BOSTON — If you've been spending early summer at the beach, you might have noticed something in the air. An invasive and quite ... pungent ... species of seaweed has made its way to the East Coast from Asia. Judy Pederson of MIT’s Sea Grant Program said the seaweed, which favors rocky shorelines and coves, could be squeezing out native species.
 
"We’re finding that over time these non-native species come in early, they grow faster or sooner than our native species and then they begin to displace them," she said. "And the native species they might displace are things like mussels, barnacles, sponges — things that are typically what we think of as our major New England species."
 
The seaweed has also become a hassle to state workers, who say they have no place to dispose of it — or the money and resources necessary to do so.

The National Weather Service says that this year, it will begin pushing text notifications to cellphones that alert users to hazardous weather conditions.

The text notifications will be sent to those people within the location of the severe weather. The Weather Emergency Alerts could also be used for local emergencies that require evacuation, AMBER alerts and presidential alerts "during a national emergency," the Weather Service said.

Tech site The Verge reports:

"The Wireless Emergency Alerts system will notify people of approaching tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, flash floods, extreme winds, blizzards and ice and dust storms by sending an up-to-90 character message to their smartphone. The system is only compatible with newer devices, and will not be available in all areas, but the NWS says that "millions of smartphone users" will start receiving messages soon. Apple intends to support the service this fall, but it's not clear whether the support will be limited to new hardware, or if all its devices will receive an update."

The Weather Service says users can opt out of the service.

The CTIA says that AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon are all participating in the system. They have more information on whether your phone is supported at their website.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Part 1:

Part 2:
 

A girl drinks from a tap in Rwanda. (jon gos/flickr)

We look at the increasing scarcity of water.

As the world’s population explodes, from 7 billion to 10 billion, will violence erupt over water the way it has over other natural resources, like gold, oil and diamonds?

Who will control water? And how much will it cost to access?

Guests:

• William Moomaw, director, Center for International Environmental and Resource Policy, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

• Shafiqul Islam, director of the Water Diplomacy Initiative; professor, Tufts School of Engineering

• Lisa Sorgini Marchewka, vice president, Oasys Water

A bizarre event has drawn scientists to a beach in Oregon — a floating concrete dock from Japan has washed ashore. It had been ripped from its moorings by last year's tsunami and floated across the Pacific.

The dock is encrusted with mussels, barnacles and other marine life from Asia. Scientists are amazed these organisms survived the 14-month voyage, but they're also worried some of these organisms could become pests in U.S. waters.

Marine biologist John Chapman heard about the dock last Tuesday. It hit the beach a few miles from his laboratory at Oregon State University, and when he saw it, he was shocked.

"There were just an amazing diversity of species that we have never seen before," he says. "And the massiveness of this thing — it's about a 100 tons of stuff. And it really does have millions of organisms and maybe hundreds of species."

The dock is 66 feet long, 19 feet wide and 7 feet high; a plaque with a name on it revealed its source: a coastal town in Japan.

Chapman expected the organisms stuck to the dock would be deep sea species that hopped aboard during its Pacific transit. Japanese coastal creatures could not have survived a 14-month trip in the open ocean. But when he looked closer, he realized he was wrong.

"You know, it's appalling to me that this artificial island of Asian species was ripped off of their shore and transported to here really intact, and that we would not have predicted that," Chapman says. "So what we thought we knew is wrong."

Chapman says nothing like this has ever happened on such a large scale. The dock was like a Noah's ark for all these local Japanese species.

Or perhaps like a Trojan Horse.

"There could be very bad things in there," Chapman says. "We already know of very bad disasters of introduced species."

Zebra mussels from Russia have fouled the Great Lakes; in Oregon, the invasive oyster drill is a worm that threatens the oyster business. Chapman says non-native species are regular arrivals on the Oregon coast. But this is different.

"It's as if we had this turnstile that would only let through one a year, and then you know, a stampede came," he says.

In just two days of examining the dock, scientists have found a starfish that looks like one that has overwhelmed huge coastal areas in Australia; there are crab that look like one that's infested the East Coast of the U.S.; and there's a nasty species of brown algae all over the dock.

Jessica Miller, an Oregon State University biologist at the site, says workers are trying to get rid of what they can.

"The state hatched a plan which included this morning going out with a team to scrape most — as much of it as they could — and bag up as much as they could of the living biota and dragging it up the beach to reduce the risk that it might drift and float and settle somewhere local," she says.

Unfortunately, whatever was growing on the bottom of the dock isn't there anymore.

"When it got up on the beach, there was nothing left," Chapman says. "It all got ground off, which means that all of that was washed off in the ocean. It got away."

University scientists are still trying to census this floating menagerie. But Miller says the team is also mindful of the event that brought it to Oregon.

"A gentleman came up and put some white flowers in a crevice on the float and gave my intern a hug and then walked down the beach," she says, "really reminding us that yes, it's interesting scientifically, but it's only here because of a very serious devastating human tragedy."

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

 
RUTLAND, Mass. — When Randy Jordan was in high school, his family’s dairy farm was one of 640 in the state. Now, a generation later, there are only 200 still operating in Massachusetts.
 
“Farmers aren’t going out of business because they're dying or — geesh, there’s better opportunities. They’re going out of business because they can’t afford to stay in business,” said Jordan.
 
Jordan said one of his biggest budget busters was his electric bill: $2,400 a month to keep his 300 cows milked and his 1,000 acres of corn and hay growing. He had to cut costs. And his cows were the answer.
 
“The average cow poops about 18 gallons of manure and pee a day — a lot!” said Jordan. “And there’s nothing but methane in it.”
 
The cow as energy source
 
Methane gas has huge energy potential. So 2 years ago, Jordan partnered with Shannon Carroll of AGreen Energy to build the state’s first facility that converts food waste and manure into electricity.

The process starts in Jordan’s barn with the cows doing, well, their thing.
 
“We have a slotted barn so it automatically falls down into the manure pit under the barn and from there we pump it into the digester,” said Carroll.

 
Then comes the second ingredient: organic waste — things like fruit rinds and eggshells. Big tankers truck in thousands of gallons of waste a day.
 
“One of our customers is Cains. They make salad dressing and mayonnaise. We get all of their waste products. Hood is another customer, so we get liquid ice cream,” said Carroll.
 
But it’s inside a 500,000-gallon digestion tank that the real magic happens. Bacteria eat at the manure and food waste mixture. As it rots, methane gas is released. Then it’s converted into electricity.
 
“We get enough gas out of this system to run a 300-kilowatt engine, which is basically producing electricity for the farm as well as about 300 houses,” said Carroll.
 
Simpler than it sounds?
 
Europeans have been turning table scraps into fuel for years. Go over to Europe and you’d see more than 10,000 food-to-fuel facilities. But currently Jordan’s farm is the only licensed farm in the U.S. that can take food scraps and manure, mix it all together and spit out energy.
 
“This is not that complicated,” said former energy secretary Ian Bowles. He says the food-to-fuel trend is quickly making its way here, and by 2014, it could become mandatory for large businesses like colleges and restaurants to compost their organic waste.
 
“You just have to build the infrastructure over time,” he said. “But it would essentially be a fourth bin: You’ve got your true waste, your recycling, your yard waste and then your food waste.” 
 
Bowles said composting would free up some much-needed space: Of the several hundred landfills opened a couple decades ago, only a dozen are left. “We export a lot of our waste at a great cost out to other states that sometimes don’t have as good of landfills as we do here,” said Bowles. “So our costs are rising. This is really a solution.”
 
Jordan said the digestion facility was his solution — and it's given him one more way to keep his farm up and running.
 
“That’s my ‘cash cow’ other than milk," he said. "It’s our retirement. I feel more comfortable when I go to bed at night.”

 
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Line up at a Whole Foods fish counter these days and you might notice something missing …
 
Fish!
 
Whole Foods has become the first national grocer to stop selling “red-rated” fish. The designation means the species is overfished or caught in a way that harms other marine life.
 
Whole Foods seafood coordinator Matt Mello rattled off the list of local losses: “Grey sole, octopus, Atlantic cod and halibut.”
 
> > What's a "red-rated" fish? Check the SeafoodWatch guide.
 
The demand for fish
 
Mello said this is the latest step in Whole Foods' long commitment to ocean conservation.
 
“There’s been a timeline in our seafood departments, such as the lobsters — moving away from the lobsters,” said Mello. “We were the first retailer to come out with a rating system. Now we’re the first retailer to stop selling red rated fish.”
 
The first, but not the only: BJ’s and Target have made similar commitments. And the trend has only picked up steam after the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization reported that 80 percent of fisheries were fully exploited, overfished or recovering from depletion.
 
“I always say: if you enjoy the ocean and you want it here for future generations, and you want the bounty that the ocean provides for future generations, you really should care,” said Mello.
 
It’s something avid fish consumer Terry Drucker cares about. He said he wouldn’tgo to another supermarket if Whole Foods stopped selling certain fish.
 
“I guess if they’re pulling it, I’d guess there’d be a good reason for that and I’d try to avoid it — like I didn’t eat swordfish for a long time when I thought they were endangered,” he said.
 
The supply side
 
But Gloucester fisherman Russell Sherman wasn’t taking the bait.

 
“This is a corporate move out of Texas. And to me, it’s basically pandering to their customers,” he said.
 
Sherman has been fishing the waters off Gloucester for 41 years. And he’s been selling his catch to Whole Foods for the past 6 years.  He thought Whole Foods’ decision to stop selling “unsustainable” fish was nothing more than a marketing scheme.
 
“The government has just issued a statement where five more stocks have become sustainable. And I believe that all of our stocks are on the upward trend,” said Sherman.
 
Sherman said sustainability is at the forefront of every fisher’s mind, because fish are their livelihood. Plus, he said the U.S. already has the most stringent fishing regulations in the world.  
 
“I think Whole Foods should hold our industry up as a model to the world. We believe in sustainability,” said Sherman. “Each one of us are small businessmen, small entrepreneurs, who depend on the ocean. And I believe that we are the real conservationists in the world.”
 
The checkout line
 
Since launching the program on Earth Day, Whole Foods has pulled more than a dozen species fish nationwide. Those fish include sturgeon, turbot, some rockfish and swordfish and tuna from certain fisheries.  
 
Four types are missing from the colorful fish displays locally: trawl-caught Atlantic cod, Atlantic halibut, octopus and grey sole. But Mello said most can be easily substituted.
 
“Something like grey sole, we’ll get a lot of requests for, so we have a wide variety of fish, different types of sole. One of the types we offer is Pacific Dover sole. Comes from the West Coast and we’ll offer that,” he said.

BOSTON — As WGBH News reported on May 21, the Casella Waste Materials Recovery Facility in Charlestown takes in 100 tons of plastic a day. Much of that material is separated out by the type of plastic and then recycled in facilities in the U.S. However, some does get sent abroad — mostly mixed batches of plastic that aren't cost-effective to separate for recycling here. Those bales of plastic get packed into shipping containers and loaded at the Port of Boston on to the proverbial "slow boat in China."

Nearly all the plastic scrap that leaves the Port of Boston goes to China: In 2011, 11,869 tons went to that country out of a total of 12,782 tons. That makes Boston 13th in the nation for plastic scrap exports. Los Angeles tops the list with 49,486 tons exported in 2011.

Once it crosses the ocean, the plastic is processed. Most re-emerges as agricultural sheets, stools and other implements of Chinese daily life.

Data provided by Massport.

Port of Boston: Plastic Scrap Export Data

BOSTON — The plastic water bottle has become a symbol of waste. In April, Concord, Mass., banned the sale of single-serving bottles altogether. But the recycling industry can't get enough of those bottles — and all the other plastic detritus of modern life — to turn into new products. WGBH News examined recent developments in recycling and learned that the conventional wisdom about water bottles might be wrong.

Plastic everywhere
 
Let’s begin where we see plastic the most: the supermarket. Up and down the aisles of Trucchi’s in Taunton, there are all kinds of plastic packaging — bread, butter, tortilla chips, those clear boxes from the bakery, juice, soda, laundry detergent. Plastic is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget how often we come into contact with it. But there’s one man who really knows his plastics.
 
“English muffins, OK? You got English muffins. This bag is imminently recyclable,” says Steve Alexander, who heads the Association of Post-Consumer Plastic Recyclers. We see English muffins. He sees the polypropylene resin they’re wrapped in.
 
“Most people tend to take the carton and recycle it, the bag they don’t necessarily know what to do with,” he says.
 
Adding to the confusion, different towns have different recycling rules. Maybe you have curbside pickup or perhaps you have to deliver your recyclables somewhere. Either way, what you see as a random bottle or a bag, others are lining up to cash in on.
 
Bottles in bales
 
Your plastic garbage throwaways could end up at the Casella Waste Materials Recovery Facility in Charlestown. A stale, sour air hangs in the air as the dust swirls each time the bulldozer pushes another pile into the towering peaks of paper, plastic, glass and aluminum.
 
“We see 100 tons of plastic come through the facility a day,” says Bob Cappadona.
 
He's in charge of all the recycled stuff Casella manages in New England. And when he sees plastic — soda bottles, yogurt cups, anything — he sees a commodity he can profit from.
 
“They’re separated into various commodities," says Cappadona, leading a tour of the facility. "Each plastic. A milk jug will go to one mill, then detergent bottles will go to a separate mill."
 
At the Casella facility, a freeway of conveyor belts zips around as water and soda bottles go out one chute, and milk jugs go out another. Blue detergent bottles go down their own tunnel while red bottles go through another portal. They all get compacted into large squares, like bales of hay, and in the back of the warehouse, 1,800-pound bales are stacked so high into the smelly air that they dwarf people.
 
Now, long out of your mind, these compacted, stacks of former plastic bottles, jugs and containers are ready for sale. But who buys them?
 
“Recyclers are actually the end user for what they’re made into. It will go down to Georgia at Mohawk industries. This rug right here was made by Mohawk,” says Cappadona.
 
That’s right, your plastic recyclables are turned into carpets,home siding and lawn chairs. Much of your garbage stays here at home — but you might be surprised where some of it goes.

The slow boat to China
 
At Massport’s Conley Terminal in South Boston, I watch as crane operators load containers onto a cargo ship that’s heading back to China. Cargo ships make a weekly round to the Boston port, and we are regular exporters of recycled plastic scrap.
 
“The idea that we’re shipping 50 percent of the soda bottles to China is just mind-boggling and makes us bang our heads against the wall,” Alexander says.
 
Another reason for U.S. businesses to bang their heads against the wall has nothing to do with exports to China. It has to do with us.
 
“The recycling rate is not as high as it could be," says Patty Moore, CEO of Moore Recycling Associates, based in California.
 
She says part of the problem is that the U.S. doesn’t have the infrastructure needed to collect all of our plastic. Consider this: When you’re on a road trip and you stop at a gas station to clear your car out, chances are — unless you’re planning on taking it home with you — you will throw your plastic bottles in the trash because there’s no recycle bin.
 
“It’s either not being put in the right bins or lost in the infrastructure through collection. We don’t have a high enough collection rate for these materials,” says Moore.
 
And as a result, too much plastic ends up in landfills and the ocean, which is bad for the planet and bad for recyclers. Is there anything … maybe an innovation ... that can solve this?
 
Legal and business solutions
 
“We’d like to see a system where by law companies like us would add a little bit to the price of the product and pay for the recycling of the package after the consumer uses it,” says Michael Washburn.
 
He heads sustainability at Nestle Waters North America, which owns Poland Springs, among other bottled water brands. That means they produce 20 billion plastic bottles a year — and it looks bad when their brands end up in places they shouldn’t be, like on the sides of streets and beaches. Washburn wants to change that by making all companies that make products that come in recyclable packaging to take full responsibility of recycling it. It’s called Extended Producer Responsibility. The concept is not without its critics; Washburn has seen pushback from other big companies, private haulers and municipalities.
 
“We want to move to much higher rates of collection so that there is a greater supply of recycled material. We can have better infrastructure and less expensive processing to turn this material back into a less expensive material for us," says Washburn. That would create a "lower-cost, more robust and more efficient recycling system."
 
The financing mechanism would be a built-in cost of the package. Washburn says it would be miniscule — about .4 cents more for a bottle of water. If you extend it to every kind of recyclable packaging, it would pay for a streamlined recycling infrastructure … one in which you would see recycle bins at every storefront, gas station, park and airport. The slight added cost of what we buy would also pay for the hauling and sorting of this new bounty away.
 
Which brings us back to the supermarket. Remember that package of English muffins that Steve Alexander was holding, with the plastic bag that he says most people wouldn’t know what to do with? It could come back in its next life as …
 
“Could be a deck, could be a railroad tie, the trim and fascia board on your house. Typically stuff with a long second life — 20, 30 years," says Alexander.
 
And not end up in a landfill, a gutter and the ocean. It could even improve the economy and increase the number of jobs. But first you need to recycle it. Imagine that.
 

> > EXTRA: Steve Alexander of the National Association of Post-Consumer Plastic Recyclers talks about the Concord ban.

 
BRIMFIELD, Mass. — Dry weather and high winds have firefighters battling brush fires throughout the Northeast. The about 4,000 residents of Brimfield, between Worcester and Springfield, have plenty to fear.
 
It’s the perfect combination of all the worst ingredients: toppled trees, dry gusts of wind, pine needles parched and brittle. Brimfield State Forest has become a forest-sized fireplace.
 
“In these conditions right now, it wouldn’t take much more than a cigarette butt and you could get this pile to start burning and burning rapidly,” said Dave Celino, chief fire warden of the Department of Conservation and Recreation.
 
But it wasn’t a cigarette that set parts of the forest ablaze the week of April 2, threatening homes already ravaged by last year’s tornado. Celino said it was a legal, permitted fire pit. It’s something that wouldn’t have been such a problem a year ago when a dense forest kept winds weak and vegetation moist.
 
“Then June 1, 2011, the tornado hits and did this obvious damage,” said Celino. He looked out over acres and acres of downed, dried out trees. “We actually lost 100 percdent of the forest canopy. All of this fuel here that’s on the ground is now unshaded. We’re talking about fuels that are super, super dry." He snapped a twig to illustrate its aridity. "This is what we call very receptive to fire ignition.”
 
And the fire threat isn’t contained just to Brimfield. Edward Lambert is the commissioner of the Department of Recreation and Conservation. He said a nearly snowless winter and a moderate draught have left much of the state poised for a potentially fiery summer. Flames have already flared in Randolph, Saugus and Worcester.
 
With “that lack of snow pack and the dry season that started back in November, the winds now — the dry Canadian winds that are coming down — are really creating what is for us the highest fire hazard season in about 10 years," Lambert said.
 
Worse yet, the fire season started about 2 months earlier than usual.
 
To hedge the odds in Brimfield, state workers are taking the fuel for the fire away. Large machines chopped and ground the flammable tornado debris, creating a 100-foot fuel break off the road.
 
Lambert considered it the most practical solution to a 600-acre problem.
 
“We did take out about 9,000 dead trees out of Brimfield State Forest last year and in this particular phase we’re in, we’ll take about another 25 to 30 acres out,” said Lambert. By creating these fuel breaks, "if there was a burn it would only go to a certain level and protect the public.”
 
Lambert said it was also up to local residents to do their part to keeping the problem from getting worse.
 
“Folks in Brimfield and Munson and some other places really have to try to determine that to try to keep dry timber near your home in these conditions is probably not a good thing,” he said.
 
Still, no matter how careful people and state workers are, the threat of fire can’t be completely eliminated: The likelihood this year is just too high.
 
“If we flick 10 matches out there, six of them are going to start fires,” said Celino.
 
Not the best of odds when the season is just beginning.