals,” said Zac Trahan, who attended the demonstration. “Big retailers like IKEA and Ashley Furniture are already doing this, why can’t Pier 1 Imports?”

The Fort Worth protest was coordinated with other consumer advocacy groups across the nation pressuring Pier 1 Imports to change their chemical policy. Just last month, Macy’s responded to the same coalition of advocacy groups by removing these chemicals from their furniture.

Organizers with Texas Campaign for the Environment delivered consumers’ letters of concern to corporate officials, intended to be read by the company CEO, Alexander Smith. “Sometimes corporate leaders don’t chose to do the right thing, they need a little push, and it’s best when that push comes from the people they care about most, their shoppers,” said Laura Trevisani.

###

Phasing out toxic flame retardants

Posted on November 2, 2015 at 6:16 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

TCE Blog
Zac Trahan, Statewide Program Director

Q: Why are there toxic flame retardants in my sofa?
A: Big tobacco!

The use of toxic flame retardant chemicals in everyday products throughout our homes is a cautionary tale, a perfect example of what happens when industry and corporate lobbyists get to decide our public policy. The current movement to eliminate these chemicals from consumer products is an inspirational case study in persistent, effective advocacy for the public good. That’s why we say: Don’t get mad – get organized.

Toxic flame retardants are a class of chemicals that have been added to products all around us, such as furniture, carpets, insulation, fabrics and electronics. As the name suggests, they are supposed to protect us from fire. Here’s the thing – they don’t work. The evidence shows they provide no significant protection from fire, and they make fires even more deadly by making smoke more hazardous. Worse still, these chemicals are escaping into household dust and accumulating in our bodies, and they have been linked to cancer, reduced IQ, infertility and other reproductive disorders.

So why do we even use them? Well…. because big tobacco lobbied for this “solution” for furniture instead of making fire-safe cigarettes. That’s right, when public pressure was mounting to have tobacco companies create self-extinguishing cigarettes to reduce the risk of fire, they responded by convincing elected officials to require furniture companies to start using flame retardant chemicals instead. They used made-up testimony and lied about how well these chemicals work. They even tricked fire marshals and fire department leaders into supporting their solution. Leave it to politicians to trust the tobacco industry with our health and safety!

So what’s a concerned citizen to do? This is where the story is starting to get better. There are hundreds of public health and environmental organizations working to snuff out toxic flame retardants once and for all – and we’re winning. The law that required furniture companies to use these chemicals has been reversed. Major retailers like IKEA, Ashley Furniture and Macy’s have vowed to eliminate toxic flame retardants. Activists are turning the tide, and all we need to phase these chemicals out completely is more public pressure.

Our current target for that pressure is Pier 1 Imports, based in Fort Worth, Texas! Pier 1 needs to join other furniture retailers in phasing out toxic flame retardants in its products. But so far, company officials have dismissed this concern and refused to make a commitment. You can send a message to Pier 1 today. Go ahead.

Now that we know these chemicals don’t keep us safe from fire – just the opposite actually – we need we need to end this toxic mistake. Public pressure and grassroots organizing works; the entire industry is responding to this effort. You can add your voice today by telling Pier 1 Imports to work with its suppliers and manufacturers to eliminate toxic flame retardants in its products. If smart shopping is also on your to-do list, you can learn how to choose flame-retardant free furniture here.

[UPDATE: After we held a demonstration at their Fort Worth headquarters and delivered hundreds of letters to CEO Alex Smith, Pier 1 has agreed to phase out toxic flame retardants by Jan. 1, 2016! Read more about our victory here.]

Thanks to your support and thousands of other voices across Texas and the country, we are helping win the fight to have retailers phase toxic chemicals out of the products they sell. Let’s keep going.

Zac Trahan
Statewide Program Director

EPA to Require Toxic Release Reporting from Gas Plants

Posted on October 29, 2015 at 2:43 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

factory Texas Tribune
Kiah Collier

Hundreds of gas plants across the country — and as many as 180 in Texas — soon will have to alert the federal government if they discharge, produce or handle certain toxic chemicals like benzene or hydrogen sulfide.

Responding to a petition and subsequent lawsuit filed by a coalition of environmental and open government groups, including one from Texas, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has decided to add natural gas processing facilities to the list of entities that must report annually to the Toxic Release Inventory, or TRI. Congress created the program nearly 30 years ago as a way to provide citizens with information about the presence of toxic chemicals at facilities in their neighborhoods.

The EPA declined, however, to add the entire oil and gas sector to the list, as groups including the Texas Campaign for the Environment had demanded.

In a letter written late last week to the Washington D.C.-based Environmental Integrity Project, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy explained that the agency was partly granting the group’s petition — filed in 2012 in conjunction with 16 other organizations — and partly denying it.

“EPA agrees with petitioners that numerous processes within the oil and gas extraction sector are associated with significant quantities of TRI-listed chemicals,” she wrote.”However, several factors lead EPA to decline to add this sector, with the exception of natural gas processing plants, to the scope of TRI at this time.”

“EPA is currently engaging in a number of activities, including rule-making, research, guidance and other outreach, targeting the oil and gas extraction sector,” McCarthy continued.

She went on to note that the agency previously has argued that the inventory’s reporting requirements for facilities — including employing a minimum of 10 full-time equivalent employees and handling a minimum amount of chemicals — are not likely to be met at all individual well-drilling sites, so it doesn’t make sense to require the entire industry to report.

The EPA agreed to respond to the petition by Oct. 30 after the coalition sued in January, claiming an unreasonable delay in response.

The coalition groups heralded the EPA’s decision as a victory on Tuesday, but said they still believe the agency should require the entire oil and gas sector to report to the inventory, which Congress created in 1986 with the passage of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.

That law requires certain facilities to report to the inventory every year if they meet three criteria: They must employee 10 or more full-time equivalent employees; manufacture, process or use a certain amount of nearly 600 toxic chemicals on the program list; and be part of an inventory-covered industry like mining or manufacturing.

“Getting gas processing plants to report to the Toxic Release Inventory is an important first step, but we have not yet made any decisions about dropping the lawsuit,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project. “We are still evaluating some of the other emission sources in the oil and gas industry to determine if they are large enough to also be required to report their toxic pollution.”

Still, the addition of natural gas processing plants will help hold the oil and gas industry accountable, said Aaron Mintzes, policy advocate for Earthworks, one of the groups in the coalition.

“While we prefer [that] EPA require reporting industry-wide, this step will provide the public a better understanding of the toxic contaminates in their communities,” Mintzes said.

The EPA intends to implement the new regulation as quickly as possible, but can’t yet say when it might take effect, according to information emailed by a spokesman.

“EPA believes the addition of natural gas processing facilities to TRI would meaningfully increase the information available to the public and further the purposes of” the 1986 law, the email said.

PDO_gas_processing-plant “EPA estimates that natural gas processing facilities manufacture, process, or otherwise use more than 25 different TRI-listed chemicals, including hydrogen sulfide, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene. Additionally, EPA estimates that approximately 42 million people, 48 percent of whom are minorities and 14 percent of whom live below the poverty line, reside within 49 kilometers (approximately 30 miles) of at least one natural gas processing plant.”

The agency estimates that more than half of the 500-plus natural gas processing plants in the U.S. will be required to report. In Texas, there are 180 plants total, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. How many of them meet the reporting criteria remains unclear.

The Toxic Release Inventory differs from other programs like the National Emissions Inventory in that it requires the annual disclosure of discharges to land and water, in addition to air, along with “waste management and pollution prevention information.” (The National Emissions Inventory requires reporting every three years.) The Toxic Release Inventory database also is designed to be easily accessed by the public.

Nearly every natural gas plant in Texas — 175 of them — already are required to report air emissions each year to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and must obtain state permits that cap emissions “at levels protective of human health and the environment,” the state agency said in a statement.

“Emissions event reporting is required by all facilities that emit a reportable quantity of a pollutant,” the statement said. “These reporting requirements are applicable regardless [of] if the site in question is required to report to the EPA [Toxic Release Inventory.]”

Victory: Curbside Composting in Austin

Posted on October 1, 2015 at 3:31 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

TCE Blog
Robin Schneider, Executive Director

Sometimes, campaign victories look just like they do in the movies – a crowd assembles, people speak eloquently as a community to reject (or support) something, and you can almost hear the heroic soundtrack swelling.

Other times, it’s not like that at all. A bad idea comes up, first privately, then publicly, and it starts getting some traction among elected officials. But then skilled community organizers move to generate letters, phone calls and emails against it, stopping the proposal from ever coming up for a public vote. It dies a quiet, meek death.

That’s how it was with the bad idea to derail Austin’s comprehensive Zero Waste Plan. We won this campaign quickly and quietly, so if you didn’t hear about it – well, that’s what this blog post is for.

Let’s start with the background. At the end of 2012, the City of Austin began its pilot program for expanding its yard waste curbside pick-up to include food waste and food-soiled paper such as pizza boxes. More households were added in 2014 to bring it up to a total of 14,000 homes.

In this year’s city budget process, the Austin Resource Recovery Department (the new name for the Solid Waste Department) proposed a $1.70 monthly rate increase to cover a wide variety of services including street sweeping, dead animal pick-up and many others. Four cents of the fee was to fund trucks for expanding the curbside organics collection.

Some members of Austin City Council floated the idea that the curbside composting program should not be universal for all residents, but should instead be a subscription-only service. Only some residents would be able to pay for this, leaving many Austinites without access. This bad idea was gaining momentum as more City Council members seemed to gravitate toward it.

We knew it would be impossible to reach our long-term Zero Waste goal – to divert 90% of our discards from the landfill by 2040 – without curbside composting for all residents. And we knew it would be unfair to treat this as a “luxury” service only for certain residents. In addition, because organics in landfills generate methane, a flammable and powerful climate change gas, organics diversion is a high priority for our climate protection goals as well.

So Texas Campaign for the Environment and our allies swung into action and found widespread support for universal curbside organics collection. In a matter of just a few days, hundreds of constituents wrote letters, emailed, called and met with their Council members. Environmental leaders signed onto a joint letter calling for environmental leadership. In the end, there was not enough support on City Council for the idea to even come up for a vote. VICTORY! (But no swelling soundtrack.)

A few weeks later, Austin Mayor Steve Adler addressed the crowd at our 5th Annual Trash Makeover Challenge. The Mayor made note of expanded parks funding in the newly adopted budget, and then he summed up our victory this way:

“We didn’t see a debate and public vote on whether to move forward with our resource recovery and conservation goals in Austin. It just went through. And that’s because of the people in this room.”

By the way, our event showcased amazing designs made out of at least 90% recycled materials and you can see lots of great pictures here.

The development and implementation of Austin’s curbside composting program is still in the works. It’s not a sure thing – future City Council budget sessions will need to continue its funding. However, we will be at the table and we will be mobilizing Austinites to support this crucial piece of our Zero Waste plan. Other Texas cities such as San Antonio are already rolling out these services. Austin needs to stay on the leading edge for a more sustainable future.

Robin Schneider, Executive Director

Calling for safer chemicals

Posted on August 28, 2015 at 4:33 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

TCE Blog
Robin Schneider, Executive Director

If you’ve had one of our canvassers at your door or on the phone lately, you already know that we are putting lots of effort into campaigns to have retailers phase toxic chemicals out of the consumer products they sell. Our supporters have already written thousands of letters to Walgreens, Best Buy and Family Dollar, and many have signed the national Change.org petition on Family Dollar – which now boasts over 150,000 signatures nationwide. If you’ve added your voice to this effort, thank you!

This strategy of putting direct consumer pressure on retailers is delivering results. We are part of the national Mind the Store campaign that has convinced Walmart and Target to commit to developing safer chemicals policies. Just a few months ago, Home Depot and Lowe’s committed to removing the class of toxic chemicals known as phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates) out of vinyl flooring – and to substitute safer materials, not chemicals that are just as bad or worse or where there is too little information to know. Phthalates are one of the “Hazardous 100” chemicals that we are currently pressuring Walgreens to phase out by adopting a safer chemicals policy this year as well.

toxic flame retardants

We are no stranger to this issue. When we challenged the electronics industry to start recycling, we also raised the concern of toxic flame retardant chemicals that the computer and TV manufacturers used in their plastics. We recruited a new mother in Texas to submit a breast milk sample for a national study. Unfortunately, every sample of mother’s milk in that study tested positive for the toxic fire retardants found in electronics. (It’s still important to breastfeed for all the health benefits.) Other studies have found these chemicals in the blood of umbilical cords. Toxic flame retardants have become known as the asbestos of our time.

Thanks to strong public pressure, these chemicals have been phased out of many computers. Best Buy has removed toxic flame retardants from their own brand of TVs (Insignia). Now we are urging Best Buy to get toxic flame retardants out of all the other brands of TVs they sell.

These toxic flame retardants are also found in furniture. Mind the Store has succeeded in persuading Ashley Furniture and Macy’s to require that the upholstered furniture they sell does not use toxic flame retardant chemicals. Now we’re putting pressure on Pier 1 Imports to make similar commitment for all the furniture it sells.

[UPDATE: After we held a demonstration at their Fort Worth headquarters and delivered hundreds of letters to CEO Alex Smith, Pier 1 has publicly announced its commitment to phase out toxic flame retardants in its furniture! Read more about our victory here.]

targeted toxicity

We are also working closely with environmental justice allies in the Campaign for Healthier Solutions coalition who are leading the effort to pressure the major discount store chains to protect their customers from toxic chemicals. A recent study found that 81% of the products tested at dollar stores contained at least one hazardous chemical above levels of concern. In many communities, there are very few (if any) alternatives for residents to purchase everyday products. But ALL families deserve safer products on store shelves – especially those who can least afford to pay top dollar for specialty products. You can read more about this campaign here.

Texans know that we cannot always rely on the federal or state government to protect us. Big chemical companies have armies of lobbyists at the U.S. and State Capitols. So we are organizing direct consumer pressure, at the grassroots level, in the second most populous state in the country. We are demanding that retailers tell their suppliers to make safer products available. This is a proven, effective strategy to safeguard the health and well-being of our families.

If you haven’t sent your letter or signed the Change.org petition, please do it now!

We will keep you posted on our efforts, as always. Thank you for all you do to help us win campaigns like these.

Robin Schneider, Executive Director

Schneider: Recycling works best when citizens know how, why

Posted on August 14, 2015 at 2:23 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

Austin American-Statesman Op-Ed
Robin Schneider, Executive Director, Texas Campaign for the Environment

The news is out: Austin’s recycling rates have stalled. Despite education initiatives by the city, our diversion rate has stayed at about 40 percent for years. Something different has to be done — and some of us are wondering if now is the time to start requiring recycling.

If you read Andra Lim’s article on this problem you know that my organization — Texas Campaign for the Environment — is in favor of such a requirement, but there is an important word Andra used right before she quoted me: “Ultimately.” It means “in the last place,” and right now we stand with all of the zero-waste supporters quoted by Andra in saying that Austin has some options we should pursue before making a recycling requirement our top priority.

Imposing mandatory recycling on Austin today would be, in some ways, unfair. Many are confused about recycling. We have been taught to throw waste away, and that we should put it on the curb where it will disappear, never to bother us again. In truth, it gets trucked to someone else’s community — where it becomes their problem — but the easiest way to get responsible people to make such an irresponsible decision is to tell them not to think about it.

Successful recycling, on the other hand, happens when residents know what recycling actually is — the marketing of our discards as commodities — and how the facilities here do their part. This makes sense of all the rules associated with the blue cart, but our educational efforts are still just chipping away at the massive edifice of a waste culture that has taught us to be willfully ignorant about where our discards go.

In the past, new programs have increased recycling the most, not education. When Austin went from dual-stream recycling to single-stream, our recycling rate shot from 30 percent to 36 percent in a matter of months — and it didn’t take much longer to get to our current 40 percent.

We hope to see a big jump with the introduction of curbside composting citywide. This third bin will let Austin residents divert materials they have mostly been trashing to this point: food scraps, food soiled paper, greasy pizza boxes, and other valuable organic material. We expect that this will move our diversion rate over 50 percent and get us back on track towards our zero-waste goals.

This is a good reason to roll out this program as quickly as possible — by 2018 or sooner, not 2020, as Austin Resource Recovery is currently suggesting. These new programs, of course, require education efforts, and the city’s pilot program for organics collection provides a great example of what works best. It’s something familiar to Texas Campaign for the Environment: door-to-door canvassing. In the city’s pilot program the neighborhoods where Austin Resource Recovery went door-to-door to explain the carts had the highest participation rates. A cute jingle or cool-looking flier is useful, but nothing works like direct human interaction right where people live. Austin needs to invest in this for both our upcoming organics program and for recycling.

In the end, that word “ultimately” not only shows us where recycling mandates belong, but also should remind us of the ultimate big picture we are facing here. Recycling, composting and other diversion programs are not just nice things; they are necessary for the health of our community. As we are starting to see with rare earth metals, you can only extract materials from one place to be buried again in a landfill somewhere else for so long; sooner or later you run out of resources. We will all have to recycle sooner or later; thankfully, Austin Resource Recovery has taken the initiative to conserve our resources and reduce our dependence on landfills before a crisis forces our hand.

Ultimately, recycling is already necessary for our safety, prosperity, and health, but with some continued leadership, it may not have to be required for a little longer.

Schneider is the Executive Director of the Texas Campaign for the Environment & TCE Fund.

Website evolution: A look back at TCE online

Posted on August 5, 2015 at 7:00 pm.

Written by Zac Trahan

TCE Blog
Zac Trahan, Statewide Program Director

The new website you’re looking at is the product of a year’s worth of work from the selfless souls who dedicated their time, energy and expertise toward this project. Although we did much of this ourselves, we do owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to the web design and development professionals who contributed their valuable work at “non-profit” rates – without them, it just doesn’t happen. This is the story of how our website has evolved over time and how the current version came to be.

In the beginning

Here’s what the TCE website looked like in 2001. Simple, right? It’s interesting to see how website trends have essentially come full-circle back to this kind of clean, simple layout because so many people view them on mobile phones now. With some brighter colors and better pictures, this could almost work today – if we only had one office and we only worked on clean air issues. But as a statewide group working on several campaigns at once, we need room for more content and information.

A year later, our website became a little more visually oriented, but still fairly rudimentary. It remained essentially a collection of links with no real menu or navigation in place.

This is how our website looked when I first started as a canvasser with TCE. When I would meet people at the door who asked whether we had a website they could visit to check out the organization, I wasn’t always excited to tell them about it – the printed materials I had on my clipboard were always more up-to-date and complete. And this is how it stayed for several more years.

TCE 2.0

The first major overhaul finally came in 2005, and while it was a difficult process, the resulting TCE website was as giant improvement. A very talented professional designer, Paul Whitener, helped us re-imagine our logo and lay out the new home page. We had room for more articles and information about several campaigns – we had a new office in DFW as well. It was something we could be proud to show off and happy to direct our supporters to.

This was also when I became more responsible for maintaining the TCE website, posting new articles and making any changes needed. Slowly but surely, I started learning the basics of HTML and other website coding tools. I have no formal training in this area and to this day I am a total amateur, but at least I can handle some simple tasks to keep things running.

The problem was, this is how our website looked for TEN YEARS – which in internet time may as well be a century. What was once new and fun soon became old-fashioned and counter-productive. We thought and talked about doing another overhaul several time, but we always seemed to busy working on our environmental campaigns to dedicate so much time for a project like this.

We did add a few new touches over time, and we may have kept on “living with it” if not for the iPhone revolution. Today most people view emails and websites on their mobile phones, which this website was never designed to handle. There was no getting around it – we needed to build something new from the ground up.

Where to start….

The first major decision we made was to move our website into WordPress. This is a straightforward, user-friendly Content Management System (CMS) that millions of people and organizations use every day, and its possibilities for customization are endless. This system would allow us to create whatever kind of website we wanted for TCE.

But that level of “blank slate” choice actually got us into trouble immediately. We spent far too much time having TCE staff members toy around with WordPress, attempting to come up with an initial design for the new website. Bad plan.

When it became clear this was going nowhere fast, the next idea was to have our resident graphics expert – Jeff Jacoby, Austin Staff Director – take a stab at creating a new home page using the same Adobe design software he uses to create our Annual Report each year. Here’s what he came up with. Very nice, yes? This became the foundation to start the project in earnest.

While Jeff has quite the eye and talent for aesthetics, he also has a full-time job in running the Austin canvassing office. He couldn’t do all the graphic design for the entire website. So he reached out to a former TCE field manager and current website design professional, Josh Vincent, to see if he would be willing to help. This turned out to be a huge turning point – Josh took the initial mock-up Jeff had created and quickly churned out a set of beautiful, use-able designs for all the pieces of the website. And he charged us so much less than market value that we basically owe him for life. After a few rounds of feedback and adjustments, here’s what Josh finalized for the new home page. Look familiar?

Under the hood

The last step would be to find a website developer who could write the code to turn this design into a functioning website. Fortunately we didn’t have to go far – Paul Whitener once again agreed to take us on and tackle this project for a low non-profit rate. Over the course of the next few months, Paul customized our WordPress account to turn this vision into a real website. That’s what you’re looking at now.

And in case you’re wondering, I have been primarily responsible for adding the bulk of the content, articles, text and pictures, along with TCE program staff members Melanie Scruggs and Andrew Dobbs. Of course, our fearless leader Robin Schneider acts as the editor in chief as well.

Glad to be done

This entire process certainly included hand-wringing, hair-pulling and face-palming, but the frustrations were well worth it. It’s satisfying to see the final product working so well. We hope you use it over and over to contact your elected officials, petition companies to prevent pollution, learn more about the environmental issues we work on and stay up-to-date as a TCE member. Please don’t hesitate to give us your feedback and ideas as well. The “contact us” links are there for a reason!

Zac Trahan, Statewide Program Director