State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.

For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.

The article explores how many people take their water infrastructure for granted, and rate increases have been fought tooth-and-nail in cities around the country, including Philadelphia. The article ends with this powerful quote: “This is the fight of our lifetimes. Water is tied into everything we should care about. Someday, people are going to talk about our sewers with a real sense of pride.”

Read the whole article here.

What is the best way to manage snow accumulation on streets, highways, and parking lots and protect the environment?
The most environmentally sound manner to deal with accumulated snow is to allow it to slowly melt where it falls. This approach provides replenishment of groundwater and a slow, steady flow or snow melt to streams and other surface waters.

What’s an environmentally acceptable way to deal with snow and satisfy our transportation needs?
The standard approach to providing reasonably clear and safe roads during and after snowfalls or other frozen precipitation events is to apply road deicing chemicals, followed by plowing.
Environmentally responsible snow management includes the following:
• Controlling the amount of deicing chemicals applied to recommended levels
• Avoiding application of deicers close to streams and other surface waters and ground water drinking water sources
• Plowing or removing and transporting the snow to areas where it can be allowed to melt with minimal impact on resources.

For more information, visit www.depweb.state.pa.us, keyword: Snow Removal.

You can see all the photos from our tour on our Facebook album.

Drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale is growing at a breakneck pace – often destroying water supplies and damaging local communities, with no tax in place to restore and repair the damage and reimburse our citizens – it’s clear that taming the Marcellus Shale drillers is Job 1 for next year.

National gas drillers from around the world are coming to Pennsylvania to tap one of our most valuable natural resources – natural gas in the vast Marcellus Shale formation that underlies most of the state. Some of the drillers are conscientious about protecting the environment, but many are not. This brings tremendous risks to our land and water. And right now, those risks are being shouldered by local communities and environmental treasures.

In almost every state that has substantial natural gas deposits, drillers must pay a severance tax on the extraction of the resource to compensate for the depletion of the resource and for damage done to the environment and public infrastructure.

But not in Pennsylvania. This past year, we successfully pushed for a vote in favor of the tax in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, but the Republican-controlled Senate and the oil, gas and drilling industries blocked any consideration in the Senate.

We are determined to push the tax through in 2010…

Visit PennFuture’s website to learn how you can help! Also check out our past posts on Marcellus Shale to learn more about the issue.

Enact mandatory recycling of electronic gadgets and computers. There is nothing to prevent people from simply dumping electronic gadgets, computers and televisions into landfills, even though many are classified as hazardous waste and often contain toxic materials. Legislation being considered by the House and Senate will protect our environment and grow Pennsylvania’s green economy. The proposed law requires the manufacturers of electronics to arrange for them to be responsibly recycled, usually bylocal e-cycling businesses. Enacting e-cycling legislation will be yet another win for the economy and the environment.

Contact your state legislator to make sure that Pennsylvania adopts the right resolutions!

Here’s some of the latest news from PennFuture:

A gathering solution for stormwater?
Sprawl, inadequate policies, lack of effective legal and financial tools for local governments, and changing climate patterns all add up to extraordinary problems with stormwater and flooding in Pennsylvania. On Tuesday House Local Government Chair Robert Freeman (D-Northampton) will ask his committee to approve House Bill 1390, comprehensive stormwater management legislation.

HB 1390 requires local governments to address existing stormwater problems and to plan to avoid new problems. It also allows local governments to form stormwater authorities, which will give them the right to charge fees to those who are causing the problems. In Philadelphia, PennFuture advocated for and defended a similar program, which we believe will lead to better stormwater management practices across the city.

PennFuture supports HB 1390 and urgescommittee members to support the bill on Tuesday.

Help protect Pennsylvania’s water from drilling
The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has proposed new regulations for industrial wastewater that is high in TDS, which stands for total dissolved solids (or totally disgusting stuff).

DEP needs the new regulations to ensure that wastewater generated at Marcellus Shale gas drilling sites does not damage streams and rivers. Marcellus wastewater contains high levels of TDS in the form of salts and can be two to four times saltier than seawater. High TDS levels can harm aquatic life, ruin the taste of drinking water and render river water unfit for industrial users.

Please voice your support for these important new regulations that limit the volume of TDS that new sources of pollution can discharge into our rivers and streams. Next week the Environmental Quality Board is holding public meetings in Cranberry (Butler County), Ebensburg, Williamsport and Allentown to receive comments on the TDS proposal. Citizens can also send written comments on the proposed rule to:

Environmental Quality Board
P.O. Box 8477
Harrisburg, PA 17105-8477
regcomments@state.pa.us

Read more on the PennFuture site!

• The City of Philadelphia has announced a full launch of the Philadelphia Recycling Rewards program in partnership with RecycleBank. Based on the total amount of recycling collected in their neighborhood, residents will earn points that can be redeemed to use at local and national retailers, or donated to non-profits. Residents can also earn points for trash reduction. The program will begin in February of 2010 in North Philadelphia, and will roll out in an additional section of the city each month, making the program citywide by July. Residents can sign up at http://www.phillyrecyclingpays.com/ and register to receive a sticker, to be placed on any bin.
• We also learned that with citywide single stream weekly curbside collection, the city has been able to increase the recycling rate from 7 to 15 percent, with some neighborhoods recycling at close to 30 percent. The increase in material diverted from landfills and incinerators saved the city $4.8 million in tipping fees and kept the program running during the fiscal crisis.
• In addition, the East Coast’s largest composting facility, the Wilmington Organic Recycling Center, just opened. The Wilmington Organic Recycling Center has the ability to divert up to 500 tons of organic material from landfills a day. The proximity of the facility to Philadelphia will make composting as simple as trash collection for many restaurants and businesses that produce a significant amount of food waste. (As for residential compost collection, both Pedal Coop and PhillyCompost provide smaller scale pick-up services for those who want to compost but don’t have the space.)

Thanks to RecycleNOW Philadelphia for all of their hard work — and for sharing the good news!

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

In “Sewers at Capacity, Waste Poisons Waterways,” Duhigg explains the problem with combined sewer overflows, with a brief mention of how Philadelphia is addressing the problem through the Green City, Clean Waters program.

Duhigg explains the problem in a nutshell:

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, today, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage — including human excrement and dangerous industrial chemicals — is spilling into waterways.

In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.

You can read all of the articles in the series here. Don’t forget to check out the accompanying videos as well!

Thanks to all of you who helped to improve the quality of our waterways and environment!